One of the most important aspects of creating your website and tackling your SEO campaign is determining your targeted keywords. Targeted Keywords are the words or phrases that you want to be found for in search engines. These keywords typically relate to your services or products. Your ultimate goal with increasing your website visibility is to turn up at the top of search engine results pages (SERPS) for specific search queries. Thus, you must determine the keywords that your prospects and customers are typing into Google in order to optimize your content. Here are 3 main ways to go about determining your targeted keywords.
1) Brainstorm Session
Form a focus group with your team and spend a substantial amount of time tossing around ideas for targeted keywords. The key here is to put yourselves in the shoes of your customer. Imagine you were a prospect in need of your service, what would you type into Google? Set aside your jargon and insider information and think solely from the viewpoint of an outsider. For example, if you are an oncologist, you need to understand that many of your prospects may not know that term and instead will be typing in “cancer treatment”. Thus, you will want “cancer treatment” as a keyword.
2) Review Statistics
Take some time scouring the keyword section of your web statistics. This section shows which keywords that people are typing into search engines, turn up your page as a result. More than likely you will want to move past the first 10 results because these are probably branded and have to do with your name. While it is great that customers and prospects have heard of you and are typing your name directly into search engines, your challenge and ultimate goal is to be found for general search terms that people who have never heard of you are typing in. So, look at that second page of results to see what words are leading to your site.
3) Do Your Research
Go online and see what people are interested in as well as what your competitors and industry leaders are doing to get found. You can tell what others consider their keywords to be by looking at their landing pages, the specialized pages within their website. Also, some websites still use the Meta Keywords tag so you can right click, view page source, and look for this tag in their HTML to see exactly what they consider their keywords to be. Use various platforms, like Google AdWords, to see what the monthly traffic numbers are for various search queries. This will tell you what words are getting searched the most. With this information, you will want to consider whether a highly searched term is worth working to rank for or if it is so highly searched, like “car”, that you don’t want to focus all of your energy on such a feat.
Determining your targeted keywords can be a difficult and time consuming process but it is absolutely necessary to managing your website and your search engine optimization efforts. Hopefully these tips will help you get started. If you need help determining your targeted keywords, Informatics has extensive experience with SEO and keyword research, so feel free to contact us for assistance.
