One of the most important goals my clients have when approaching me for inbound marketing services is growing their business steadily and organically. We all want to attract more of our ideal customers and see our brand build trust and recognition.
Keyword optimization is one of the most integral drivers of growing your business naturally through inbound marketing. The right keywords attract your target audience directly to your site or content, meaning that rather than searching for your ideal customer – they come to you.
What Is Keyword Optimization?
So, what is keyword optimization? When your customer searches for your service or product using an online search engine like Google or Bing, what words do they use? For my services, potential clients might use several different word combinations when searching, such as “inbound marketing”, “online marketing” or even location specific queries like “online marketing Pleasanton”. Because these are words your ideal customers are most likely to use when searching for you online, they are your target keywords. Once you’ve identified your target keywords, you can optimize your web content by including these keywords in the right way.
How to Find Your Target Keywords?
Marketing professionals do extensive research to find target keywords for each individual business. While you might think it will be easy to guess the best keywords for your business, your choice of target keywords needs to be a careful balance of relevance, competition, and quality, based on data provided by the search engines themselves. Optimizing keywords is also an ongoing process – you can’t just ‘set it and forget it’. The best keywords for your business need to be constantly updated and added to your online content to keep your optimization relevant.
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How Does Keyword Optimization Work?
Once you’ve identified the best keywords for your business, you need to include them in your online content, so customers will find your blogs and webpages when using those search terms. Keyword optimization forms a part of both front end and back end SEO (search engine optimization), so it can be helpful to have an SEO expert help you at this stage.
Keywords should be included in the front end of your site by being used in blogs, web content, and other site text. Take care not to ‘oversaturate’ your site with the same keywords, as this indicates to search engines that your site is low quality. Do use synonyms and alternate words for your keywords to add interest and variety, and to make your content more readable. Keywords can also be added to Title tags, links, image descriptions, meta descriptions, and URLs in the back end of the site.
While keyword optimization can seem easy, it’s very important to do your research well and implement keywords carefully. Using too many keywords, the wrong keywords, or placing keywords in the wrong place will produce no benefit and could even cause your site to be penalized.
>>Checkout Our SEO Cheat Sheet and Ensure Your Website is Keeping Up With SEO Best Practices!
What Are the Benefits of Keyword Optimization?
When done correctly, keyword optimization gives your site numerous benefits, and really helps your whole search engine strategy to take off.
- Drives Higher Quality Traffic – Yes, you want more visitors, but you want high-quality visitors too, who will stay on your site and look around. The right keywords attract your ideal customers, so you get quality visitors.
- Helps You Understand Your Customers – By looking at the search terms and keywords your ideal customers use, you can get ideas of how to make your business and services even more appealing to them.
- Write Better Content – When you know what topics and keywords appeal to your customers, you can write better content framed around those subjects that will also naturally include your target keywords.
- Measure How Much Traffic You Could Have – By using search engine data and identifying your ideal keywords, you can look at how much potential traffic your site could be getting – and the potential of your business growth!
If you’re a business with an online presence and you’re not optimizing your keywords, you could be missing out on achieving the greatest potential for your business! Researching and implementing optimized keywords makes your site more relevant, popular, and useful, so your business can naturally grow and succeed.
