Increase Traffic to your Website by Using Keywords

Keywords play such a crucial role in small business marketing. If your business can effectively choose keywords that your buyer persona are likely to type in the search bar, then your business website will receive search engine traffic from people that are interested in your company. So now that we’ve established that keywords are pretty important, how do you find the right keywords for your business? We have some tips for you below and we will use a sample remodeling construction business as an example so you can follow along.

Where do you Start?

Finding the relevant keywords for your business website can be an overwhelming and seemly impossible task. I mean, when you type in “remodeling construction business” on Google, there are over 31.6 million search results!

You’re probably wondering how your small business can even draw attention to your website when you’re competing against millions of search results. Fortunately, we have some good news… you are the expert when it comes to picking keywords for your company.

Start with YOU

You know your business and your customers better than anybody else, so let’s focus on your knowledge first. For example, if your business is a remodeling construction business in Willamette Valley, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that “remodeling construction business in the Willamette Valley” would be a good starting keyword.

Just like that, we went from dealing with 31.6 million search results to just 405,000 by adding 3 new words to the keyword search. This shows that word selection and placement of keywords is unbelievably crucial to getting your website noticed on Google’s search engines.

Now, step inside your customer’s shoes and think about what they would enter in a search bar to find products or services like yours and make a list of potential keywords off of this research. If you’re struggling to make a list, ask your friends and family to see what terms they would use to find a business like yours. Another alternative is to type in a keyword in Google, then scroll to the bottom and find relevant searches and boom, you just found some relevant keywords just like that.

Befriend Google Keyword Planner

A big recommendation we have for you is to sign up for Google Adwords and use the FREE Google Keyword Planner tool. By entering a single keyword, the Google Keyword Planner will give you dozens of related keyword options. This is a great way to do a trial and error process with keywords as you may notice that your initial keyword instinct was close but it’s not quite what your customer is searching. For example, the tool may show that people aren’t looking up “remodeling construction business in Willamette Valley” but rather “remodeling in Willamette Valley”, “remodeling construction business”, or even “Willamette Valley remodeling business”. These small differences in world choice and placement can greatly affect the amount of web traffic that comes to your website. Find keywords that are relevant to your business and customers, has a high search volume, and relatively low competition.

Additional Tips for Choosing Keywords

Relevancy
Regardless of the tool or methods that you use to find keywords, remember that keywords are only good if they are relevant to what you’re offering and your audience. For example, if you’re a remodeling construction business and one of the more popular keywords is “how to remodel your home”, you need to think again. Regardless of how much traffic that keyword may bring, it’s attracting the wrong audience. People that are searching that term are looking to do the remodeling themselves, not hire a business like yours to do the work for them.
Variation
With millions of search results to compete against, don’t make your own keywords compete against each other. Have a variety of related keywords and incorporate them into a series of blog posts or articles on your website. If your page only focuses on “remodeling construction business”, then all your pages are competing against each other. Look for alternative keywords such as “remodeling and construction”, “businesses that do remodeling and construction” or “remodeling construction company”.
Performance
While establishing keywords is a crucial process, tracking results is just as important. Use analytical tools to track which pages are performing well and which pages need more focus. After looking at the results and noticing which keywords bring traffic to your website, you need to ask yourself if you’re making the most of that traffic. Is your content relevant to the keyword search? Does your call to action on the page make sense?

How do I use my Keywords?

So, now we’ve established how to find relevant keywords that will drive the right audience to your website. Now, where do you put these keywords? We’ve listed 6 places that are extremely crucial to include your keywords to maximize your search engine optimization.

1. Page Title

Your page title, or title tag, are the links that come up in search results. To maximize efficiency of your keywords, use an exact match of your keyword and keep it under 70 characters.

2. Meta Descriptions

The Meta description is the wording shown under your page title in the search results. Put some of your targeted keywords here and keep your Meta description under 156 characters long to prevent it getting cut off.

3. URLs

Including keywords in your URL is a great way to drive SEO traffic as well. You don’t need to look for domains that have your keyword already included because you can put your keywords at the end of your URL.

http://yourwebsite.com/your-keyword

4. Headings

Headings are the larger scale text used throughout a page to divide your content. While including keywords in headings is very important, many website forget to do so. Don’t make this mistake and use a combination of your keywords in various headings.

5. Body Text

The general rule of keyword placement in your content is to include it 2-3 times in the main body and once in the first 1-3 sentences of the first paragraph. Try not to cluster your keywords in one place.

6. Image Descriptions

Yeah, who would’ve thought to include keywords with your images… but it is actually a very important placement. Images can be optimized by:

Alternative text: this is the main text search engine that is used to describe an image
Image title: this is the text that people see when they hover over your image
Image description: this is crucial to include keywords for this will help your image get found on image searches
Image file name: how your image is labeled on your computer

There is no doubt that content marketing, blogging, social media, and email marketing are becoming strong forces in the marketing world and they have keywords to thank for that. The concept of keywords is allowing these marketing methods to become noticed and successful. Finding these keywords aren’t easy, especially for small businesses, but with our help, you can get off to a strong start.