This may be ‘day one’ stuff for experienced internet marketers. But for the average business owner who has a company website and is learning as they go – this is an important question.

The search terms your target market are typing into Google are very important to be aware of.

Your industry keywords are like the foundation of a house in website terms. This is because you will be basing your online presence around these phrases.

keyword research

 

Your prospective customers use these search terms to find what they are looking for, so if you don’t do your research properly you may miss out of a big chunk of your market.

To gain the most exposure you need to carefully map out each webpage for different sets of search phrases. Much like you would keyword optimise your video when uploading to Youtube.

The most important fact you need to start with is to thematically group your chosen search terms.

Why?

For two reasons…

Firstly, Google likes an orderly website. It likes your information categorised so it’s easier for its ‘spiders’ to crawl your website and index it. This means each different page has its own grouped set of keywords and can’t be confused with another page.

Secondly, grouping your search terms together makes it easier to plan out your different web pages. A good example of this would be a dentist who offers many different kinds of services. Each different service will have its own unique set of keywords. This requires a different web page for each different type of service.

By thematically grouping your keywords, you can rank your website for more search phrases as well as offering a better user experience for your visitors.

A good rule of thumb is to focus on 4-5 different keywords per page. All closely related.

Choose your most coveted keyword per keyword group. Use it for the H1 of your content and try to fit it into the slug of your URL. Also, use that main search term for your page meta title – this is the title that shows up on Google search results.

If you overuse your keywords on each page, Google will hit you with a mild penalty. Meaning you will never make page one. So you will need to follow this strict keyword density rule:

Single word search terms can be no higher than 2% within your page content

Double word search terms no higher than .8% – 1% within your page content

Triple word search terms no higher than .25% within your page content

How do you work this out?

To make the math easier let’s say each of your pages has text content 1000 words long. Single word keywords (dentist) can be used 20 times, double word keywords (Sydney dentist) up to 10 times and triple word keywords (Sydney dental implants) twice.

It is important to know that this keyword density equation counts for all words on each page. Meaning the words in your URL as well as metadata.

If in doubt – play it safe and cut the density down.

Part two of this post will outline keyword buyer intent.

Corporate Video Melbourne