Everything you think you know about SEO and keywords is wrong. Here's what's right. Ep. 3

SEO keywords are critical to your search engine optimization plan, yet they're one of the things people get wrong when trying to do SEO on their own. 

Find out what is right and what's wrong when choosing your SEO keywords so you can rank higher on Google, get more organic traffic, and make more money from your website.  

Transcript

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What if everything you think you know about SEO and keywords right now is wrong? Whew. It probably is. I want you to join me in this episode of the Simple SEO Content Podcast so that you can learn what you really need to know about SEO keywords in order to succeed with them. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen, president and founder. CEO of Etched Marketing and Etched Marketing Academy, and today we are digging into SEO keywords because there are so many misconceptions out there and misconceptions hurt you because they keep you from making successful gains and getting traffic and ranking, and they keep you from being successful when it comes to your seo. If you have tried search engine optimization or you have tried to get. Traffic to the content that you're creating and you're just not making headway. This episode is for you because I can almost guarantee that you're making one of these mistakes, and by the end of the episode, you're going to know what you're doing wrong and that's gonna help you make the changes that you need to make so that you get better results in the future. Number one thing that I see people do wrong with their keywords is they choose a really big giant keyword with lots of search volume because they think they have to have a really big keyword with tons of search volume to get traffic. But in most cases, those terms that are maybe shoes or. Soda or cup, those are going to be incredibly competitive. And as small business owners, we're not gonna rank for them. And it's nothing against us. It's nothing that we're doing wrong, it's just the reality of the situation. We're not gonna rank for a giant keyword like that. So using it in our optimization, we're not gonna get results. We need to choose keywords that are going to be a better fit for our. So let's quickly walk through an example that I like to use with my students that makes it really easy to understand. Let's start with the word shoes. Goodness gracious. There are one to 3 million searches a month for the word shoes. Now, on average, the website in position number one gets about 34% of the traffic of all traffic. So let's say that that position number one website is gonna get 340,000 visits a month. I know. Whew. 340,000 visits a month from the word shoes. Now you may be thinking, gosh, I could make so much money. I could sell so many shoes, if only I could rank for that word. The problem is, who is looking for shoes and what kind of shoes do they want? If it's me, am I looking for myself, my husband, my kid, maybe a pet? I have no idea. The consumer who's searching the word shoes may not even know what they're looking for yet, and as a website owner, I can't align them with what they need. With a term like shoes, it's just not possible because I don't know what kind. Now, if we go further down the sales, and we look at women's shoes. Okay, that's a little bit better. We have a little better understanding, but even now, what kind of women's shoes? Dress shoes, rain shoes, snow boots, high heels, flip flops. There's so many types of shoes. Let's go a little further down the sales funnel and let's get into women's running shoes. Okay. Now I'm sure we have lower search demand than we did for the word shoes. However, from a consumer intent standpoint, we know a lot more about what the consumer searching for women's running shoes is looking for. We have a much better chance of aligning with them and meeting up kind of in the middle where if our website was optimized for women's running shoes and was ranking. We could potentially sell more women's running shoes. However, if we went even a step further and we went to women's Asics Gel, kayo running shoe, now we could sell a lot more because that consumer knows exactly what they're looking for. They're closer to the point of conversion, and if we can rank high for that, even if there's only 10,000 searches, Let's say that we get 3000 visits. We'll just keep easy numbers. We get 3000 visits a month from people looking for women's ASIC gel chio. If I have a landing page that's women's asic gel, chio running shoes, and I rank in position one and I get 3000 searches a month, you better believe I'm gonna sell some shoes. Because I know exactly what the consumer is looking for, and my website is returning exactly what they're looking for. So if I have the color and the size and the style of the shoe that they're looking for, there's a really good chance that they're gonna buy from me. That's why I want you to stop worrying about things like realtor and your city, or. K five writing instructor or resources for teachers, like these are big keywords. They're not ones that are gonna help you make a lot of money. We need to look more tailored and more niche, and we need to help you figure out exactly what keywords you're going after. So that's the very first mistake that I see is that people choose keywords that are just way too big for them. The next problem I. Is that people use the same keyword on every page, and that hurts you. So now let's pretend that you've chosen one of those keywords that can't rank, and now you've used it on every page on your website. So now you have 10 pages that can't rank because you're never gonna rank for that keyword. So now you're not gonna get traffic to the website because all 10 pages have the same keyword word. Now let's take it a step further and let's say it is a keyword that you can rank for great. However, If you've got it on the same page, you've got the same keyword on all 10 pages. You've just limited your opportunity to rank, because Google's only gonna show your website a maximum of two times for any given keyword. That means you're gonna have two ranking opportunities instead of. 10. This my friend, is why you've got to understand how keywords work, how to choose them, where to use 'em, and what to do with them to make sure that you get traffic from Google. Because remember, search engine optimization that brings the relevant targeted