How To Use Keywords For SEO

Just what are they and how do they get used

Meta tags have not been utilized in years

When and SEO company offers to increase the number of my keywords from 20 to 40

Keywords are used extensively in paid search

They are a critical element for search engine optimization


Pencil drawing of Don Quixote

“What’s in a name? That which we call a word. By any other keyword term, would it still not rank the same?”

— Definitely Not Shakespeare

You need to be realistic in your expectations

What is the research process?

  1. Identify the main keywords that best describe your business and get them down into a document, spreadsheet or notepad.
  2. Utilize a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush, or even Google Trends for your research. Some of them even have a difficulty scale to provide you with a reasonable expectation of how competitive these words are and the difficulty of ranking for them. (these are estimations)
  3. Utilize these keyword tools and look at your search console tool to see how well your website ranks for these terms and specifically which pages.
  4. Now look at the data in the research tools and look at similar terms and extended phrases. You may find some of these to be less competitive and easier to rank for.
  5. How much search volume there is for each to be sure it is worth the effort compared to the difficulty.
  6. Use these tools once again to see who is ranking for them and why. Really look at the pages themselves to get a sense for why Google chose those pages. Is their content quality? Do they have lots of strong backlinks?
  7. Now go back to your website and review it with the same critical eye. What improvements can you make? If you were not ranking at all, do you need to create new pages specifically for that keyword or phrases?
  8. As you build links for other websites, or for your own website internal links, be mindful of the anchor text and to utilize optimized words.
  9. Be sure the content you create is related to your list. Bring focus to those keyword terms in your headings, title tags, backlinks etc.
  10. Now you need to track them. How are they ranking? Do you have multiple pages ranking for the same word or term?
  11. Always be thinking on what can I do to improve my positioning for each term but not tat the expense of other important goals.

Do not stuff your keywords