We’ve all done it thousands of times. You pull up Google on your computer and type in some innocuous phrase to search by without giving any thought as to the “keywords” that you’re using.

For those not in the marketing industry, you’ll never give your word choice a second thought. However, for those of us in marketing, we spend significant amounts of time AND money trying to optimize those phrases, more commonly known as “keywords.”

Before we dive into the actual steps of choosing and confirming your keyword, let’s first explore what a keyword even is!

What Are Keywords?

The concept of keywords focuses on the coupling of what a searcher wants to find online and what topics a piece of content focuses on.

A company will select specific keywords for each of their website pages which indicate the main content themes. This way, when a user searches for related content, the assigned keywords should help the user to be connected to their content. Seems simple enough, right? Wrong! Picking the correct keyword to entice the right type of customer to your page can be trickier than you think.

Now that you better understand the concept of keywords, below we will give you the step-by-step process of how you can pick the perfect keyword for your business:

Pick two-to-three specific keyword choice options

Let’s imagine that you own a bakery. While it’s tempting to just choose “bakery” or “baked goods” for your keywords, that’s not the right decision.

Keywords like “bakery” or “baked goods” are some of the most popular terms to describe your business. If you’re just starting out with SEO, it’s better to pick more niche or specific keywords which will not only be easier to rank for but will also help attract the right type of customers.

With a business like a local bakery, you probably aren’t overly concerned about competing with bakeries in other states. So, instead of choosing one of the above two options, consider a keyword like “Lakeland Florida bakery” or “red velvet cupcakes Los Angeles.” Now you’ve clarified the location which helps pare down the number of companies using your chosen keyword.

Once you’ve got a few keyword ideas, it’s time to validate them.

Learn more about your keyword options.

By heading to this Keyword Explorer, you can learn more about your chosen keywords and see some related suggestions. What’s cool about this tool is that you can run 20 different keyword searches each month for free. This gives you access to data like below:

Screenshot from Moz’s Keyword Explorer

After learning some more about your potential keywords, you may decide to pivot in a new direction or you may be encouraged that you found the correct keywords. Once you’ve settled on the right keywords for your business, it’s time to assign keywords to each of your pages.

Assign your keywords to all the necessary places.

Beginner marketers often understand the theory behind SEO but are unsure how to execute it. No worries, we’ll make it easy for you.

Here are the six places you need to include your keyword:

  1. Page Title
  2. Meta Description
  3. Header
  4. Sub Header
  5. Body Paragraphs
  6. Image Alt Tags

Screenshot of Six Stories WordPress

By including your keywords in the above six places, your website is telling Google what sort of content your page is showing. Without keywords in these places, search engines will have a harder time trying to distinguish what your content is about.

 

We hope this post helped to answer some of your questions regarding keywords! If you have need help setting up your keywords, let Six Stories help you choose the best ones for your business.

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