traffic to our websites. That is our no factor in like, know and trust. We need people to know about us. We need traffic to come to our website and in order to get it, we have to use the right keyword. So search volume right now, I want you to kind of wipe away everything you've ever thought about search volume. The search volume is not the most important thing when it comes to choosing a keyword. Absolutely not. The most important factors are, does my client, does my ideal customer use this keyword? and can my website rank for this keyword? I promise you, if you choose keywords that your ideal customer uses, that your website can rank for, you will get more traffic, and you will make more sales because you're bringing targeted, relevant traffic to your site. You're ranking high in Google search results, you're getting the clicks and people are finding what they need. Focus on what your customer. And choose a keyword that your website can rank for. If you wanna learn how to determine if your keyword can rank, if your website can rank for a specific keyword, I teach that in my free class. Make sure you request that. I'll put it in the show notes for you so that you can get access to that. then you wanna make sure that you are using your keyword in all the places that Google is gonna look for. So Google looks for your keyword in very specific SEO elements, and that is how Google understands what your website is about and can determine how they're going to rank you. So Google is gonna look at your title tag, your meta description, your url, your copy, your image file name, your header. Google is gonna look for a keyword in all those areas. You wanna make sure you're using the same keyword in all of those areas so it continues to signal to Google. This is what my page is about. Please show me to people who want information on this. If you don't yet have a copy of my SEO content, quick Start Guide. Request that from the link in the notes, it's going to walk you through exactly what to do for Google and where to use your keyword on each page or blog post that you create. And it has a checklist at the end of it that you can use to verify that you've done it right. Make sure above all you can rank for the keyword and your ideal customer uses the keyword. So if you have brand terms and you are sitting here, think. People ask me about the wrong term, all the. I want you to take note of that. Just because you refer to it as something does not mean that's the term that your ideal customer uses. I dealt with this a lot when I was in the corporate world. I had one client in particular, large outdoor retailer locations everywhere, sold in every store you can think of. They didn't sell back. They sold day packs. The problem is consumers don't buy day packs. They buy backpacks, so we weren't getting the rankings that we needed to get. We weren't making the sales because they were using a term that their consumer didn't use. Once we were able to show the data and show people don't search day packs, they search backpacks. People don't buy day. they buy D backpacks. We were able to make the change on the website. They actually changed the brand term and made them backpacks so that they were more search friendly. And you know what? Their rankings improved because now they were using the term that they wanted to rank for and the term their ideal customer was using. And in their instance, it was a keyword they could rank for. So they were showing up at the top of Google for the word backpacks. Now, if you are not. If you are on the right track with your keyword or not, think about the keyword you're considering using, go to Google, put it in the search bar, and look to see who shows up on page one, positions one through 10, and then look at positions one, two, and three the closest, because those are the ones that are getting the majority of the traffic as you. 34% of traffic goes to position number one, like we talked about in the shoe example earlier. 34% goes to position number one. A combined 60% goes to positions one, two, and three, which means if you want traffic from a term, you really need to be as high as possible On page one, page two doesn't count. 99% of searchers never go to page two. You have to be on page. So if you go to Google and you look at the results and all the websites on page one at the top are huge, like they're big competitors. If they had stores, they'd be at the mall. They're huge brands. You need to look for a different keyword because my friend, it's nothing against you. You're not gonna rank for that keyword. It's just not going to be possible. Now, if you go to Google and you see websites that are really similar to you, you're probably on the right track. If you see local competitors, sites that are from businesses about the size of yours. If you're in a local area and you're using your localization as well, then you're probably on the right track and you wanna keep going from there. you can use different keyword research tools to find search volume, to find ideas, opportunities. There are some plug-ins that I use when I'm searching that I teach my students about. Um, use whatever keyword research tool you want. It does not matter to me. They should all have the same data from Google, so use the one that you're the most comfortable with, but do some keyword research verifying Google to make sure that what you're seeing in the research tool is representative of what you actually see in the search results. Sometimes a tool will tell you there's low competition, or it'll give you a green light, or it'll say it's a great keyword for you. And you go to Google and there's no way that you're at all similar to the websites that are on the search results, start over. Don't trust the data in that tool. If it tells you something different than what Google shows you. Google is the source. Trust Google, because you want your search engine optimization to work because that's how you're going to get traffic to your website and you're gonna build your no factor. You have to choose keywords that your website can rank for. Quick refresher. One keyword per page. Make sure it's the keyword that your ideal customer is using, and above all, make sure it's a keyword that you can rank for. If you wanna learn more about this, take my free class and get the SEO content Quick Start Guide. The links are in the notes. I hope you found this lesson super helpful, and I will see you here next week. Bye for now.