If you’re new to SEO, lesson one is how to use keywords. The basis of any effective SEO campaign should be properly research, well-chosen keywords. But finding the right keywords to target is only the first step. You also need to know how to use them effectively, to direct as much organic traffic to your website as possible.
Drawing on our experience as a leading SEO agency in the UK, here’s our top tips for using keywords in the right way:
1. Put plenty of time into keyword research
Before you start using keywords in your content, you need to do some serious research. Find out which keywords are relevant for your business, that your audience is using to find products and services like yours. You’ll want to find the right balance between high search volumes and competitiveness, so you have a realistic chance of ranking for your target keywords.
2. Optimise your website pages
Got your target keyword list? Use tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush to identify pages on your website that could benefit from a tweak, to help drive up organic traffic even further. Go through each page systematically, finding natural places to use your target keywords. Or you can work with your digital marketing agency to optimise your website pages.
Avoid the temptation to stuff each page full of keywords though. Remember that it’s a human audience that will be reading your pages – not just Google.
3. Focus each piece of content on each keyword phrase
It’s good SEO practice to use one target keyword, or a closely related cluster of phrases, per piece of content. Try to include it within the first 200 words, as some experts believe that search engines give more weight to the first part of your content.
Choose a primary keyword which will be the main focus of the content, and use it in the header. You can also have secondary keywords which complement the primary. These are usually just slight variations, so they’ll still feel natural within the focus of the content.
And only use each keyword once, otherwise you could run the risk of competing with your own content for search rankings.
4. Tick the technical boxes
There are lots of other places you should be using keywords outside of the main chunk of content. For example:
• Meta descriptions
• SEO title tags
• Alt text descriptions for images.
If your website is built on WordPress, you could use a tool like the Yoast SEO Plugin to help you optimise your content with keywords.
5. Use stop words to make your keywords sound natural
Many keyword phrases are pretty difficult to fit into a natural-sounding sentence, especially those which include a location. For example, ‘SEO marketing agency UK’. In fact, some keywords can be extremely awkward and hard to use.
There is a way around this though. You can use what is known as ‘stop words’ to introduce keywords more naturally into sentences. These are words like ‘in’, ‘the’ and ‘and’. Search engines tend to ignore these words, so SEO will be unaffected but your content will flow much more smoothly.
Need professional help with SEO? Work with the Nextgen Marketing, a network of SEO experts in the UK. Contact us to find out more.
