How to Use Keywords for Search Engine Optimization
How Can SEO Help Your Business?
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important digital marketing strategy that can help improve your business drastically. It's a crucial tool for raising brand awareness, building strong and healthy relationships with customers and gaining the title of being a trustworthy source and expert in your field. SEO is able to rank how effective your content is in search engines.
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Some factors that are important in determining your rankings on search engines include:
- Quality of Content
- Trustworthiness of Sources
- User interactions with the page (bounce rates)
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If a website has a low bounce rate, it means that people are staying for an extended duration the website and scrolling through the pages. As a result of users finding my website valuable and staying on it longer, search engines will rank my website higher.
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What Are Keywords?
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Keywords are simply words and phrases that people use to find specific content that they are looking for online. Companies can use those keywords to reach out and connect with audiences who are looking for their services and products.
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Good SEO can attract audiences and increase the likelihood of your page being clicked. Keywords are used by users when they are looking something up on search engines. If I were looking to buy a new phone, I might search up something like “Smartphones” or “Best smartphones to buy”.
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My search engine would then provide me with a bunch of links that it considers relevant to the word or phrase that I searched up. These links can be both informational and transactional.
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For example, when I searched up “smartphones”, I was provided with links that showed prices of different popular smartphones at the moment.
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Underneath the transactional links, there are informational links that inform you of what you should buy. The title for one of the links is “The Best Phones for 2023”. This link is able to inform me about the different types of phones that are being considered as the “Best Phones” for the year of 2023.
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SEO and keywords are related because search engines will rank your page according to how relevant it is to a user's search query.
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Some keywords are more popular than others which makes it harder to rank higher on search engines. However, other words or phrases aren’t as popular which makes ranking higher on those terms easier since there is less competition to get to the front page of SERPs.
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Brands utilize keyword research to discover and investigate the search phrases that customers use to find goods, services, or general information on search engines. Websites like SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner can help you identify industry-related keywords for you to rank for.
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For example, if I were to go on SEMrush and type in “SEO”, it would show the following image:
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The keyword "SEO", has a high search volume, indicating that it is a common keyword that is searched on Google.
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Search volume is how often the word or phrase is being searched up on a search engine. As shown in the image, the Keyword difficulty is 100% making it a very hard keyword to compete for.
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When a word or phrase has a high keyword difficulty, it indicates that the word/phrase is very competitive and will be difficult to rank high for.
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On the other hand, the phrase “Technical SEO Agency” has a lower keyword difficulty, indicating that it's easier to rank high for than "SEO" on Google.
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It also has a lower volume meaning that people aren’t searching for this term as much. Both a high search volume and a low keyword difficulty are characteristics of a good keyword. As a result, you will have less competition while attempting to rank your page higher on search engines.
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How Does Content Affect SEO?
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Content is a core part of SEO as it’s what you will use to reach out and engage with your audiences. Knowing what kind of content you will be writing about and how the content is being made is essential to making your content successful.
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For example, if you’re a company that specifically makes running shoes, you’ll publish blogs about why people should buy your shoes, how they are better than other shoes in the market, how people can buy them, and many more. When a runner or someone that is interested in running shoes looks for information about these shoes, your blog will come up.
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This allows you to interact with the audience and provide information that can help you build a strong relationship with them. The idea of SEO is that when people want to buy running shoes, you’ll be the first company they go to. Creating high-quality content to rank your website higher for keywords on search engines is ideal for people to find your website.
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If my goal were to promote shoes that my brand is creating, I would create videos explaining why people should buy it.
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This can include a durability test on the shoe, how comfortable it is, how fashionable it is, etc. There are many different ways that I can create content like this.
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Different Forms of Content include:
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- Videos
A video that a company creates to improve their web presence and attract viewers. In this, SEO plays a role by giving your video a higher position if it is credible and has relevant keywords in the title and description pages.
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- Blogs
‍ An article that a brand frequently posts in order to keep their information up to date and keep readers engaged. SEO plays a factor in this by allowing your blog to rank higher based on the keywords used in the blog. ‍
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- Podcasts
‍A group of people or an individual that talk about a specific topic in order to build loyal audiences while driving high levels of engagement. If you have keywords in your title, SEO will link your podcast to users that search up the keyword. The more relevant your podcast is, the higher search engines will rank your podcast.
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An image, text, or video shared on social media platforms that advertises a company and fosters audience engagement. The purpose of the post could be to educate, gain brand awareness, or spark discussion.
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Final Thoughts
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In order to build a brand you must create content that is helpful to your audience and are aligned with their interests and needs. If your content meets the requirements of the audience, your brand will be viewed as trustworthy and credible. Your brand will continue to grow and extend as you develop more connections with your audience through SEO.
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Interested in Learning More?
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