In this analogy, the fish are your potential customers, and the particular net is your 'targeted keyword.'
So, let’s explore the answer to “What is keyword targeting?” and how to leverage it to boost your rankings.
Understanding Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting is the practice of finding and analyzing actual search queries that people enter into search engines. This research then guides content strategy, marketing initiatives, and more.
Keyword targeting involves understanding what individuals, or your potential customers, are actually searching for, analyzing the phrases, words, or questions they are using to find answers, knowing how often they are searching these keywords, and gleaning how those searches may change over time.
It's all about getting into the mind of your prospective customer, understanding their questions, their needs, their search habits, and then optimizing your content around those findings—essentially, ensuring your 'net' is the most convenient, accessible, and rewarding spot for them!
💡 You may want to read: What is Search Intent?
Why is Keyword Targeting Important for SEO?
Keyword targeting shines a spotlight on your content in the vast digital arena, allowing it to catch the right eyes.
Here are some of the benefits keyword targeting can provide to your campaign:
🚀 Understanding your audience: By researching what your audience is looking for, you can understand their needs, questions, and concerns better. This knowledge enables you to create content tailored to their needs and provide solutions to their queries.
🚀 Boosting website visibility: When you optimize your content with the right keywords, search engines rank your website higher for those keywords. High web rankings lead to increased visibility and traffic, ultimately attracting more potential customers.
🚀 Staying ahead of competitors: Knowledge of strategic keywords gives you an advantage over competitors. You understand the audience better, answer their queries more effectively, and meet their needs more efficiently. Simultaneously, it allows you to create content that stands out in the crowded market.
🚀 Lower advertising costs: With strategic targeting, your ads appear to the most relevant audience, leading to a higher click-through rate (CTR). A higher CTR can lower your cost-per-click (CPC) in advertising campaigns.
How Many Keywords Should You Target?
There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The number of keywords to target depends on several factors, including the size of your website, the industry you're in, the competition level, and your SEO goals.
However, a good rule of thumb is to focus on one primary keyword per page or post. Additionally, you can sprinkle in a few related secondary and tertiary keywords.
The aim is to help search engines understand your content, not confuse them with too many keywords. Send your 'net' out strategically, rather than scattering it too thin and catching nothing!
💡 You may want to read: Understanding How Many Keywords to Use Per Page for SEO
6 Steps for Effective Keyword Targeting
At its core, keyword targeting works on the principle of relevance. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the engine's algorithms sift through billions of pages to provide the most relevant results. They do this by scanning the pages for the presence and context of the searched keyword.
Relevance, in this context, isn't just about the presence of a keyword on your web page. Factors like the position of a keyword, its frequency, the context around it, the relevance of overall content, the user's geography, and more drive the relevance.
And that’s not where it ends. Search engines also use numerous other factors like site speed, mobile-friendliness, page quality, and other ranking signals to determine your page's relevance.
However, the starting point of this all is keywords. When you strategically choose, place and optimize your keywords, you give your content the best shot at appearing as a relevant search result.
Here's an overview of the process:
01. Research
Start by conducting comprehensive keyword research. This step involves identifying a list of potential keywords that your target audience uses when searching for products or services similar to yours.
There are a variety of tools to aid your research. You can simply use SEOmator’s Keyword Research Tool to find the perfect target keyword for successfully managing your online advertising campaigns.
Also, sign up SEOmator's dashboard for free to achieve a more detailed research and gain competitive edge.
02. Analysis
Once you have a list, the next step is to analyze these keywords. Consider factors like search volume, competition, cost-per-click (CPC), and more.
Low difficulty or low competition keywords might represent niche queries with lower search volumes but these keywords often have high conversion rates as they attract highly specific traffic.
Furthermore, long-tail keywords are highly specific and usually have lower search volumes, but they tend to attract highly targeted traffic, leading to better conversion rates.
💡You may want to read: What are KPIs in Marketing? - 21 KPIs to Measure for Success
03. Selection
Based on your analysis, select the most relevant, high-performing keywords to target.
The goal here isn't to choose the keywords with the highest search volume. Instead, you want to select those that align with your audience's intent and your business goals.
04. Implementation
The strategic placement of your keywords helps search engines understand the context of your content and index it accordingly.
