How to choose the best keywords for SEO

Keyword research is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO), as it allows you to determine which words are used by your target audience when they search for a product or service. Keyword research can help you find out what topics people want to learn about, which helps improve your content marketing efforts.

Table of Contents

Understand your target audience

When it comes to keywords, you want to make sure that the ones you choose are relevant to your audience. The best way to do this is by understanding their needs and what they are looking for. You can also look at what they are expecting, and how they will react if they find that content on your website.

Know your competitors

While it’s important to know your own keywords, it’s just as important to know your competitors. Knowing how they are currently doing SEO and content marketing can help you make better decisions about which keywords you want to target.

To understand what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO and content marketing, you need an overall picture of their strategies. You should:

Find out what keywords they’re targeting with their SEO strategy (including on-page optimization)
Find out who’s linking to them (content marketing)
Check out their social media strategy

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Find potential keywords

Before you can start your SEO campaign, it’s important to find the right keywords.

There are several tools available that allow you to find potential keywords. Here’s a list of some of the best:

Google Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner) – this tool is fairly basic and only allows you to search for words with less than 100 results per month, but it still gets the job done in most cases.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool) – this tool allows for more advanced searches than Google Keyword Planner, but it has other limitations as well (for example, it won’t give results from one country if another is selected). It also lets users create lists of keywords they want to monitor over time so they don’t forget about them later on down the road when they’re ready for optimization!

Validate keywords

In addition to the basics, you should check your keyword’s search volume. This can help you gauge if it will be worth your time and effort to optimize for that keyword.

A good place to start is Keywords Everywhere, which allows users to see how many monthly searches a certain term gets on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can also use Moz’s free keyword tool or Ahrefs’ free version of their premium tool. These tools let you know how competitive a given phrase is by showing (in real-time) how many other websites are trying to rank for it—as well as how much they spend in PPC advertising on average.

Finally, make sure that the location of your website matters less than its relevance when ranking organically!

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Ambiguity in keyword research

Let’s take a look at some of the ways that ambiguity can creep into your keyword research.

“Golf clubs.” This is an ambiguous term because it could refer to either golf clubs or golf-balls. You might think that this would be an easy one for your audience to decipher; after all, someone looking for golf balls isn’t going to be interested in buying a set of clubs. But if someone is searching for this keyword via voice search rather than typing it into Google (and thus has no other hints about what they’re looking for), then they may not realize their mistake until after they’ve clicked on a link from the SERP and find themselves on another website selling golf clubs instead of balls (and possibly even buying them).
“New York City” is also a potentially confusing keyword phrase: does it mean New York City itself or simply any city in New York State? There are many cities with similar names throughout the country–what if someone tries to type “New Orleans” into Google only to get results about Louisiana instead? If someone wanted information about New Orleans but thought they were searching for just plain old ‘New,’ then they might end up disappointed with their search results–or worse still, misled by them!

Choose relevant and specific keywords for your niche

The first step to choosing the right keywords is to understand your niche and its audience. You should also consider how many people are searching for those terms, what they’re looking for, and how many results come up on Google when you enter those terms into the search bar.

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Choose relevant and specific keywords for your niche. You want to choose keywords that describe your business or website in an accurate but concise way—something like “best marketing agency” rather than “agency specializing in public relations solutions for small businesses” (this latter phrase is much longer).
Choose keywords that are easy to rank for by using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush. If there are too many other sites competing with yours, it may be difficult or expensive for you to compete with them all. That’s why choosing less competitive terms will help ensure higher rankings!
Avoid very broad or overly long phrases since they’ll be impossible (or extremely costly) to rank well against authoritative sites such as Wikipedia, Bing, etcetera

Use different types of keywords

To make sure that you’re choosing the best keyword for your site, it’s important to use different types of keywords. If you only use one type of keyword, then it won’t be as effective as if you had used multiple types.

To choose the best keywords for SEO:

Use short-tail keywords – These are very specific terms that people might search on Google when they want something. For example, “best headphones.”
Use long tail keywords – This is a longer version of the short tail keyword where there are more words in between each word in the phrase or sentence. Examples include “best headphones under $50” or “best headphones under 100 dollars.”
Use phrase keywords – Phrases are two or three words linked together by either commas or dashes (depending on whether they appear at the beginning or end). Examples include “best cheap headphones” and “cheap headphone brands”. You can also combine both phrases and long tails into one search query such as “best cheap headphones under $100” which would return all results containing both terms “best” and “cheap” with $100 being less than their combined total cost

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Do not use generic keywords in place of specific ones before doing keyword research

Generic keywords are not specific enough to help you rank for a specific keyword.

Long-tail keywords are not just single words but phrases that contain multiple words in them. These types of keywords may sound generic but they do help you rank well on search engines like Google and Bing because they’re more specific than their single-word counterparts, who are often too broad or ambiguous.

Stick with your keyword list and do not get tempted to stray from it

You should stick with your keyword list and not get tempted to stray from it.

In other words, do not try to change your keywords at this stage. You can still add new keywords in the future but make sure they fit within the scope of your current project.

If you do choose to change them, then it will only confuse you and make everything more difficult for you in the long run.

Do not combine two or more keywords into one as it affects your audience’s reach

Combining keywords into one is a bad practice. You may think that it will work, but it won’t. The truth is that combining multiple keywords in one sentence can create low-quality content and make your content less relevant to your audience.

For example: “How to choose the best keywords for SEO” means that you are using two different types of words (the word “SEO” and the word “how”), which makes this phrase hard to understand if seen by a potential visitor who wants information on both topics at once. Let’s say we want our readers to be able to find out more about SEO, so we use the phrase “how to choose the best keyword for SEO.” Now we have combined two different types of words into one phrase; this makes our text even less readable than before because now there aren’t any pauses between sentences!

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You should always write your article with phrases like this in mind:

What are my customers looking for? What questions do they need answers to? (e.g., How can I improve my website performance?) 2) What question do I want to be answered by writing this article? (e.,g., How can I improve my website performance?) 3) Can these questions be answered separately from each other without being confusing or unclear?”

Make a note of good keywords you find on competitor websites while browsing the web

As you’re browsing the web, make a note of any good keywords you find on your competitors’ websites. This is important because you want to be able to find these keywords easily again later on. If possible, include the page URL where you found the keyword and the search engine that returned this result. You can even use Google’s “Saved” feature so that all of your saved results are grouped together under one category: The Saved Search bar at the top of their search results page (for now).

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Use long-tail keywords as they are easier to rank on search engines

Long-tail keywords are more specific than broad match keywords, and therefore easier to rank for. The reason for this is that long-tail keywords are less competitive (the competition is lower) and therefore easier to rank high on search engines.

Long-tail keywords also have a higher conversion rate because they’re more specific and targeted around what the user is actually looking for. This makes people more likely to click on your website as opposed to other sites that rank higher but don’t actually have what the user wants or needs.

Do not use broad-match keywords as the results you will get will be very different from what you are expecting.

Broad-match keywords are not as effective as they used to be.
The results you get with broad-match keywords are not as targeted as you would like them to be. They can lead to irrelevant traffic and low conversion rates for your website.

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Conclusion

The best way to find good keywords for your website is by conducting keyword research and analyzing competitors’ websites. It doesn’t matter if you are an expert in SEO or not, as long as you follow these tips and put in some work, then we are sure that your website rankings will improve over time.