How to choose SEO keywords for your Web

There are hundreds of factors that affect the SEO Optimisation of a website. One of the most important is to have relevant content and quality in the pages that Google will include in its index. Each fragment of content must bring a value to the user who is reading it. It is not going to be any use to include empty meaning or duplicate content. But other than that, for that content is also useful when positioning each of the pages of our website we will have to have previously worked on a strategy of content in which we have chosen the keywords that are most relevant to us. Choosing the keywords in advance allows you to:

• Be more efficient, because you will not “waste time” writing about topics that are not priority when it comes to positioning your website.
• Prioritise the work, because you will have a keyword study in which to see what words have more potential when it comes to attracting traffic to your site.

Preparation of the key words study

A keyword study will be the basis for working on the content of our website. If we have a document that collects the keywords that we have chosen for our pages we can always:

• Check in what position we are for each of the keywords, through specific tools or the Google Search Console, where you can filter by search terms and by URL.
• Analyse the evolution of the position of each keyword and the organic traffic.
• Make sure that we are not using the same keyword on different pages, which could confuse the search engines and make our pages compete with each other to position themselves for a specific term.
• Guide us when optimising all the elements of the pages, because it is advisable to use the most relevant keywords in all the elements that we will optimize on the same page: title, meta-Description, H1, images, etc.

To begin with, we will compile a list of words that are relevant to our business. If our web is an e-commerce we can start from a list with the name of the products that we sell in our catalog or the names of the current categories, for example.

Also, we can use some tool that allows us to export the keywords of any Web site to obtain a list of terms for which the websites of the competition are positioned, sites that we consider references in the sector or even Wikipedia.

In addition to the lists we can get from several SEO Tools, we can add synonyms that occur to us, terms related to the ones we already have, more generic or more concrete and suggestions from Google related to each of the terms as we obtain with keywordtool.io. This tool also offers suggestions of questions and variations of the word using different prepositions and gives you the possibility to find specific suggestions for Youtube, Amazon, Instagram, etc.

Once we have a list with all the keywords, we must take into account which are the most wanted by the users. There are several tools that give an estimation of the searches that each term has but we can use the keyword tool of Google Ads, Keyword Planner, that allows to export the volume of search of up to 700 terms.

How to choose keywords for an e-commerce

Once we have a document with all the keywords for which we would like to position ourselves we will have to classify them according to the intention of search that is deduced from each one. For example, when someone wants to “buy curtains” we know that the person is looking for curtains with the intention of buying them and being well positioned in this type of search increases the chances that the user ends up buying in your online store. Instead, if someone is looking for “hanging curtains” we know that their intent is not to buy, but to find information. Therefore, for many searches you have, if the curtains category page of our website does not include information on how to hang curtains, we will not choose.

We can classify the keywords according to the intent of the search:

Considering the intent of search for each term will help us to choose the best keyword for each of the pages we want to position.

However, the search intent behind a keyword is not always so obvious. For example, if someone is looking for “modern curtains” you may be looking to buy curtains or simply look for ideas to redecorate your dining room in the future. In any case it can be an opportunity to position our online store. We could choose that keyword as the main topic of an article in the blog and, although the user does not look to buy curtains at that time, we will make our online store for future purchases not only of curtains, but of any other product of our E-commerce.

Something that can help us in these cases is to check what kind of results Google shows for each of the keywords. Google is becoming better recognising the intent of searching behind each term and therefore does not always show the same type of results, which will affect, for example, the number of organic results shown and therefore, the volume of traffic we can Receive from each search.

For example, in the case of “kitchen curtains” and “curtains for kitchen”, the two terms have the same monthly search volume. However, the search results page is different for each term.

Results for “kitchen curtains”:

In the case of “kitchen curtains” we see that there are no ads on the right side of the page, so the user is more likely to click on organic results.

On the other hand, in doing this type of checks we can detect new opportunities or threats. For example:

• If the first organic results are images, we have the opportunity to position images for this search and get traffic from users who click on them. In addition, positioning an image will help seekers understand that our site is relevant to that search.
• If the first results are a map with stores and we do not have a physical store, our organic results will have less opportunity to receive traffic. And if you have a physical store, we have the opportunity to appear on Google Maps.
• If it is searches that return a Google service like Google flights or do not require the user to enter any page, as happens when looking for a definition, we will have to choose alternative keywords that, even if they have a smaller search volume, have Greater potential to attract traffic.

When we know which keywords are the most wanted and are also the most relevant and correspond to our objectives we will be able to develop the content. We can assign each keyword or group of keywords a URL. Depending on the intention of search we will decide if the URL corresponds to a category of our online store or, in case of more informative keywords we can choose them as possible topics for articles of our blog.

Identifying the most important keywords is crucial. You can’t position your pages for all the keywords you find. The words you choose will determine:

• The speed with which you will be able to position yourself. If you choose keywords with more competition take longer to position yourself and need to invest more resources on it than if you choose keywords with less competition. It all depends on your goals.
• Your target audience. If your products or services are specific to a customer type, you can choose specific keywords for that type of user. In principle it will be easier to position your pages for more specific keywords (long-tail) than for generic keywords.

Choosing the keywords of an article

If you are working on the content of a blog instead of an online store and have doubts when choosing the keywords of an article we recommend:

• Make sure you choose keywords that are not already being used in other articles on your website. One way to check it is by handing out the list of terms that have impressions in your Google Search Console account or by doing a Google search for: “keyword” site: tusitioweb. com. This will prevent more than one page on your website competing for positioning. If we already have a page that has impressions for a particular keyword, it may be more appropriate to update the content of that article instead of creating a new one.
• Check the type of result that appears for those keywords before you write an article. In the case of informational keywords you can detect opportunities for more traffic if the results appear in “featured snippets” format.

This type of result can attract more traffic to your site especially if a list is not complete, so the user will have to enter our page to read the complete list.

In short, the choice of keywords in SEO does not depend only on the estimated search volume but there are many other factors that will help us make a decision and make our content strategy more effective.