Keyword Targeting Done Right – You Can’t Win Without It!

Proper keyword targeting is critical for a successful blog or website — that is assuming you are in it to make a profit. If not, write what ever makes you happy. But if you are like most of us, you want web visitors and you want them to be interested in what you have to sell.

But do you know what keywords your potential customers are entering when searching for the product or service you offer? Cornering this one aspect of search engine optimization is extremely important. You can literally transform your site from one with modest traffic, to one that is full of high quality traffic on a daily basis. There are plenty of tools on the market that can help you achieve your keyword targeting goals. This article features discussions of those tools and concepts to help you get more traffic to your website.

Keyword Targeting: Broad Or Narrow?

People often start searching with broad results in mind. However as they get closer to making a decision, they narrow the results by adding more keyword to their search. The “long tail” in search can be anything from three words to as many as seven or eight. It is of critical importance to establish a web presence that shows up when your potential customer enters that longer keyword phrase in the search box. This means that you most likely will need a detailed keyword analysis to find out what your customers are really searching for with their keywords.

Just as themes develop in business, they also develop in keyword queries from your potential customers. Just picture a retail business that is constantly flooded with people looking for the same product at the same time. Obviously this means that the product is popular, and with keyword targeting done right, this occurs all the time. But there are literally thousands of people searching every day for keyword phrases that you had never thought about using on your website. We will explore how to find those phrases.

Since many of your competitors are already doing this research, you need to get started now. Conduct exhaustive keyword research and implement your findings so you might finally leap frog that competitor ahead of you in the natural search results.

Keyword Research for Beginners

Even SEO beginners can easily do some basic keyword targeting for free by using free tools accessible to everyone. For instance, Google’s keyword tool is pretty handy for doing some basic keyword research.

Let’s say you own a company that sells environmentally friendly soy jar candles. You want to find out what keywords you should highlight on your website and in marketing articles. You use Google’s keyword tool to look for keywords related to soy candles. By looking at the list of results, you decide that natural soy wax candles and aromatherapy soy candles are a couple of good terms to focus on.

Of course, you’ll notice that there are a lot of results there — dozens, if not hundreds actually. So how do you sort through all of them and decide which ones are most important to focus on? Well, the Google keyword tool does have several colored bars that show how much competition you’ll have for each keyword phrase. It also shows how much search volume each keyword phrase gets. You can use these to help determine which keyword phrases offer the greatest opportunities for your business.

Keyword Research for Technical Subjects

Keyword targeting on popular topics is pretty easy. A lot of people search for keyword phrases related to eCommerce and online shopping. So it’s easy to use a keyword research tool to help you locate the most frequently used keyword phrases.

Technical topics, however, are not that simple. Not that many people search for these keyword phrases. That makes it more difficult to pick out popular keyword phrases that also match your target/niche market.

Here are some tips for selecting keywords and keyword phrases for more technical subjects.

• Keep your target audience in mind. Are you trying to sell your product to scientists or another technical group of people, or is it a technical product to make the average person’s life easier? If it’s the first, you’ll want to make use of technical terms and lingo that the scientists would use — but if it’s the latter, you should use layman’s terms. For instance, would the average person use the search terms “liquid flow calibrator” or “ultrasonic water flowmeter“?
• Consider branding. If your company’s name is well known, you might want to include it in your list of keywords. If it’s not well known, focus instead on keyword phrases that are more likely to be searched for. For instance, Sierra Instruments is a well known manufacturer of mass flow meters, so companies and individuals looking for these meters are likely to use the manufacturer’s name in their keyword searches.

Appropriate Keyword Targeting

Your keyword targeting is important, because the keywords that you build your website around can make or break your online business. Therefore, it’s important to choose the most appropriate keywords.

An Example

You have a rental car business in Florida. You might want to pick up keyword phrases such as “car rental Fort Lauderdale” and “car rental Orlando.” This will ensure that people looking for rental cars in specific areas of the state will be able to find your website.

However, you don’t want to try to cram all of the different cities’ keywords onto every page of your site. This will confuse visitors. People looking for Orlando rental cars may think they’ve found the wrong page and click away if they see a keyword phrase for a city on the other side of the state. Also, search engines may see this as detracting from the relevance of your website. Your best bet is to create a separate page for each city and focus on the relevant keywords there.

As you see – when used correctly – keyword targeting research can vastly improve your site and increase your traffic. It’s well worth taking the time to look up the appropriate keywords and optimize your website!

No Time For Keyword Targeting? Let Me Help!

If you have a hard time deciphering this data, don’t be afraid to get help from a professional keyword research or Onpage SEO Audit provider. Outsourcing this kind of work is often much better than trying to muddle through it on your own, because you’ll get expert help done in a fraction of the time it would take to do it on your own.

For the Record and Proof of Concept

I created this post of ~1100 words (100% copyscape.com proof) on May 22, 2019. I optimized the post for the following term:

Keyword	Search Volume	CPC	Paid Difficulty	Search Difficulty
keyword targeting	210	$0.00	10	21

After publishing the post, I immediately went into GSC (Google Search Console) and requested to index this new URL in the “URL Inspection” area. As you see below it was indexed within minutes. (Please ignore the “11 hours” in the meta description. It’s about the time stamp on my server and Google’s).

So far I have NOT promoted the page with 3rd party links of any kind. I’ll keep you posted here about the ranking development.