How to Use Keyword Strategy to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Sep 14, 2015

Keyword strategy is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO), as properly using keywords can mean the difference between ranking on the first page of Google or the last. Read on for practical advice on how to use keyword strategy to improve your search engine ranking.

It’s important to use high-performing keywords in your content to drive traffic to your website. The most relevant keywords are ones that are closely related to your business or industry. Once you determine which keywords are most relevant for your use (more on that in a minute), you will need to optimize your content to include them – that is, incorporate those keywords naturally into the text on your website.

How do you rank on a search engine for those highly relevant keywords? Using Google AdWords or another program, you commit the amount you’re willing to pay, referred to as your bid, for each person that clicks on your website after searching for that keyword. So, when someone searches for that keyword and clicks on your ad in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you pay the search engine the amount you bid on that keyword. This is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

How do you know which keywords to choose? You want people to easily find your page when they search for something relevant to your business. The last thing you want is to appear several pages into a Google search. It takes a lot of research to figure out the most relevant keywords to use that will attract paying customers. You can use Google Analytics and other services to determine which keywords send the most traffic to your website, but you’ll need to look at your own data and make some educated guesses as to which of those keywords will actually lead to the most sales. This often involves a lot of research and trial-and-error, but it can really pay off to understand how to use keyword strategy to your advantage. If you’re not sure which keywords perform best, you can run a test campaign to see how much traffic is generated to your site using certain words.

As you get more practice running these campaigns, you’ll get a feel for which keywords perform best for your company, and how to incorporate them naturally into your web content.

 

Thank you to Liz West for the image.