How to increase traffic to your company’s website through keywords
By HGB , Mar 21 2017
There’s a reason keywords are called exactly that. Certain words are key to driving traffic to your website. In his latest blog, Ben the intern talks about the role of keywords in website copy.
First things first. What are keywords? Keywords are words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines such as Google.
The main purpose of keywords is to enable your target audience to find your website when searching for products and services. This is called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Using the right keywords
The keywords you use must relate to what your website offers. For example, if you have a website distributing farming equipment then you would have to research the phrases and words farmers would be putting into search engines when looking for the types of products you sell.
Keyword programmes
There are many tools and programmes that help with monitoring and analysing what keywords are best. Free ones include Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends and keyword.io
When you type a word into Keyword Planner, Google will produce a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level.
Google Trends lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter the information, it’ll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest and where the traffic is coming from, along with similar keywords.
keyword.io is a pretty rudimentary online keyword research tool, but if you’re just looking for a list of long-tail keyword suggestions related to one you already have in mind, then it can be useful.
In depth keyword research
These free tools give you the basics but don’t provide information on search volume or cost per click. For more in-depth information, a paid tool is Term Explorer.
Term Explorer offers the deepest research reports of any keyword research tool on the market. From one single seed term, you can get over 10,000 keyword variations. Best of all, the tool does a great job of keeping the results as relevant as possible and pulling through lots of supporting metrics with them.
How can keywords benefit your business?
Apart from increasing traffic to your website, there are four main benefits of keywords:
1. Engaged audience
The first benefit is an engaged audience. By finding out what your audience is interested in you can write engaging content around it, incorporating keywords that will enable your readers to find it.
2. Increased conversion rates
The second benefit is an increase in conversion rates. If the content you provide is meaningful to those who view it, it will lead to a higher conversion rate. Engaging your audience in more relevant communications can increase net profits.
3. Key trends
Keyword analysis can offer you insights into marketing trends and consumer behaviour. So, if you know what’s important and popular to your audience, you can use this information to stay relevant.
4. Prioritise your time
Identifying which keywords are ultimately improving your bottom line can help determine where you spend your time most effectively.
Five top tips for driving traffic to your website with keywords
- Include different keywords that relate to the different aspects of your company
- Put your competitors’ names as keywords
- Use alternatives of the same word. For example, New Zealand would be one keyword and NZ would be another.
- Find key phrases that relate to your website which use less competitive keywords but have a high search volume. This can improve your conversion rate as it helps to place your business on the first page of the search results.
- Include keywords in titles, descriptions, headings, content, captions, alt text, and URLs.