A seasoned San Jose SEO Expert, especially someone with years of experience will likely be adept at using keyword research to help your website outrank your competition. What most search engine optimization (SEO) clients don’t realize is that there is a whole gamut of intricate processes involved in determining the keywords that will help improve your website’s ranking. The task of coming up with the right keywords is made even more complex by the ever-changing search engine algorithms and the increasing level of competition.
Clearly, there is so much more involved in keyword research. Regardless whether the keywords are short, medium or long-tail, SEO specialists are not just making the words materialize out of thin air. SEO experts are good at what they do because they know important tricks to keyword research, and they are not too keen to share them their clients. Below are three of the more important secrets to keyword research that you need to know.
1. Optimizing for a Target Audience
Bringing in traffic to your website is one thing but attracting the right kind of traffic is what your SEO keyword research should be accomplishing. It is true that attracting visitors that are unlikely to become customers or clients will help your page ranking somewhat. However, this is low-quality traffic. These types of visitors will have very little chance of returning or endorse your website to friends.
Attracting low-quality traffic will also likely increase your bounce rates and abandonment rates. These stats will adversely affect your page ranking and will likely cause your ranking to dip. Google uses RankBrain, which is a machine learning system, to help it decide how to rank your website. Among the visitor behavior that RankBrain takes note of is “dwell time,” which as the term implies, is the length of time that visitors spend on your website. The wrong kind of traffic will also make your site’s dwell time suffer.
Optimizing for your target audience means that your SEO guy needs to understand the language of your audience when doing keyword research. For instance, someone who’s researching keywords for hunting should know what it means to do a gutless field dressing or what an Alaskan zipper is. Prioritizing keywords that the target audience understands and uses will help immensely in filtering out low-quality traffic.
2. Research Keywords for All Stages of the Buying Process
Prior to buying a product or a service, online customers often go through two stages before proceeding with the purchase. The first of these steps are research, where they show interest in the product or service. If their research made them more interested in the product, the next stage is the evaluation phase where they try to study more about the product, make comparisons and search for online reviews. An experienced SEO specialist knows the importance of optimizing your website for keywords for all the three stages of the buying process and not just the last buying stage.
3. Provide Your Audience What They Need
If you have snagged your visitor using keywords for the three stages of the buying process, you need to provide them with content that addresses their needs. Provide your keywords with the support that it needs with high-quality content. For example, you can give them an in-depth and well-written guide on how to use your product. You also can explain to them why your product or service is better than the competition. Most importantly, give them compelling reasons why they should take their browsing up a notch by sampling any of your offerings.
There is much more involved in keyword research apart from those mentioned above. However, you can use what you have learned here when hiring SEO services in order for you to provide them with better assistance when they are researching appropriate keywords for your website.