How to test keywords for SEO

If you want your website to grow in traffic, you simply cannot neglect keywords. Keywords are essential for your SEO strategy and play a pivotal role in improving your search engine ranking and generating additional organic traffic.

Without incorporating keywords throughout your site and content, you could easily end up targeting the wrong audience, or worse, getting little to no audience at all. So how do you find and test keywords to ensure that you’ve got an effective SEO strategy in place?

Let’s dive in.

For starters, you’ll need to do keyword research. This can be done through Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Moz Keyword explorer or a variety of other online tools that can provide you with a list of keywords, their search volume and their competitiveness. 

Ideally, you want to find keywords that aren’t extremely competitive, but have some search volume. If you try to compete with “Nike” for keywords around “Nike”, you’ll end up with nothing but wasted time. Similarly, if you begin to use niche keywords like “Purple Monkey Banana Screwdriver Rollercoaster”, there likely won’t be much search intent. It’s all about finding the sweet spot that fits within your niche.

Additionally, you can use those same keyword search tools to look up your competitors and see what keywords they’re ranking for. This will give you insights into what people are searching for around your business, and you can either look for gaps in those keywords or attempt to outrank your competitors depending on how thorough they’ve been with their SEO. 

Once you’ve got your keywords, begin to integrate them throughout your website in your on-page SEO, including meta titles and descriptions, headers and throughout your content. Ensure that each piece of content you produce is internally linked with other content you’ve written, and do this consistently to begin seeing results. 

Using Google Analytics and Search Console, you can begin to see whether your position is increasing, stagnating or decreasing on search engines. 

It is important to ensure that you continually refine your SEO strategy based on the results you’re seeing, and when you begin to see certain pages ranking, try to unpack why that page ranked over others. Was there less competition? Did you incorporate different keywords or a greater volume of keywords?

Once you can see a pathway to generating results, you can begin to expand upon it and double down and watch your ranking climb. 

Lastly, ensure that you don’t neglect backlinking or local SEO, as these will be crucial in your overall SEO strategy. 

‍