Once you have your chosen keywords, start incorporating them into your website content, metadata, URLs, ad campaigns, and more. The main areas to focus on are the title, headers, sub-headers, introductory sentences, concluding paragraphs, meta descriptions, and image alt texts.
Aim for a natural, value-adding placement over forced keyword stuffing.
Title tag is the most important place to put your keyword. Make sure it seems natural and not forced. Mention your keywords at a normal cadence throughout your content but also include them in headers.
If possible, use your keyword in your web page's URL. Although meta description doesn’t directly influence ranking, a keyword-optimized meta description can improve click-through-rates.
💡 You may want to read: Metadata Optimization: Best Practices for Better SEO 🚀
05. Monitoring
The next stage is to monitor your keyword performance.
Using various analytics tools, you can track how your keywords are performing in terms of rankings, traffic, conversions, etc.
06. Optimization
Based on your monitoring, you'll often need to make adjustments. You'll see some keywords performing well, while others might not deliver as expected.
Here's where you tweak your strategy - you may need to change your targeted keywords, adjust their placements or usage frequency, and so on.
How Can You Use Keyword Targeting on Social Media Platforms?
Entirely focusing your keyword targeting strategy on SEO is also no longer a smart move. Social media platforms are also search engines on their own right now.
If you're not focusing your keyword strategy on these platforms, you're missing out on a large piece of your potential target audience.
Here’s how you can leverage keyword targeting on some of the major social media sites:
🌐 Facebook: Facebook doesn't work with a keyword-specific strategy. Instead, it focuses on audience interests and behaviors. However, keywords still play a substantial indirect role. When you're choosing interests and behaviors to target, be specific and use keyword research to discover the right terms.
🌐 LinkedIn: The biggest professional networking platform utilizes keywords in a similar way to how search engines do. So, if you have a LinkedIn business page, make sure you have strategically placed keywords throughout your company description, employee profiles, posts, and so on.
🌐 X (Formerly Twitter): Hashtags are essentially X’s version of keywords, and strategically using them can help you increase your visibility on this micro-blogging site.
🌐 Pinterest: Pinterest is another platform that uses keyword targeting effectively. The best way to achieve this is by using keywords in your pin descriptions, board titles, and board descriptions.
🌐 YouTube: As the second largest search engine (only after Google), YouTube is all about keyword targeting. From your video titles and descriptions to tags and even transcriptions, keyword optimization is critical here.
What are Additional Keyword Targeting Options?
Keyword targeting isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. It requires continuous testing and tweaking to ensure you’re catching the right fishes.
Thankfully, there are a plethora of additional keyword targeting techniques that can fine-tune your strategy for better results.
Here are a few:
🎯 Geo-Targeting Keywords: Geographical targeting implies targeting keywords specific to a location. For instance, if you have a physical store in New York, you might want to target keywords like ‘New York Bakery Shop! to reach out to the local audience.
🎯 Event-Triggered Keywords: These involve targeting keywords related to specific events or trending topics. They work best for time-bound campaigns.
🎯 Adding Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are phrases or words that you wouldn’t want to trigger your ads. For instance, if you’re selling premium watches and don’t want your ad to show for searches on 'cheap watches,' you can add ‘cheap’ as a negative keyword.
🎯 Semantic Keyword Targeting: This involves targeting keywords that are contextually related to your primary keyword. For instance, for the primary keyword 'weight loss,' semantic keywords could be 'exercise,' 'healthy diet,' 'calorie deficit,' and so on.
🎯 Competitor Keyword Targeting: This involves identifying the keywords your competitors are ranking for and creating content that targets those keywords to capture some of that traffic.
Wrapping Up
Keywords aren't just about driving traffic — they're about driving the right kind of traffic. If you choose your keywords wisely, you're casting a net out into an ocean teeming with potential customers.
Imagine your web page is like a book. Keyword targeting helps the 'search engines' understand what your 'book' is about and whether it answers the searcher's query. If it does, you're likely to show up in your prospective customer's search results!
Also, don’t forget that keyword targeting is a continuous process with monitoring, testing, learning, and optimizing cycles. Refine your keyword selection, target low-difficulty keywords, leverage long-tail keywords, and strategically place keywords for maximum impact!
💡 You may also want to read:
- PPC for Small Businesses: 8 Tips & Tricks
