Keyphrase research is essential to developing SEO for small business websites. Without it, the customers you intend to reach may never find you on search engines. Here are our 9 tips to better small business SEO keyphrase research.
1. Determine Your Goals
You can’t begin research without knowing what you want to achieve. Who is your target audience and what do you want them to do when they find your site? How much traffic and/or conversions is your business aiming for?
2. Identify Keyphrases
Once you know what you want to achieve, make a list of all of the keyphrases you think your target audience might search for when they try to find your products or services in Google.
For example, what problems are they looking to solve, what questions are they asking, and what products are they looking for?
3. Research
Use your answers to the above questions to research these keyphrases. One easy way to do this, is to enter each keyphrase into Google and see what it suggests as you are typing – these are the most popular keywords that real people use.
Alternatively, there are loads of keyphrase research tools out there that are either free or paid to use. Or, you could even invest in the services of an SEO Specialist so that you can setup your SEO Campaign with strong foundations, and the highest chance of success.
4. Find Long-Tail Keyphrases
During your keyphrase research, try and figure out what long-tail key phrases are being searched for in Google.
When we talk about ‘long-tail’, we means long, specific phrases rather than single keywords. These are more likely to reach potential customers.
For example:
Single keyphrase = shoes VS Long-tail keyphrase = womens brown high heel shoes
5. Analyse the Competition
Use your identified keyphrases to research your main competition. You can do this by simply typing each keyphrase into Google and seeing what results return on the 1st page.
From there, you can mark which keywords are more or less competitive and identify how you can stand out from big names within the market.
6. User Intent
Looking at the competition, try to work out what audiences are looking for when they enter these words. Is it informational, navigational, commercial or transactional?
User intent has become a very large part of SEO, so it’s vital that you understand it before moving forward with keyphrases to optimise for.
7. Landing pages
It’s no good doing all of this keyphrase research if you aren’t going to utilise it in the best way. Use it to create landing pages with excellent on-page SEO to drive visitors to the site and direct them to the action you want them to take.
Good on-page SEO includes optimising your meta-data and on-page content with your SEO keyphrases – and always do so with the user in mind!
8. Evaluate
Look at your insights and keyphrase rankings to determine if your keyphrase research has been effective. This is an on-going process as rankings will always fluctuate in Google for numerous reasons.
One way to enhance your on-page SEO or landing pages is to update your content with more focused keyphrases if you are not getting the results you want.
9. Continue the Research
Trends and patterns change constantly, not to mention Google’s continuous algorithm updates, so keep on top of your audience by repeating the keyphrase research process over time.
You’ll also need to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, so it’s important to give you keyphrases a realistic time-frame to improve in ranking rather than swapping keyphrases after just a couple of months.
For affordable small business SEO, get in contact with DigitUX today.
