It’s painful, isn’t it? You invested time and money in a website; you thought customers would flow freely… And yet, nothing, not the slightest contact. Like many, you have just discovered that creating a website is only the first step. Now your future customers must find it! To achieve this, there is nothing like natural referencing to improve your positioning in search engines.
And for that, we advise you to start by searching for the keywords of your website. This is an essential step to make your website visible. If you skip this step thinking that you already know the keywords to use perfectly, we can assure you that you will miss the majority of your audience.
ASK THOSE AROUND YOU
To begin, you will be able to draw up a first list based on your ideas and those of your collaborators or even your family and friends. When you are an expert in your field, it becomes difficult to step back, hence the importance of calling on those around you to achieve the best result. By multiplying the profiles that will give their ideas, you will get keywords that you could not have found alone.
To do this, we advise you to organize one or more brainstorming sessions or, if you prefer, simply ask your contacts by email to give you 3 keywords that they think best define your business. It’s simple, fast and efficient.
You should now have a long list of more or less relevant keywords. The problem is that at the moment you don’t know which ones have real research potential. There is no need to add keywords to your site if no one else uses them.
MEASURE THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR KEYWORDS FOR YOUR WEBSITE
Google offers a free tool to get keyword suggestions and monthly search volume estimates. This is very useful to clean up your first list but also to complete it.
Go to https://adwords.google.fr/KeywordPlanner and create a free account. Once connected, simply click on “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”.
All you have to do is enter your first keyword and start the search. You can paste all your keywords on your website at once but we advise you to enter them one by one to get the maximum suggestion.
Also note that if you target a specific geographical area (city, region…), you can indicate it without the ‘targeting’ area, this will allow you to obtain more realistic volumes.
Add to your list any suggestions that you think are relevant and do a little sorting by removing any keywords that are not searched at all. You certainly think that you can also delete keywords with a low search volume… and that would be a mistake.
Let’s take an example. A query like “black and white women’s shoes” (~110 monthly searches) will of course be much less sought after than “shoes” (>9000000 monthly searches) but not only will the first query be much less competitive, but it is also much more accurate. Conversion rates will therefore be much higher for this type of keyword (long tail). By multiplying these keywords on your website, you will gain traffic easily and boost your conversion rate.
You should now have a much cleaner list, but we can do even better!
ANALYSE YOUR COMPETITORS
You are probably not the only one in your field, so why not take advantage of your competitors’ research? List the main players in your field and take the time to browse their site. Read all of their content carefully and focus on titles and subtitles. This is where the main keywords should be found. Also look at the structure of their menu and categories.
To help you in your analysis, the Yooda Insight tool is excellent. It is not free, but you can create an account for free, which will already give you access to a lot of information.
Once connected, go to the “SEO BENCHMARK” tab and enter the address of one of your competitors and click on “analyse the site”. The results are amazing. You will get all the keywords for which this website is on the first page of Google. This is much stronger than a simple suggestion because here you get the keywords that really generate visitors to their site.
SEGMENT YOUR KEYWORD LIST
At this stage, your list must be very complete but still difficult to use. You can’t just paste all these keywords into your pages at random. Your list covers a set of sub-themes around your main activity. These themes will define the structure of your site and must be the subject of a dedicated page or article. For each of these pages, you will take care to add the most important keywords in the titles and subtitles.
This way, not only will you get the right keywords, but your site will also cover your entire theme and Google loves it!
1 KEYWORD, 2 KEYWORDS, 3 KEYWORDS….
If you have successfully passed all these steps, well done! It takes time, patience and a little organization. But believe me, it’s worth it!
Obviously this is not enough to finish on the first page and you will have to work on other points such as netlinking, performance optimization, your internal mesh… But can you tell yourself that at this stage, you have already done more than the majority of your competitors!
