As a digital marketing specialist, I am often asked: “What are keywords and how to use them”.
Keywords are essential in marketing that they can make or break your marketing campaigns. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to use the keywords to your advantage in terms of digital marketing, SEO, and Google Ads strategies.
Watch the video version of this article below:
Importance of keywords to business and marketing
Your keywords, serve as the link between what people are searching about your products or services and to what your business offers.
The foundation of all online marketing because it’s all search-based. So, make sure that everything you do online is optimized with the same keywords that people are searching for. These keywords should also be embedded across all your marketing channels— from your Google My Business local listing to your SEO, Google Ads, blog, other local listings like Yelp, and even your social media channels like YouTube. That is how you use keywords everywhere.
Keep a spreadsheet on file at all times with your core keywords. If you already have one but it has not been updated in a while, then it’s time to update that list. I also advise that you update the keywords with the tools I’m going to show you.
Keyword research tools
Mangools
One of the tools I like to use when doing keyword research is Mangools. This is a very easy tool to use, even for people who are total newbies. Let me show you quickly what the Dashboard looks like:
So the above image is the keyword dashboard after typing in my target keyword for the term I am searching for. As you can see, the tool shows the different variations of the keywords I entered. You can also see more details for each keyword variation such as trend, and search volume.
Keyword Planner by Google Ads
With Mangools, you need to have a paid account to properly utilize their keyword research. If you want to save on costs, then I highly suggest you use Google’s keyword planner, which you can easily access within your Google Ads account.
And in my opinion, when it comes to keyword research, it’s better to go right to the source and use the Keyword Planner in Google Ads for the very reason that all 3rd-party tools get their keyword data from Google. You can go right to the source yourself instead of paying for 3rd-party tools for this data.
Grouping keywords
A part of successful keyword research is grouping your keywords. Grouping your keywords will help you get better results and it’s easier to manage them on a page or in an ad group.
Grouping of keywords should be done in a semantically and logically organized hierarchy. You can write ad text that applies to all the related terms in that group simultaneously.
By organizing your keywords into small “themed segments” or ad groups you can get:
- Lower costs per click
- Higher quality score
- Better ad rankings
- Improved click-through rate
SEO vs Google Ads
In terms of using keywords for SEO and Google Ads, you need to understand that there is a slight difference between these two platforms.
In SEO, you should find less competitive, less expensive, and BUT highly-relevant (to-your-business) keywords.
These are called long-tail keywords, which are long threads of the core keywords. For example:
“Automobile accident lawyer” is a long-tail keyword, but this keyword is considered very competitive and hard to rank. So to get a better keyword for this term, we get another searched long tail keyword which is, “best car accident lawyer near me”. This keyword is less competitive and is easier to rank compared to the first long tail keyword.
In SEO, you need to find those long-tail keywords, which you can rank for faster instead of trying to rank for the keywords that are dominated by competitors, and mostly these competitors already have a good head start on you.
Google Ads, on the other hand, is not focused on the long-tail keyword. Instead, the focus is on relevance and intent, making sure that the search term targets a person who is actively searching for the exact product or service that you offer.
But how do you know if these keywords are good keywords for Google Ads? You can test your keywords in the Google ads dashboard and quickly determine which keywords are bringing you the most business and which are not.
How to use keywords on the website
You need to know at least the basics of SEO to properly optimize your website for keywords. Like for example, you can optimize your target keywords in the content title, on your page, in your header tags, and meta tags. You can also optimize your images for the right keywords.
To conclude
I hope the article helps you better understand what are keywords and how to use them. These are simple, basic knowledge of keywords and keyword research. You can use this as a good foundation to start using keywords to your advantage in business and digital marketing.
