Solid keyword strategies are needed if you’re planning on creating great content that engages your site visitors. Unlike before, Google now takes social signals into account when deciding whether your content should rank or not.

Depending on the number of tweets and retweets on Twitter or shares on Facebook, Google can now determine how good your content is. People will only share great content with others if they feel that the content is going to add value.

This underlines why it’s so important to have good keyword strategies in place. Unfortunately, most business owners who try to do SEO for themselves instead of hiring a competent marketing agency, end up making costly mistakes. These mistakes undermine any gains their hard work might have achieved.

This article will highlight the dos and don’ts of robust keyword strategies.

What’s Trending Keywords

No matter what market you’re in whether seasonal or all year round, you can bet there are times that certain keywords in your niche will be all the rage. It’s prudent to ensure that when that happens, you’re well prepared. You’ll have created content that will ride the trending topic.

For instance, keywords that include Halloween costumes trend in October as does “Christmas gift” during the Christmas holiday.

To ride this short-lived wave of a term’s popularity you should use tools such as Google Insights that show you how a keyword has fared over a period of time. By doing so, you’ll be more likely to capture the top rankings for your keyword the next time your main keyword trends.

Avoid Confusing Keywords

Not too long ago, the term “web 2.0” was trending. However, fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to come across the word anywhere. When coming up with your keyword strategies, you should ensure that it’s not dominated by jargon.

Even if a word is all the rage, you should mix it up with common words that people are likely to be using 2 or 3 years down the line, when the trending word is no longer as popular.

Numbers Matter

No matter how good you are, your strategy is still bound to fail if you don’t target terms that people use when searching. You need to ensure that you’re targeting the right keywords. Keyword search tools like Hubspot, Google AdWords, and Marketo, are perfect for discovering new keywords that you can incorporate into your keyword strategies.

In addition to finding new keywords, you’ll need to track how well your chosen keywords perform, that is, how many searches a month are there for a keyword. If you want to be successful, you need to target keywords that have a large volume of searches.

Keyword Density

There was a time you could put in a certain number of keywords in your copy to get Google to rank you. However, we’ve come a long way since then. Google’s search engine’s intelligence has evolved as has its algorithm. Spammy content that contains plenty of repeated keywords is quickly parsed by Google and pushed down in the results.

Instead of trying to game the system, I would encourage you to write as naturally as possible. Use LSI words, that is, words that are synonyms to the main keyword you’re trying to rank as Google catches that.

Spy on Your Competition

To be perfect, your marketing strategy needs to incorporate elements of competitive analysis. This means you need to find out how your brand stacks up against other companies within the same industry.

You will want to find out where they’re getting their backlinks from, as well as figure out other factors that make them stand out to the final consumer.

You have to be careful not to copy exactly what they do but instead use your findings as inspiration for changes and minor tweaks you’ll want to implement on your own brand. This way your brand gets to maintain its voice while at the same time maintaining a professional stance.

There are tools you could use to carry out competitive analysis such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.

Optimize Your Images

Even though search engines have grown more intelligent over the years, they’re still not able to parse images and need your help understanding the relevance of your images.

When you upload an image to your blog, you have various spaces you can fill out to describe your image. One of these; “Alt Text” should always be filled out. This is where you can describe what the photo’s about while at the same time incorporating your focus keyword.

If you fill out the alt text correctly, search engine users are likely to find your image when they use the image engine.

On-Page SEO

There’s debate regarding how much on-page optimization affects how well a page ranks. But be that as it may, you shouldn’t abandon on-page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to improvements you can make on your website to give it a better chance of ranking organically.

Here’s a list of elements of a well-optimized website.

• Unique Value

Content is king and will continue to be. Your website should always provide great value for your visitors. It shouldn’t be just about self-promotion but should help answer important questions in that space.

When you create valuable content, whether it’s a video, podcast, blog, or the findings of a study, you distinguish your brand from others.

Any of the content types mentioned above are remarkable in their own right but combined, they have an even greater impact. You should always aim to have a success score of over 80% from your audience. You can easily gauge how well your content resonates with your website visitors by simply looking at the comment section of your blog.

• A Great User Interface

The reason why many sites have a high bounce rate is that visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for. An easy navigation menu on your website will help keep your visitors engaged for long periods of time as they can easily find what they’re looking for.

You should also aim to have pages on your website rendered in less than 0.5 seconds. Pages that render slow have been cited as being one of the major reasons why website visitors leave as soon as they arrive.

You should also ensure that your website design is optimized for use on various devices, that is, desktop and mobile.

• Crawl-able

The way search engines work is that they use spiders to crawl the content on your website. A search engine spider is simply a program that runs on your site indexing the content therein. If these “spiders” are unable to crawl your search engine it goes without saying your website won’t be ranked.

To make things easier for the spiders here are some things you should do:

• Make the URL static, that is, the URL to a particular page isn’t dynamic
• Content on each URL is unique and any other duplicate content should be canonicalized, that is, point to the unique content using an HTML tag “rel=canonical”.

Other issues that need to be looked into include:

Authorship, schema, metadata, and rich snippets.

If you would like a consultation on how to optimize your page contact us today.