Doing your research, what search phrases should you rank for?
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Now that you’ve decided to do some SEO
It’s time to figure out
What keywords or what searches you want to appear in the search results for When somebody does a search in Google that’s called a search it’s otherwise also called a keyword you type your keywords into Google and when you’re starting to do SEO the first thing you need to decide is what searches what keywords should you show up for because the interesting thing is is that you’re so used to your business that the way you talk about your products could be completely different from how your customers are talking about your products and those little changes in how we search for things actually matter if you worked for example to search for t-shirts online did you know there’s a
hundred and sixty-five thousand searches done every month in the US alone for the word t-shirts but more interestingly the number of people searching for buy t-shirts online actually far outnumbers the number of people who go into google and type in just buy t-shirts.
People are specifically interested in buying t-shirts online if you didn’t do keyword research to find what keywords people are searching for in Google you would never know to use that online keyword because you sell t-shirts.
You would just want to rank for buy t-shirts but that buy t-shirts online keyword has more search volume.
How do you find out what people are searching for well at the end of the day it’s actually kind of straightforward Google gives you a tool for you to find out how many people are searching every single month for your keywords.
The first thing to do is to go into Google and simply search for keyword tool or Google Keyword tool and that will get you to Google’s keyword tool which you can start using and you want to type in first of all what you think people are going to be looking for for example buy t-shirts buy t-shirts online buy t-shirts in California or New York or wherever you are and then Google’s going to come back and it’s going to tell you how many people search per month for those particular keywords but it’s also going to give you all the recommendations on other keywords that people are looking for that are that are related to what it is that you do.
The couple quick tips you need to understand about Google’s keyword tool before you start getting excited about the millions of searches Google is going to tell you about the first is something called exact match there’s a little button in the Google Keyword tool called exact match if you click that button then you’ll get then you’re going to get a more accurate number of how many people actually search in Google every single month for that keyword Google defaults to showing you what’s called broad match keyword which means if you were to type in buy t-shirts online into Google’s keyword
tool it’s going to report on all the people who searched for buy t-shirts on live by red t-shirts buy t-shirts in my city it’s going to give you a whole universe of searches but you want to know specifically which keyword to use.
You want to make sure that you check that exact match option the other thing you want to look at is you only want to find out how many people are searching for your keywords within the countries that you actually ship to.
There’s a little option in the Google Keyword tool to choose the country where the searches are happening.
If you’re in the US and you only ship your products to the US then you want to make sure you’re only looking at u.s. search volume.
Make sure you set the country as well as setting the keyword tool to show you exact match keywords when you’re choosing your keywords.
Another thing to bear in mind is that you’re not going to get even in the number one position if you rank number one in Google you’re still not going to get every possible click from every possible search people do in Google for example if a keyword has a thousand searches per month and you ranked number one not everybody who does that search is going to click on your result they might decide that somebody else’s Meta Description tag looks better and click on that they might click on an ad instead or they might decide oh that’s not what I meant and then go back and do another search.
If something if a keyword has a thousand searches per month and you rank number one you might only see a couple hundred visits come to your website per month from that keyword.
Just bear in mind when you’re choosing keywords you’re not going to see a thousand visitors per month because a search a keyword has a thousand searches per month also be aware that Google rounds numbers.
When you see that a keyword all a keyword has ten searches per month that doesn’t actually mean that it reliably has ten searches every month it’s an average over a course of time that around a 10 or so searches per month will happen for this keyword now when you’re choosing keywords for the pages on your site you’re going to want to choose about 3 to 5 keywords maximum for pages on your site.
If you sell t-shirts and you’re only ship to New York State then your keywords might be you know buy t-shirts online order t-shirt t-shirts for New York State but you’re not want to go you don’t want to put in 10 to 15 other keywords or you’ll have trouble crafting a high-quality title tag you’re going to have trouble writing a good Meta Description tag that speaks to people searching for these keywords you’re definitely going to have trouble writing focused content around all these different keywords and you’re going to have to do extra link building to rank a page for many specific searches.
Try to keep your pages focused pick 3 to 5 keywords per page and try to stick to keywords that are strongly related to each other on every single page