Has your site recently launched and you can’t seem to draw customers in? Or, has your website been up and running for a while now and you’ve noticed a drop in traffic? It may be time to take a deeper look at your online presence to discover if your current SEO (search engine optimization) content could be hindering your Google search engine results page (SERP) ranking. 

An SEO audit, completed on your site, is a crucial step to discovering areas you can easily build and improve on. A great starting point for the audit is to focus on the keywords that are currently in use within your content. Keywords play a fundamental role in communicating the type of content your site has to offer to search engines. A discernable use of keywords, that are relevant to your particular industry, can play an important role in consumers having the ability to locate your business on page 1 of the search results. Instead of it being hidden down on page 5. 

In this article, we’ll discuss four tried and true methods you can use to research and gather keywords that can be used to improve your SEO content and ultimately boost your SERP’s ranking.

Longtail Keywords

A simple yet powerful way to begin your research is to start with longtail keywords. These are extended keyword phrases that your consumers will be using to search when they are close to purchasing a product or service or if they are using voice search.

An example of this would be: a used car dealership is unable to rank at the top of the search pages for  “used car” because of the amount of competition from other companies. Now, if that dealership utilizes longtail keywords in their content such as “used Toyota Carolla for sale”, they can capture the attention of customers searching for that exact model of vehicle. 

Assembling a collection of these keywords could not be more straightforward. Simply visit the Google Search page and type in words relevant to your industry. Google will show you auto-fill options that you can use within your site.

Competitors Keywords

Just like the previous method, researching the keywords that your competitors are currently using is an excellent method that can assist your business in understanding how others are grabbing the attention of your shared potential customers.
Ubersuggest is a powerful SEO app you can employ to analyze exactly how your competition may be drawing traffic to their websites. It contains a large selection of tools designed to help you take control of the content of your site and it’s free for limited use! Simply, visit the “Competitive Analysis” section of Ubersuggest and select “Keywords by Traffic”. From here you can type in the domain of any of your business’s competitors and the keywords that they are using to attract customers will be displayed. Take a look through the list and gather any of the words that may not be used in your content yet.

Online Communities FAQ

This next strategy is quite simple and easy to complete. You are going to collect the top questions that are being asked in online communities. These questions can then be woven into your site content for search engines to locate. 

Instead of spending hours combing through multiple web pages, there is an online platform that does all the work for you. Answer the Public is a fantastic (and free!) site that scours the web for questions related to any keywords you tell it to search for. It compiles those queries on a web that you can then keep for your research.

Google Search Console

The final method you can utilize to locate keywords to boost your SEO Content and your SERP ranking is to make use of the Google Search Console. On this console, you can see your top queries based on impressions under the “Performance” section. These queries can then be drawn on to create your site content. 

An SEO Audit can seem like a daunting task but if you start with the basics you’ll be successful! Keyword research is a great first step to amplifying your website’s SERP ranking results and the above-mentioned methods are designed to help your content make your business stand out from the competition. If you would like any assistance with improving your SEO content, please reach out to Vigilante Marketing here.