Tips for Choosing the Right Keywords

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Keywords or Key Phrases: Selection and SEO Strategy

How can you attract the traffic your website needs to achieve your goals? How can you appear in the top search engine results?

To answer all these questions and reach your objectives, you need to implement an organic search (SEO) strategy. To set up an effective SEO strategy, it is essential to follow certain steps:

➪ Identify your target audience.

➪ Define your objectives.

➪ Choose the right keywords.

➪ Produce optimized content.

➪ Measure the results achieved.

➪ Implement corrective actions.

This list is not exhaustive, but in this article we will focus on choosing the right keywords. OpenMedias guides you in answering the question: How do you choose the right key phrases?

Choosing Keywords: Research Methods

After identifying your target audience and defining your objectives, you need to choose the terms you want to rank for. This choice is essential to your SEO strategy. It is decisive for your search engine rankings and positioning.

Intuitive Research

Before using other keyword research techniques, you should rely on your intuition. This exploration phase involves putting yourself in the shoes of an average internet user typing a query into a search engine. List as many words as possible that seem most important to target. This list will also contain secondary words that are synonyms of your main keyword. These secondary keywords are ranking opportunities that should not be overlooked in your SEO strategy.

Keyword Generators

Today, you face increasingly fierce competition on the web. Moreover, thousands of pages certainly cover the same topic as yours. A word list from intuitive research is essential, but remains insufficient for your action plan. That is why you need to use keyword generators.

Various database tools offer keyword variations. Generators such as Yooda Insight, Keyword Tool, or SEMrush can help you build your list of keywords and key phrases. Google notably offers its Google AdWords Keywords Generator tool, which is based on queries typed into its search engine.

Whatever main keyword you have chosen, you must not forget the SEO rule: one main keyword and a list of secondary keywords per page.

Why Choose Secondary Keywords

Google needs to be able to associate each of your pages with a group of pages covering the same topic. This is how your pages will appear in a large number of search queries. For example, if you have an insurance website, you should have at least one page for "car insurance," another for "home insurance," and additional pages for other types of insurance. Each of these pages will be positioned on a main keyword and a set of secondary keywords corresponding to multiple expressions of the same idea. This is how you will target more keywords with significant search volumes.

Analyzing Keywords Used by Competitors

Before launching a competitive analysis, do a simple search with the keywords you plan to rank for. Your competitors, like you, are looking to increase traffic to their websites. To outrank them on the SERP, you need information about their SEO techniques. Several SEO analysis tools such as SEMrush, Majestic SEO, and Google Keyword Planner help identify these competitors.

Analyzing your competitors’ keywords will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor. You will also get an idea of the relevance of your own keywords, which will help you improve your website and content.

This analysis strategy should be accompanied by an analysis of the marketing strategies deployed by the competition.

The keyword or key phrase is the foundation of all SEO optimization for a website. Long-tail keywords are low-traffic, less competitive phrases. SEO is a long-term effort. It is therefore essential to review your strategy every month to modify, remove, or add target keywords or key phrases.