So keywords, these bad boys are super important for not only your SEO but also in your inbound marketing strategy. Keywords have been one of the cornerstones of any SEO efforts in bringing traffic to your site and the same goes for inbound marketing.
Since we are developing brilliant content to attract visitors to our site, we need to be able to understand why keywords are so important to this objective.
So what are keywords?
We can sum up a keyword as; A word or phrase, or grouping of words used to target a specific topic.
This will allow users that want to read a post or article on “said topic” to easily be able to understand that your post meets the criteria.
So if your posting on a topic like “chocolate-tastes-great-with-coffee” this is what the person will be expecting to read about. If however, you post leant more to the fact you’re promoting drinking hot chocolate over coffee, then you would go for “benefits-of-drinking-hot-chocolate-instead-of-coffee”.
Both are about coffee and chocolate, but they are completely different in context.
So what about SEO?
SEO is the next thing we need to look at, and probably half the reason your reading this post. So using keywords well and correctly will help you rank better in your search engine results.
Ultimately this is what every website owner wants, to rank higher. Because the higher you get in the search engines organically, the more likely the searcher will click on your URL.
Long-tail to short tail, what’s the difference
Short-tail keywords:
Short-tail keywords are basically broad keywords that usually are generalised to your business and have a higher search volume, as well as lots of competition. These tend to be harder to rank on and visitors from these types of keywords are less likely to hang around on your site and become leads.
Short-tail examples from our chocolate blog post:
Chocolate
Hot
Drink
Coffee
Cocoa
Chocolatiers
Long-tail keywords:
Long-tailed keywords are more refined & targeted than the broader small-tail ones. These types of keywords are generally more specific to your business or service with much low search volumes, which means little or less competition.
So that being said, it equates to being easier to rank & get more qualified traffic.
The other benefit to the long-tail keywords is that the likelihood of a visitor becoming a lead is a lot higher. This is simply because they have followed a refined and targeted link, so there’s more chance they will want to consume your content.
Long-tail examples from out chocolate blog post:
Best hot chocolate drink
Making perfect hot chocolate
Best Chocolatiers gold coast
Best Hot chocolate gold coast
Gold coast best raw cocoa chocolate
So let’s say we search 2 terms “hot chocolate” and “best hot chocolate on the gold coast”.
Now the first one will bring up many things about hot chocolate, images recipes and the band hot chocolate.
Now if we search the long-tail keywords of “best hot chocolate on the gold coast” we see these results. Ok firstly we see no one has blogged about this, so if you’re a chocolatier on the Gold Coast heads up and blog this now J
The next thing we see is that it brings up reviews about where to get the best hot chocolate on the Gold Coast. So it has allowed us to refine our original search and target it to a location, this will lead us to several options in our search for our cocoa bean fix today.
So you can see, not only will long-tail give us a better outcome on searches, due to it allowing us to target exactly what the searcher is searching for. It will also be less competition as we are focused on a specific topic.
Where they need to be!
So you now fully understand the how’s and whys, let’s take a look at the where’s.
Firstly, when creating new content (blog post etc.) the golden rule is to include your keywords in it or least some variation of it. This will appear in a few places:
- Page title – “Best hot chocolate on the gold coast | Gold Coast Chocoholics”
- Title / Header Tag – “Best hot chocolate on the gold coast!”
- Meta description – “Come in and enjoy the gold coast best hot chocolate experience, the richest creamiest cocoa your dreams are made of, check it out now at Chocoholics Gold Coast store”
- Image Alt Text – “best-hot-chocolate-on-the-gold-coast.jpg” or just describe the image as best you can.
- Main body – don’t plaster it throughout the page, however, if you can incorporate it naturally into your writing elsewhere or at least parts of it. The please do. Spamming the keywords will not only result in a penalty from the search engines, it will annoy the visitor and they will leave. Rule of thumb, if you can’t add it naturally into the flow of the post leave it out.
And this relates to inbound marketing how?
If we are going to be a success with inbound, firstly we need to attract the right visitors to our site. The more we can narrow down that traffic to being the right traffic, the higher your lead generation will be. As we will be attracting people that are actually searching for what our business provides.
Most of the time we set out to firstly educate, through blog posts and articles in the attraction stage of inbound and most people we know will go and Google a series of questions, from which they will start conducting their research.
This is where we need to make contact and this is where carefully thought out long-tail keywords will give us the edge over our competitors.
So it is essential for us that we understand how long-tail keywords work and create content around the questions a prospective lead may be asking Google and then keyword optimise our pages accordingly.
Helpful too for your research:
Keywords research no matter whether you are coming from an SEO or Inbound standpoint is critical. Getting the right words that people are likely to search for and then refining them down to the ones that have less competition can be very challenging.
Google has provided the Keywords Research Tools, here you will be able to see search volumes for your specific keywords, and be able to work out the best ones to use. Small tail or long tail this tool will help you analyse which ones have too much competition and which ones are ripe for the picking.