How Your Website Leverages Keywords

If you’ve been thinking about SEO for your business website, you’ve probably heard about keywords. Sometimes people make them sound mysterious and magical, the key to some secret relationship with Google.

Keywords are powerful, but they’re not mysterious. Keywords are simply words and phrases that people type in search engines to look for information. So, if you run a pet shop, people who are looking for your store or a place like yours might type in “pet shop” or “pet store.” Those are keywords.

However, people might also type in “grooming,” “mynah birds,” or “Jacksonville dog grooming place that also sells mynah birds.” This is why it pays to go beyond the obvious and look for a good list of 10 or so keywords for your website.

You should look at the keywords that bring people to your website. Our analytics tell us that people look for us with “Jacksonville web design companies” and “web design and development Florida” as well as “Oyova.” You can also look to see if you can tell what keywords your competitors have chosen, ask your customers what they would use to search for a store like yours, or use a keyword suggestion tool like Google’s Keyword Tool.

This tool shows you how many terms people search on your keyword, both around the world and in your neighborhood. You want to choose terms that a lot of people look for, but also terms that you can realistically compete for. For example, eleven million people each month search for “dogs,” but there are also 167 million pages on Google’s list of pages about dogs. Your local shop probably won’t make it to the top of that list soon.

Once you’ve decided on a good list of keywords, what should you do with them? Come back Thursday to find out!