Choose Key Terms from a User’s Perspective

There is a lot of info out there about choosing key terms for metatags and content and there are a lot of good tools to help you do that. The most important thing to keep in mind, though, is how your potential buyers are searching for what you are offering.

As with many aspects of marketing, the sales team can be a huge help here—they almost always understand buyers better than anyone else at the organization. They are a good resource for choosing key terms and phrases. Note that I said “resource” not “authority”. The sales team will be able to make suggestions that set the strategy in motion—or take it in a different direction. But they won’t understand the nuances of search.

Unless what you are selling is really unique, think in terms of phrases, not single terms. This helps search engines match users to what you are selling. The number of people that go to your site and reach out to contact you also increases because you’re more likely to have what they were searching for.

Even the world’s SEO experts are never really sure what Google will do with the key terms they are using—there are many, many variables, such as news, that affect results minute-by-minute.

If you want to hedge your bets, start with a strong key term and add to it. So, for example, “High Performance Servers for Simulation Applications”. You can count on being ranked somewhere (maybe not on the first page) for “High Performance Servers” and you can also count on being ranked for “High Performance Servers for Simulation Applications”. You may or may not be ranked for “Servers for Simulation Applications”. So key term optimize the entire phrase/title, not just the first term. These phrases can all be used as headings for paragraphs or as links to their own pages.

Remember, search engines also look for keywords in hypertext links within the text (where clicking a word or phrase takes you to another page within the website). Using a search phrase within the hyperlink leads to a higher search rank for that phrase.

You should also still include stop words (very common words such as the, a, to, if, who) in your search phrases. Google had removed stop words from its indices for several years, but they now use them to perform much more precise searches. The only caveat here is to avoid stop words (or any weak words) at the beginning of the term.

For a no cost discussion of your situation, some great tools that may work for you and the volume of quality traffic we can drive to your website via organic search call 630-363-8081 or email jeanna@smartprcommunications.com. Scroll down to the bottom of any page on this website to get a free automated technical analysis of your website