How to Find Keywords for SEO Getting Buyers to Your Keyhole

Your business lives on a street somewhere within the world wide web. A tiny little corner of the internet where you produce or share your products and services with prospects and customers. However, it’s not enough to just take up residency there. If you’re interested in making some money with your business, as most people are, then you need to make yourself searchable. You need a way to distinguish yourself from your neighbors, so that passerbys know you offer what they need. You must find a way to get them to your doorway and start knocking. In this case, you need to know how to find keywords for your site that will lead people to your keyhole.

In this post you will discover how to find keywords and why they’re important to the success of your business.

First, a quick search engine optimization lesson. The way your business gets found across the massive world wide web is through keywords. When an internet user looks up information, search engines send out spiders to crawl across the web in search for the most useful and credible answers. In order for your business to rank high on the list of matches to a query, you need a good supply of relevant keywords placed in key locations throughout your website.

These keywords can be one word — called short-tail keywords — like “blueberries.” Or they can be a collection of words — known as long-tail keywords — such as “blueberry farms near me in Colorado Springs.” The former are typically the most popular keywords, meaning many other sites will choose to use these keywords on their site. The latter, while less popular, tend to connect your business to serious buyers.

You know keywords are important, but how do you know what keywords to incorporate onto your website content? How do you find these keywords? Here are five ways to build out your keywords list with relevant terms and phrases that can help get you found.

1. Check Your Buyer Personas

If you’ve spent time creating buyer personas for your business, then this should be your first stop. Take some time to get refreshed on the characters you’ve created.

Perhaps you have some keyword terms already built into their descriptions. You first need to think of broad ideas of what users may possibly search within your niche. This will help you come up with seed terms that you can use in your keyword research tools to generate more search terms.

For instance, a technically-minded person searching for a fix to their cable issues might type in “How to run tests on modems to reset cable issues” while a more social or laid-back individual might type in “why isn’t my cable working?”

2. Ask Your Customers

Chances are that many of your current customers first found you through their own organic searches, so go back to them and find out how. Select a cross section of your customer base and get on the phone, send an email, or take them out for lunch to explore their buying experience.

What were their needs? What were they searching for back then? What grabbed their attention when they first found you online? If they can’t recall, just talk with them about their current use of your products and services. Ask them to walk you through a recent experience using your solutions and listen intently to the verbiage they use.

Hearing the way they talk about your business can be extremely insightful in knowing how to find keywords.

3. Ask Yourself

It seems like this should be the first step, right? After all, no one knows your products and services the way you and your staff do. But that’s precisely the point. You can be too close to your business that you’re blinded by how the outside world may look for or look at you. Only after you’ve taken the time to hear what external audiences have to say about you should you spend time brainstorming as a team.

Here you can refine the language you use internally and begin adding any missing long- and short-tail keywords to the growing list. Just be sure to speak in real terminology and not industry jargon.

BONUS TIP: Before asking your customers and your team, get everyone’s clearance to record the discussion. Then use a service—like Rev.com—to transcribe the entire recording. You’ll find the conversation goes much deeper when you’re not scribbling notes.

4. Ask Your Competitors

Well, not “ask” as much as “stalk” their website to see what keywords they may be ranking or targeting. If your competitor is ranking for certain keywords that are on your list, it makes sense to work on improving your ranking.

However, don’t ignore the ones your competitors won’t address. This could be a great opportunity for you to jump on new keywords. Here are several online tools to monitor your competitors’ online activity.

5. Create Topic Buckets

This is a helpful practice detailed in creating a content strategy that we often use for brainstorming purposes. You’ll want to pick 5-10 buckets you’d want your company to address that are relevant to the business. From there, you’ll want to discuss keyword phrases you think potential customers might use to search for topic-related content.

Once you have some basic words in place, go to Google, and take a look at the related terms that appear when you plug in a keyword in the search bar. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of their results, you’ll notice suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to consider.

Many great keyword tools exist to help you make sense of the list you’ve compiled. I’m a bit frugal when it comes to keyword tools, so I can only offer two free solutions that I’ve used. But here’s a a list of The 9 Best Keyword Research Tools to Find the Right Keywords for SEO for you to consider.

Google Keyword Planner

While it does have its limitations, Google Keyword Planner can still be a great free tool for researching related keywords, showcasing metrics on search volume and competition, and exploring historical trends. It also allows you to spy and swipe your competitor’s keywords, find local keywords a lot faster, find niche markets and other topics to blog about, create adwords campaigns easily, and use as a guide to create a silo structure for your site. 

Keyword Tool.IO

Keyword Tool.io provides three key features: find Keywords, analyze competitors, and check search volume. While this tool is more limited based on pricing levels, it can give you the resources you need to at least run basic keyword searches on relevant terms and their popularity so you can continue to break out your topic buckets.

Agency Help

When it comes to ranking searches, you’ll need all of the help you can get. If you’re driving yourself crazy by constantly looking for SEO tips and ways to optimize the content on your site, you don’t have to do it alone. You may find it much easier working with an agency to improve your SEO keyword strategy. SEO is constantly changing. That’s why it’s important to have an entire team around you to help develop a plan that will find the right keywords for your business, optimize content around those keywords, and get your website ranking as highly as possible on every search. Not only that, an agency will ensure you have the other tools you need at your disposal like photography, blog writing, content plans, and so much more.

Looking for help in finding keywords or ranking higher in searches? We can help get you found by the right customers.