10 tips for choosing your keywords for SEO
Launching your natural referencing strategy requires a rigorous and detailed methodology.
Choosing your keywords is one of the first important steps in laying the foundations of your action plan on the web. Far from being a technical step, you must make tactical choices to move up quickly in the search engines.
Here are 10 tips that will help you choose the right keywords to optimize your SEO and allow you to put your site forward on the web. Whether you are creating your website, or almost at the launch stage, or simply want to optimize your SEO, these tips are for you!
1. Choose the main SEO keywords
The keyword, or target query, is an expression searched by Internet users in their search engine. These are the terms that they will use to do their research and ask their question to Google and its acolytes in order to find the websites that can provide them with the most complete and relevant answer.
The objective for you is therefore to appear in the search results of the SERP ( Search Engine Result or search engine results page) to offer your blog, product, tool or service.
For this, your main keywords must be closely related to your business in order to help you increase traffic to your site. Indeed, Google & co analyzes the vocabulary and expressions used in the requests of the Internet user and will seek the site which offers the most coherent information based (among other things) on the keywords present in the different contents. .
Imagine that you are creating a site for a professional training organization and that you are in charge of its referencing. You will of course have to work around the main keywords such as training / vocational training, but you will also have to decline your keywords according to several variants such as:
- online formation
- distance learning
- digital training
- training by expensive
- Paris training
- management training,
- Etc.
2. Choose secondary keywords
Secondary keywords are more positioning opportunities . Indeed, in addition to the sale of your product, professional training, as in our previous example, you could maintain a news blog and cover subjects relating to your sector and your services.
In this context, it may be interesting to position yourself on secondary keywords that you cover on your site, indirectly related to your commercial and marketing activity. Let's take the example of your professional training organization for which you have already established a list of main keywords. In addition to working on the optimization of these, it will be interesting to position yourself on secondary keywords such as:
- Trainer / trainers
- Retraining
- Paid training
- CPF training
- Funded training
These are just a few examples, but you get the idea! The goal is to reflect on the various requests that future students of your training organization may have and to respond to them.
Did you know ?
Secondary keywords are also synonyms of your main keyword.
They also make it possible to adapt to the abbreviations used by Internet users and must also relate to a specific page.
This kind of semantic field around the same page will allow Google to analyze a "corpus" of keywords around a subject and position you at the top of the results. Indeed, Google & co now favors relevance and quality to the detriment of quantity and repetition. By working on your lexical field, you will be able to vary your keywords while remaining consistent with the theme of your business.
Remember to adapt your list of SEO keywords to your target: a young adult will not express himself in the same way as a retired person and will therefore not formulate his request in the same way. When you draw on your lexical field, think about the different levels of language, common expressions, etc. This will allow you to select the most relevant secondary keywords that will allow you to reach the heart of your target. It will also allow you to stand out from the competition on the web.
How to work on your lexical field?
To enhance your keywords, consider enriching your lexical field with rich terms. To do this, study the lexical field associated with your activity and place these expressions in your content.
3. Get inspiration from your landing pages
Note that each keyword must match a specific URL. This is the only way to get good SEO for your business and increase traffic to your site.
Indeed, Google's algorithms will look at the richness of the content of your page, its URL and the relevant incoming links to judge your authority on the main keyword and position you more or less high in the SERPs.
You can therefore completely start from the listing of your URLs and the themes of your existing pages to draw up the list of your main keywords.
4. Use keyword generator tools
To complete your research work, use tools to generate keywords and semantic fields.
Some examples :
5. Carry out an active watch
To find the words that correspond to your sector of activity, you can carry out an active watch by following the news of your business. You will be able to find new ideas for keywords on subjects related to your sector and your centers of interest. You can even create alerts to be informed of the latest news in your sector so that you don't miss anything and regularly update your list of keywords to stay at the top of the SERPs.
6. Ask your network
Who better than your customers and prospects can tell you the keywords they use when they search for you on the Internet? Do not hesitate to carry out a small survey with your network in order to find new ideas for keywords. You might be surprised what terms are used by your future customers! You can also question your professional relations who can give you a different and complementary approach to yours.
7. Look at what your competitors are doing
Why deprive yourself of the pleasure of admiring the SEO work of a successful competitor? You work in the same field after all, so you will definitely have some common keywords. However, it's up to you to sort it out to avoid a simple copy-paste that will not help you to differentiate yourself, quite the contrary. The idea is to take inspiration from effective work in order to complement and improve your own. And for that, the competition can be an excellent source of information for your marketing strategy!
8. Read what's being said on social media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… Here are sites and applications where everyone shares ideas, opinions and questions using their own keywords. You can very well go for a walk on different networks by naturally filtering according to your activity to see what is being said and what is of interest. This will allow you to expand your keyword list and even refresh it based on fashions and buzz effects.
9. Prioritize your keywords
After making an exhaustive list of keywords, prioritize those on which you intend to focus your efforts.
To do this, determine the potential traffic they can generate for you. The volume of research on a keyword shows the appetite of Internet users for the subject. The higher the volume, the more competitive the keyword.
An effective strategy is to position yourself on keywords with a large search volume, but within your reach.
10. Refresh your SEO keyword list
Above all, do not freeze your list of keywords. Based on your analytics data, challenge your list to seize opportunities on new trends or less competitive keywords.
Thanks to the increasingly advanced performance of search engine algorithms, the way of formulating queries has changed a lot in a few years. The Internet user no longer speaks to a machine to which he says "training+Paris+CPF", he speaks to a virtual interlocutor with whom he dialogues almost normally. This is even truer with voice search on smartphones!
Google now understands long expressions and makes more and more extensive links between different themes. You must therefore review and complete your list of keywords regularly so that your site continues to speak the same language as your customers and prospects.
Don't forget that the way Internet users express themselves is also constantly evolving. Some words appear and replace others that will eventually disappear from the dictionary. This is why it is essential for you to take stock every month to add or remove target expressions and expand your lexical field. This is how you can promote your products and services on the web.
Our tip
Don't forget that natural referencing is a long-term job that can bear fruit several months after the implementation of your actions. It is therefore essential to choose your keywords wisely with the intention of sticking to them during the first months of putting your site online.
Then, remember to iterate regularly by auditing your site traffic and optimizing the content of your pages.
