How to Choose the Right SEO Keywords for Your Business

‍Using the right keywords ensures you'll see full benefits of your marketing efforts, so understanding how to pick them out is crucial to success. We're going to give you some insider tips to help you select the SEO keywords your customers are actually searching for.

Identifying the Value of Your Product

The correct question to ask is "what problem can this product solve for someone?", not "what is this?" or "what do we like about it?". This is a fundamental step in selecting keywords because you'll ultimately wind up dragging down your entire campaign if you don't look at it from a customer's perspective.

Once you understand the real value of your product - that is, what it can do for someone - it's time to start creating a buyer persona. This is another place where people often make a major misstep; they craft a buyer persona that's so far away from the reality that nobody remotely close to matching it actually exists. That isn't going to help your company so don't do it.

Instead, take the time to create a realistic persona that actually represents your potential customers. If necessary, perform some market research, run surveys, conduct interviews and do anything else you have to understand your customer.

Your goal is to locate the pain points of your customers and figure out what words and phrases they'll be using in an attempt to alleviate the problems. If there's a match between the problems you can solve and what a potential customer wants solving, then you have a winner. If you can't find a good match, then you'll need to change your target demographics or, more likely, change your product.

Standing Out From the Competition

Merely locating words and phrases is not enough to succeed, after all, the chances are that many other companies are trying to do the same thing you are and basic keywords won't be enough to stand out. The real secret to success here is to do your research.

Use tools like the independent (and, more importantly, free) Keyword Tool or SEO Book's Keyword Research Tool. They can help you find long-tail keywords based on real-world data and results, not just what you hope people are searching for.

Google's Trends tool lets you see trending searches in your region and can give some interesting ideas on what's hot.

Google Keyword Planner can also help give ideas and validate them with search volumes. Built by the Google team to help advertisers plan for PPC campaigns, it can give good insights for SEO keywords as well.

Another great tool is Twinword Ideas which makes keyword research faster by using AI and smart (user intent) filters.

Your aim is to find long-tail keywords that your customers are searching for, but your competitors haven't clued up on and get noticed for this. Which leads us to the final point:

Don't Forget About Quality Content

Selecting keywords is only the first step. Once that's done, you'll have to create high-quality content based on those keywords with a continued focus on the problems your potential customers are having. Write for the people visiting your site, not just what you want them to know about you. Writing this type of content will encourage people to share it, and you'll be noticed by the search engines as experts on that topic.

Visitors don't care about the history of your company. They don't care about who you are, where you're from, or how much you invested in their product. They care about alleviating their own problems - high-quality content addresses this and maximises ROI.

So get out there, find those problems that your customers are searching to solve and your competitors haven't noticed, then dominate the space with your amazing content.