When you begin optimizing for your website, you probably have a good idea of what keywords you want to be using in your content. Or do you?
Let’s say a hypothetical business owner sells “environmentally-safe, BPA-free, drinking containers with printed graduations”.
Wait, what? Oh, you mean “water bottles”.
While the first phrase is technically correct, that is high-level language that has a lower chance of being used in a search query. It is important to find the right language, or keywords, to use in the creation of your website content. There are several ways to figure out what keywords searchers are using when they are trying to find your product or service.
First, we can use Google itself.
Google has a feature that many people are familiar with, even if they don’t know what it’s called: The Google Knowledge Graph. This is the list of search queries that drops down while you are searching on Google.
The best way to think about this feature is Google “guessing” what the searcher is looking for based on popular searches. That means that you can assume a good amount of users are searching these phrases.
In this example, we have three heavily searched terms. Our hypothetical water bottle maker can now make decisions based on this data. For instance, if they offer personalized water bottles, they should probably make a page about that service and optimize for that service on their site.
Google Adwords Keyword Planner
The Keyword Planner allows you to find out what searches related to your base keyword get a lot of searches. If we use our hypothetical water bottle maker, we can see what keywords are heavily searched in the world of water bottles.
Disregarding the brand names, we now know that people are in fact searching for BPA-free water bottles. We also know that people are searching for glass water bottles. Now our water bottle maker knows that their website content should definitely make mention of “BPA-free” and “glass water bottle” (assuming they actually offer these products).
Use Your Competitors
Another way to find keywords is using your competitor’s websites, namely the ones that rank better than you.
This can be as simple as reading through a competitor site to get an idea of what language they are using. Or, you can get more extensive and use keyword research sites like these:
Good SEO means using the language that searchers are using to find your site and sites like it. Spending time on keyword research is a great way to get your website found.