Every Great SEO Strategy Starts With Keyword Planning: Tips from SEO Experts
– By #RSA
It’s known far and wide that content serves an integral role in the better performance of your business’ website. With billions of webpages being indexed every single day by Google, the ongoing competition for organic search engine performance is fierce. Whether you’re looking to craft an entirely new website for your business or simply are looking to give your organic search rankings a boost, we’re here to tell you why Keyword Planning is the most essential component in developing a fluid content development strategy – as told by SEO experts here at Robert Sharp & Associates in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Before you even begin embarking on the content development journey for your website, it’s critical that you have an understanding of the following things:
- How your target customers find similar products and services
- The kinds of terminology that you use to refer to your products and services
- The kinds of search terms your target audience is using to find similar products and services.
- Whether or not your website is already SEO friendly. Have you conducted any sort of rank tracking research to see where improvement is needed?
All of the above components are critical in order to create purposeful content, generated from Keyword Planning.
What is the Importance of Keyword Planning?
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we should probably define what Keyword Planning really is and what it isn’t.
Long gone are the days of stuffing keywords into your website in hopes of organically ranking for a boatload of search terms. Today, Google bases its organic search rankings on a variety of different factors that all center on subject matter, dictated by the keywords associated with each page of your website.
While you could be discussing a vast array of subject matter on your website, you only truly have two chances (or keywords/keyword phrases) per webpage to stand out with. Placed in the Title and Meta of each page on your website (or the information that you see in Google search results), you have to be picky about the keywords you choose.
Title:
Meta:
For each keyword selected, you must build an engaging content development strategy around it, centered on the subject matter pertaining to your keywords. Such content must be easily digested and represent your products, services, etc. without straying off-topic. So, you can understand why it is so critical to base your content around the keywords you choose. But how do you choose the right keywords? The answer is simple: via Keyword Planning.
How Keyword Planning Works
Assessing your Current SEO Standings
This is where understanding the terminology you would want consumers to use to find your products and services comes into play. Whether you’re using paid software or free software, it’s essential that you have a list of search terms in mind to assess your SEO performance.
In today’s age, there are a multitude of cost-effective tools available to monitor and assess the better SEO performance of your website, as well as research key metrics about specific search terms. Here at RSA, our SEO Experts leverage a mixture of SEO tools in our Keyword Research. We utilize a rank tracking software that allows us to analyze the better performance of our clients’ websites based on their organic search rankings. Here, we can see whether or not users are searching for our search terms in their respective market, where we’re ranking overall, and how our competition is ranking. With this information, we can develop a concise understanding of where we currently stand in the SEO game and define a path forward.
Another great way to analyze your current SEO performance locally for free is by opening a private browser window and searching search terms related to your business, products, and service offering. If you find you’re hardly ranking for the most important search terms pertaining to your products, services, or business, or not even ranking at all, you’ve got a clear problem. This is where the next step of keyword planning comes into play.
Finding New Keywords that Make Your Business Stand Out
You can use free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, which allows you to input search terms to assess competition, monthly searches and more. Here, you can see whether or not the search terms you have chosen are relevant. Keyword Planner will develop an expanded list of related search term suggestions based on the search terms you manually enter - giving you access to key data about search terms that you may have never even thought of! How sweet is that?
Oftentimes, you’ll find the search terms you thought consumers were using aren’t even being searched. You may even find that the search terms you have chosen are near impossible to rank for without a devout content development strategy built around them. It’s these key findings held flush against your current website content that you can allow a content development strategy to bloom. Whether you’re starting over on content or looking for opportunities to build relevant keywords into your current site content, you’ll be set up for SEO success, armed with a concise vision of the keywords you would like to rank for.
Keyword Planning is Especially Great for New Businesses!
We know the majority of the information we’ve discussed above pertains to businesses with preexisting websites, however free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner are fabulous for those looking to launch their first ever website, too. Starting from scratch with content in nearly all cases, your findings from your keyword research can be used to guide the way you write your website content and ensure you’re set up for SEO success from the jump.
The Power of Keyword Planning & Research
No matter what results you find in your keyword research, the opportunities to improve your website’s SEO are endless, with many websites seeing noticeable changes in organic search performance within 90 days. Whether you’re planning to launch a new website, make routine content edits to your current website, or want to add new content to your website in formats like blogs, Keyword Planning will take your SEO strategy to infinity and beyond before you even write a word.
RSA’s SEO Experts are here to help improve your SEO Rankings
If your business is struggling to rank well organically on popular search engines like Google, give the SEO Experts at Robert Sharp & Associates a call at 605-341-5226. Helping our clients amplify their SEO performance for over 20 years, we’ve got the writing skills, resources, and critical understanding of web development to transform your business’ online presence and reach.
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