As Jason and I talked about his business and his website, one thing became glaringly obvious – most of the services that he offered his clients were a secret on his website. The problem is that Jason wasn’t trying to keep his services a secret; in fact his reason for building a website in the first place was so that more people who were looking for a hunting outfitter could find him. It wasn’t as if the website didn’t say anything at all about hunting – it did. However, something critical was missing, without which the website couldn’t thrive. Let’s take a look at the magic words that your site can’t thrive without.
Without the right magic words, your website can’t thrive.
Why keywords are so important
The magic words that no site can thrive without are keywords. Keywords or phrases, sometimes also called a search words / phrases, are what people who are looking for the goods or services that you provide type into Google in order to (hopefully) find your website. If your site doesn’t use the right keywords, the search engines won’t rank your website very highly and your target audience will overlook your site.
To be clear, there are lots of factors that search engines use to rank websites in the search results. However, the use and placement of keywords on your website is a key factor in search engine rankings. Essentially this means that if you want your website to show up in the search engines when someone types in a particular search phrase, you need to ensure that that same phrase also appears on your website.
Today it seems like everyone is always rushing, seldom taking time to smell the roses, or read everything on your website. Instead of reading, most people scan. This means that the use of keywords, particularly in places of emphasis, is essential to helping people quickly find the information that they came to your site looking for.
Searcher intent
Longer search phrases are better than single keywords. One of the reasons for this has to do with understanding what the searcher’s intent was when they typed in a search phrase.
For example “flower” is a bad key phrase because from that one word alone it is impossible to know what the person was actually looking for. Was the searcher looking for a florist, or pictures for a scrapbook, or trying to decide what to plant around the mailbox?
Searcher intent becomes more evident when there are more words in the search phrase. You want to focus on adding the key phrases to your website that have high searcher intent.
Using keywords appropriately
Keywords should be used on each page of your website. Since each page on your website is different from the other pages, the keywords should be different as well.
A common search engine optimization (SEO) mistake that you’ll want to avoid is what’s known as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is about trying to cram too many keywords onto a page. How many is too many? A good rule of thumb is that your page should look and read naturally to your target audience. If it doesn’t, then fix it. Whatever you do, avoid trying to fool the search engines by adding invisible keywords to your pages – that’ll get you into trouble.
Use keywords for page titles, sub headings, picture captions, etc. By prominently featuring relevant keyword phrases on each page of your website, search engines will rank your site higher for those search phrases. Additionally, when a person comes to your site from Google, they’ll recognize that your site is highly relevant to what they are looking for.
The magic happens when you use the right keywords in the right way on each of your web pages. Relevant keywords used appropriately on each page are an essential element of a thriving website. Take a look at the keywords that are used on your website – do they accurately and completely convey what your site is about?
As it turned out, Jason’s site primarily contained low intent search keywords. This meant that his site wouldn’t rank highly in Google and would remain a secret. By adding high intent keyword phrases, his site began attracting a lot more people looking for the kind of hunting packages he offered.
