How to use keywords to build organic traffic to your website
While you can buy traffic to your website – by spending on pay per click advertising, for example – it’s also important to make sure your site is good at gaining organic traffic from web searches. To do this, you need to use keywords.
Keywords are individual words and phrases you use in your website content to ensure your web pages rank highly in search engine results when people search for businesses or products like yours.
A good starting point for coming up with keywords is to ask yourself: “What would someone looking for my product or service most likely type into Google search?” or, “If I boiled the content of this web page down to a few words and phrases, what would those words and phrases be?” You should then use those words and phrases regularly in your website, to increase the chances that search engines will serve up pages from your website in response to searches for those words.
Keyword research doesn’t stop with brainstorming, however. You can also carry out online research using a range of tools such as keyword explorer or ubersuggest. There are two types of keywords: one-word keywords are often very broad – so, for example, of you are a baker you might want to use the word “bread”. This is known as a short-tail keyword. They’re important but there’s usually a lot of competition to rank well with these as they are so broad.
To reach people who are most likely to be wanting what you are selling, you also need to use longer phrases – such as “sourdough bread in Swansea”. This known as a long-tail keyword, and there is less competition to rank highly for a phrase like this because it’s so much more specific. While long-tail keywords might get you less traffic, they will get you visitors who are more relevant and who intend to make a purchase or engage with your content.
How to use keywords on your web pages
While it’s important to use keywords in your content, you shouldn’t overdo it as this will almost certainly make the content infuriating to read. Instead, your aim should be to create compelling, informative content with keywords scattered through it. Make sure you put your primary keyword into both your title tag and the body of your content, because search engine bots will look at these when deciding how to rank your page.
You should also put your primary keyword into your URL, your H1 tag, the meta description and the alt attributes of images on the page, as this will also help search engine bots to identify what your page is about.
How to decide what content is needed
You can also use your keywords to plan out the content you need to create your site. By starting with keywords and creating content around those words and phrases, you’ll increase the chances that your site will rank highly and draw in visitors with intent to buy. As a general rule, it’s advisable to target broader search terms with your home page then tackle more specific long-tail keywords on other pages of your site.
Need help?
At Primedia Marketing we’re experts on digital marketing, working with a wide range of clients to ensure they perform brilliantly online. Get in touch today to see how we can help with your web content.
