What Is a Target Keyword?
A target keyword is a particular word or phrase that a website knows potential traffic/customers may use when utilising a search engine and seeking out the services that the particular website offers.
Why Are Target Keywords Important?
Target keywords are important for a few different reasons.They inform both Google crawlers and searchers about the information contained within your website and what you have to offer. Therefore they determine the kind of traffic you receive on your website.
If you utilise irrelevant target keywords within your website, you will be providing a poor UX (User Experience) to searchers because you will not be delivering the information they are seeking.
Poor UX often leads to a higher bounce rate, lower dwell time, and fewer conversions.
Google bots will suss this out too, meaning that your page will appear lower in SERPs. This is because Google is committed to providing high-quality content to users which fulfills searcher intent.
How To Find Target Keywords
Finding the right target keywords for your website is heavily dependent on high-quality keyword research.
- First you must find a few keywords or phrases that accurately describe your brand, company, or product
- Then assess how searchers are searching for these terms
- After this take a look at your competition. What keywords are they targeting?
- Consider page rank and competition by volume
How To Optimise Your Website For Target Keywords
Target keywords should be integrated throughout your website including the back-end and front-end.
1. Back-End of the Website
To get the most out of your SEO strategy, target keywords should be embedded into the back-end code of your website.
This means including them in your meta data, which covers the title tag, meta description, anchor text and alt text.
2. Front-End of the Website
Carefully selected target keywords should be effectively distributed throughout your content, including within your headings and page titles.
They could also be highlighted or bolded in order to emphasise their importance, and they should also appear early on within the text.
Tools You Can Use To Target The Best Keywords
As stated, high-quality keyword research plays a vital role in finding the right target keywords. Here's a list of keyword research tools that you can use to find the best keywords - whether it's long-tail keywords or short. These tools will boost your rankings with search engines and drive you to success.
Serpstat has a remarkable keyword research tool. It offers data on various keywords indicators such as difficulty, competition, popularity, and volume. It helps you detect the missing keywords on your pages. With this tool, you can find out which keywords your competitors use to generate more business. It even shows you the Ad campaigns your competitors run against specific keywords.
Serpstat also helps you explore popular keywords in your region and lets you compare data on up to 5 search databases at the same time.
Long Tail Pro is a simple to use tool for long-tail keyword research. It has thousands of profitable keywords that you can easily optimize for your campaigns and blogs.
By entering a single seed keyword, this tool will get you up to 400 long-tail keywords within seconds. You can then group the selected keywords based on their rank value, search volume, and other metrics.
Moreover, this tool also lets you dissect your competitor’s strategy for keywords and highlights the key terms that work for them.
Semrush keyword magic tool is an efficient tool for keyword research. It recommends relevant keywords from more than 20 billion keywords present in 142 geodatabases.
There are filters to sort question-related keywords, and you can organize the keywords based on search volume, CPC, competitive density, keyword difficulty and many other metrics. Along with the magic tool, you also get 3 other tools for enhanced keyword search.
With Keyword Overview, you can find out the volume of any keyword at global and national level along with its CPC, trend, and more; the Keyword Manager offers a deep analysis of 1000 keywords at one time; and the Keyword Gap tool offers a keyword-based competitor analysis of up to 5 competitors.
This helps you choose the most effective keywords for your blogs and marketing campaigns.
Wincher is a great tool to discover potential keywords for higher ranking. Its easy-to-use interface just requires a seed word and the software will pull out highly effective keywords in a few seconds. It shows you date data related to cost-per-click, estimated traffic volume, and search volume for all keywords.
Another great feature is its automatic keyword recommendations. Imagine having a smart tool that doesn’t even need you to do the most basic task of adding a search term in the bar. Wincher does that for you.
RankIQ is another useful tool that helps you craft your blog posts with the most relevant keywords. A distinctive feature of this tool is that along with the data on a keyword’s search volume, estimated traffic volume, and CPC, it also offers information on roughly how long it will take for a particular keyword to rank.
With RankIQ, you can find high traffic keywords that have low competition, and hence, provide a greater chance for your blog post to rank high in less time.
Other tools include: SpyFu, Keyword Surfer, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc.
What Should You Avoid?
When it comes to target keywords there a few things you need to mindful of.
- Don’t keyword stuff your content.This black hat technique creates unnatural and unreadable content, and will see your website penalised by Google’s algorithm. This can lead to a significant drop in SERP rankings
- Don’t always aim for high-volume keywords or phrases, try and target low-volume phrases too, they are often more effective for smaller or newer websites
- Don’t push yourself too hard and attempt to rank for keywords with extremely high difficulty
- Don’t distribute the same target keyword across your entire website, instead focus on developing one page’s authority. This way you can avoid keyword cannibalisation.
How Can We Help?
Keyword research still break you out in cold sweats? It’s a big task and we can help you with it.
Give us a call today and we’ll organise a free strategy session to give you an action plan to start working on.
Meanwhile, there are always our training courses where you can learn essential SEO practises that you can implement as soon as you need to.
