Keywords: Are They Still Useful?

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With Google’s ever-expanding index, keywords are more useful now than ever. Keywords are vital in improving your website’s visibility and engagement. This article will run you through some of the top uses of keywords and how they are essential for optimising web pages.

 

Improve Google rankings

Using relevant keywords is a vital part of organically boosting your Google rankings. Title tags, heading tags, and the main content of your webpage should all focus on a powerful keyword relevant to your content as this will assist search engine crawlers in discovering and indexing your content.

Similarly, while meta descriptions do not directly influence rankings, using keywords in moderation here will indirectly boost rankings. This is because relevant keywords will attract users to click on webpage if they are enticed by a strong meta description. Essentially, more clicks translates to a higher ranking.

 

Target your audience

You want to target your audience with relevant content, specific to their searches. By using a mixture of head keywords and long tail keywords in your content, you can be sure that your audience will stay on your website for longer. For example, if a user searches up ‘How to write a food blog’, and your keywords target ‘blog’ and ‘how to write a food blog’, the user will feel that the content you offer is highly relevant to them.

Keyword stuffing on the other hand negatively affects the quality of your content, appearing unnatural and annoying the reader. Instead keywords are most useful when keeping the user’s individual experience in mind. While they are definitely a great tool for search engines, keywords primarily need to target the humans reading the content.

 

Understand your competition

Keyword research is a great way of understanding your competition, in turn informing your SEO strategy. There are online tools like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Moz, which can be used to help keyword research and give you an idea of which terms are trending in your field, as well as those which are less competitive, but more likely to drive clicks and sales.

Knowing the ranking of your both your own keywords and those that higher ranked sites on the SERP are using can help you adjust your own approach accordingly. This is a useful way of ensuring your content is always competing with other websites for clicks and users.

 

Optimise content organisation

Keywords can allow you to optimise the organisation of your website’s content. By forming topic clusters, you can improve user experience on your website as well as drive traffic to webpages which focus on less searched, long tail, keywords.

For example, your pillar page might be called ‘How to start a food blog’. You might then have a series of other webpages centred on the same topic, but less specific, like ‘Promoting your food blog on social media’ and ‘Food blogging topics for summer 2022’. The pillar page will contain hyperlinks to these topic cluster pages, as these are less likely to get direct traffic from Google, and instead might rely on users first accessing the more general page, and following links from there. Keywords are invaluable in this way, as understanding which keywords are relevant to your topic can help organise your site in a user-friendly way and increase the time a user spends on your site.

Keywords are not only useful, but a must-have for websites aiming to increase engagement organically. If you have any questions about how Verto can optimise your own website through keywords, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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