Choosing your keywords is the most strategic step in SEO in Digital marketing. Positioning on a large number of keywords allows you to attract to your site the traffic necessary for the success of your site. Choosing keywords that accurately describe your business allows you to avoid overly competitive queries that would require a lot of work. This also allows you to bring qualified traffic to your site.
Choose the right keywords to prepare for SEO actions
Have you decided to position your website at the top of the results on Google? This is already very good because there are still too many French companies who have not taken the measure of what a good referencing to their website would bring them. So get ahead by embarking on this great adventure … By preparing your SEO campaign well. Referencing your site is only possible if you take care to select and analyze your keywords and phrases.
Choosing the right keywords: the detailed strategy
A. Define the main keywords on which you want to position yourself
The keyword designates the expression that Internet users type into search engines to launch a search. Obviously, the whole issue of SEO is to ensure that your site comes out in the first results on a maximum of different keywords. If you sell handbags, for example, you will want your site to appear first when an Internet user types “buy a handbag”, or “cheap handbag”, or even “handbag store”.
Start by opening a Word or Excel file, which you will call “priority keywords”, on which you will list the 5 to 60 keywords that you think are the most important to target for your SEO. This list will be very useful for the rest of the operations, we will come back to it. If you use Optimiz.me, you will be able to determine the first list of words from the tool which is accessed by clicking on “start”:
To make this list, you just have to think about all the categories of products and services that you sell. For example, suppose your business consists of renting a room for events. You mainly organize weddings, birthdays, professional events, and bachelorette parties. The different main activities, which correspond to the main keywords, are:
We find the different uses that can be made of the same place, and therefore the different categories of service offered. This list is an excerpt from what was offered by Optimiz. me to a client who thought he had only one keyword to work on for his SEO: “Lyon room rental”. This error is the most common; it is present in 90% of companies, and fundamentally prevents any SEO work. Until a complete and comprehensive list has been compiled, no improvement in traffic from Google can occur.
Let’s take another example, this time in the world of summer camps. You can again categorize according to several criteria and themes:
The camps offered can be classified into various categories (categorical pages) depending on the theme (sport, theater), location (Jura), and period (summer). We can therefore see that a large number of categories will have to be created: one for each period (Easter, All Saints’ Day, winter, etc.), each place (Jura, Aquitaine, Brittany, etc.), and each theme (cooking, horse-riding, etc.), specificities (inexpensive, of quality, etc…), public (teenagers, children…)… There will therefore be potentially nearly fifty main keywords to target.
Each of these main keywords for SEO should correspond to a specific page. For example, you will not present your riding holiday camps and your sailing camps on the same page: you will make two separate pages, in order to use on each of them a lexical field as representative as possible of the proposed content (essential criterion for Google), but also to promote easy access to information for your visitors. People who search on Google for a riding colony must come across a page that only presents them with horse camps and not other topics that have nothing to do with it.
Likewise, people looking to rent a conference room should come across a page presenting the professional configuration of the room, with information on the possibilities of PowerPoint projection, videoconferencing, and accessibility for employees. On the contrary, people looking to get married will want information on the catering service, the sound system, and the number of guests that can be accommodated at the same time.
We have seen that creating a page for each main keyword is essential for the Internet user. But it is extremely important for a good positioning for Google.
The search engine analyzes the content and the words you use to find out if your page is relevant to come out on a given query. If your page dealing with “conference room rental” contains the keywords “meetings”, “training”, “seminar” or even “company”, the engine will be more inclined to make you stand out at the top of the results than it’s he finds a lexical field that is too heterogeneous (marriage, birthday, bachelorette party, etc.).
Obviously, for each main keyword, there can be several secondary keywords, which correspond to different ways of expressing the same idea. For example, here is a list of secondary keywords for the main keyword “colony riding”:
The example clearly shows that the secondary keyword corresponds to different ways of expressing the same idea, the same service, the same “customer value”. When SEO meets marketing …
B. Creating a list of secondary keywords
If you were to take only one thing from all of your reading, it should be the following maxim:Create one page per primary keyword and a list of secondary keywords for each page.
Why? Quite simply because Google must be able to link each of your pages to a “ corpus ”, that is to say to a set of other pages which address the same subject. If, for example, you have a law firm, with some collaborators who practice in labor law, and others in family law, you must have at least one page presenting the “labor law” activity, and one page presenting the “family law” activity. Each of these pages will be intended to be positioned on the main keyword and on a set of “secondary” keywords corresponding to several expressions of the same idea:
Secondary keywords make it easier for Google to link your page to one or more “corpus”, that is to say to a set of other pages that deal with the same subject. This is essential for your page to appear in a significant number of requests. Without this content, without these declined keywords, your page may be difficult for Google to classify, and therefore not be linked to the right corpora.
The secondary keywords make it possible to position oneself on the queries of Internet users which include these keywords. For example, if you write the phrase “access,” you will get visits from people interested in the access issue, and who may need a family lawyer immediately or soon.
In the cartoon example above, the right choice is certainly keyword 2, which brings good traffic but tolerable competition.
How to find secondary keyword ideas?
It is essential to use a powerful keyword planning tool. The Google Adwords “keywords planner”, Keyword tool ”tools are interesting but must be supplemented by a lexical field generator, as we will see below. That of Optimiz.me is in our opinion the most complete (but ok, we are not objective :).
The operation of keyword generators is very simple: you enter the first term, the tool offers you alternative keywords; with an assessment of the potential search volume (we will come back to this):
D. Evaluate the potential traffic for each keyword
To know, among a list of keywords for the same idea, which should be the main keyword and which should be the secondary keywords, you have to look at the search volume. We will choose to place as the main keyword the expression with the highest traffic potential. For example, here are the search volumes for several expressions relating to riding camps:
Among the 4 terms compared, we will choose to place in the main keyword the one with the highest search volume (horse riding colony, 260 requests/month). The others will be secondary requests.
E. Aiming for the long tail
The long tail refers to the set of keywords with low competition and low potential traffic which, added to each other, will always represent more than 80% of your traffic. The idea to remember is that it is better to seek to position yourself on a set of precise expressions with a low search volume than to persist in working a small panel of very competitive terms for which a lot of time and effort. efforts will be necessary to achieve its ends. For example, it is more strategic to be in the top 3 on 50 low-volume expressions such as “teenage riding colony July” or “teenage horse camp” than top 3 on “summer camp” itself. And this for 2 reasons:
So the conversion rate, (that is, the number of people who will buy after finding you) will necessarily be much higher with long-tail terms than with high search volume keywords.
