While keywords are certainly an important aspect of marketing your business, there is more to marketing than just keywords. As you research keywords for your niche, keep in mind the following variables that should not be overlooked.
Understand Your Niche
Picking a profitable niche is important if you want to make money online, but it’s also important to actually have, or develop, some real knowledge about your niche. If you’re not willing to spend a considerable amount of time immersed in getting to know the niche you are involved in, it might not be the right one for you to try to make money in. You can have the best keywords according to the data, but miss the mark when you don’t get your niche.
Know Your Audience
Another important factor when choosing the keywords you want to use in your marketing campaigns is understanding your audience. If you don’t know who they are down to being able to create individual audience personas, it’s likely you’ll actually miss out on finding the right keywords to market to your audience.
Think of all the different words that can be used for a couch. Sofa, couch, settee, divan, davenport and other words are used by specific audiences. If you don’t know your audience, you have no idea what word is most popular for them to use to describe their couch.
Know the Why behind Your Content
Every piece of content you create needs to have a purpose, and this needs to be outside of a way to use the keywords from your keyword research. Keywords floating around on a page that has no meaning to the reader, and no other use than to attract search engine traffic, will not result in more business. You may get more traffic, but it’s not likely going to be as targeted as it should be. Use keywords in your content, but know the purpose of publishing the content.
Keep Improving Your Website Performance
All the good keywords in the world won’t matter if your site performs poorly and has poor navigation. Keep working on improving site performance while also improving keyword usage and you’ll end up with a winning combination. Hint: responsive design is now an imperative.
Care about Your Audience’s Satisfaction
When creating keyword-rich content, it’s important to provide value to your audience in a way that makes them feel important, thought about, and satisfied. If someone follows a search term to your site and finds an article that has nothing to do with what they thought, they’ll just click away. So always think of them when writing or having any type of content from menus, blog posts, podcasts, videos and even colors and images created for your website.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Really, there isn’t much more to say about this other than that using a keyword more than three or four times on any one blog post is likely too much. This includes using it in the title and anchor text. There are times when it flows well and needs to be done but do not force it. Use keywords well and you’ll have better results.
Finally, optimizing the use of keywords will never go out of style. To optimize any keywords, use them in any HTML text such as titles, headers, sub headers, and navigation.
