Launching your organic search strategy requires a rigorous, detailed methodology.
Choosing your keywords is one of the first important steps to lay the foundations of your web action plan. Far from being a technical step, you must make tactical choices to climb quickly in search engines.
Here are 10 tips that will help you choose the right keywords to optimize your search ranking and highlight your site on the web. Whether you're creating your website, about to launch it, or simply want to optimize your SEO, these tips are for you!
1. Choose the main SEO keywords
The keyword, or target query, is a phrase searched by internet users in their search engine. These are the terms they'll use to perform their searches and ask their question to Google and its peers in order to find the websites that can provide the most complete and relevant answer.
Your goal is therefore to appear in the search results of the SERP (Search Engine Results or search engine results page) to offer your blog, product, tool or service.
To do this, your main keywords must be closely related to your activity to help increase traffic to your site. Indeed, Google & co analyze the vocabulary and expressions used in the user's queries and looks for the site that offers the most coherent information based (among other things) on the keywords present in the different contents.
Imagine you're creating a site for a professional training organization and you're in charge of its SEO. You'll of course need to work around main keywords like training / professional training, but you'll also need to expand your keywords into several variants such as:
- online training
- online training
- digital training
- training by dear
- Paris training
- management training,
- Etc.
Our tip: once your main keywords are chosen, you can create an Excel file to list an exhaustive set of possibilities: between 5 and 30 keywords with their variations. This initial list of terms will then allow you to develop a keyword tree that naturally stems from your main keywords to optimize your SEO without forgetting anything.
SEO Content Strategy Packs
Redacteur.com offers you in its 3 'SEO Content Strategy' packages an a semantic audit to select the most relevant keywords. In addition, an SEO expert designs content topics from those keywords and the team of professional writers at Redacteur.com writes your new contents, SEO-optimized and ready to be integrated on your site.
2. Choose secondary keywords
Secondary keywords are more like positioning opportunities. Indeed, in addition to selling your product, a professional training course, as in our previous example, you could run a news blog and cover topics related to your industry and services.
In this context, it can be worthwhile to target keywords secondary keywords that you cover on your site, indirectly related to your commercial and marketing activity. Let's return to the example of your professional training organization for which you have already drawn up a list of primary keywords. In addition to optimizing those, it will be worthwhile to target secondary keywords such as:
- Trainer / trainers
- professional retraining
- paid training
- CPF training
- funded training
These are just a few examples, but you get the idea! The goal is to think about the different queries potential students of your training organization might have and to answer them.
Did you know?
Secondary keywords are also synonyms of your primary keyword.
They also allow you to accommodate abbreviations used by internet users and should 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 topic and rank you higher in the results. Indeed, Google and others now favor relevance and quality over quantity and repetition. By working on your lexical field, you can vary your keywords while remaining coherent with your company's theme.
Remember to adapt your SEO keyword list to your audience: a young adult won't express themselves the same way as a retired person and therefore won't phrase their query the same way. When you draw from your lexical field, think about different levels of language, common expressions, etc. This will allow you to select the most relevant secondary keywords that will help you reach the heart of your target. It will also help you stand out from the competition online.
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.
Here is a simple example of a lexical field for an activity in tourism:
Also read: Primary and secondary keywords: how to use them correctly?
3. Take inspiration from your landing pages
Note that each keyword must correspond to a specific URL. It’s the only way to get good organic search rankings for your business and increase traffic to your site.
Indeed, Google’s algorithms will examine the richness of your page content, its URL and relevant incoming links to assess your authority on the primary keyword and rank you higher or lower in the SERPs.
You can therefore start from the list of your URLs and the topics of your existing pages to compile your list of primary keywords.
4. Use keyword generation tools
To complement your research, make use ofkeyword-generation tools and semantic fields.
A few examples:
5. Monitor actively
To find words related to your industry, you can carry out active monitoring by following news about your business. This will help you discover new keyword ideas on topics linked to your sector and interests. You can even create alerts to be notified of the latest developments in your field so you don’t miss anything and can regularly update your keyword list to stay near the top of the SERPs.
6. Ask your network
Who better than your customers and prospects to tell you the keywords they use when searching for you online? Don’t hesitate to run a small survey among your network to find new keyword ideas. You might be surprised by the terms your future customers use! You can also question your professional contacts, who may offer a different and complementary perspective to yours.
7. See what your competitors are doing
Why miss the chance to admire a competitor’s successful SEO work? You operate in the same field after all, so you’ll likely share some keywords. It’s up to you, however, to sort through them to avoid a simple copy-paste that won’t help you differentiate yourself — quite the opposite. The idea is to draw inspiration from effective work to complete and improve your own. For that reason, competitors can be an excellent source of information for your marketing strategy!
8. Read what’s being said on social media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… These are sites and apps where everyone shares ideas, opinions and questions using their own keywords. You can browse different networks, naturally filtering by your activity, to see what’s being said and what interests people. This will allow you to expand your keyword list, or even update it according to trends and viral topics.
9. Prioritize your keywords
After creating an exhaustive list of keywords, prioritize the ones you plan to focus your efforts on.
To do this, determine the potential traffic they can generate for you. A keyword’s search volume shows Internet users’ interest in the topic. The higher the volume, the more competitive the keyword.
An effective strategy is to target keywords with significant search volume that are still within your reach.
Our advice
Choose the long-tail keywords. These are low-traffic, low-competition phrases. Combined, this set of keywords will be more fruitful than a single overused keyword widely targeted by competitors.
10. Update your SEO keyword list
Don’t lock your keyword list in. Based on your analytics data, challenge your list to seize opportunities from new trends or less competitive keywords.
Thanks to the increasingly advanced performance of search engine algorithms, the way queries are phrased has changed a lot in recent years. Users no longer address a machine by typing "training+Paris+CPF"; they speak to a virtual interlocutor with whom they converse almost normally. This is even more true with voice search on smartphones!
Google now understands long expressions and creates increasingly sophisticated links between different topics. You should therefore review and expand your keyword list regularly so your site continues to speak the same language as your customers and prospects.
Don’t forget that the way users express themselves is also constantly evolving. New words appear and replace others that will eventually disappear from the vocabulary. That’s why it’s essential to take stock every month to add or remove target expressions and broaden your lexical field. That way you can highlight your products and services on the web.
Our tip
Don’t forget that organic search is a long-term effort that can pay off several months after you implement your actions. It’s therefore essential to choose your keywords wisely and plan to stick with them during the first months after your site goes live.
Then remember to iterate regularly by auditing your site’s traffic and optimizing your pages’ content.
Consider Redacteur.com for writing your articles optimized with your SEO keywords or to SEO Content Strategy packs a semantic audit to select the most relevant keywords for you, as well as support from an SEO expert to improve your site’s visibility.
