Keywords: An SEO Marketing Word of the Day

How are your customers finding you? How do you reach new customers? How does your content support your business goals?

My words of the day have focused on SEO for over a week. No SEO strategy is complete (or even started) without discussing keywords.

Defining keywords for SEO requires two important ideas. Keywords are:

1. The words or phrases prospects are searching for.
2. The words marketers strategically incorporate into their content, so it is more relevant to prospect’s searches.

To fully appreciate these definitions, let’s take a step back. A marketer’s objective is to spread awareness of the product or service their business distributes. This product or service fulfills a need expressed by the business’s prospects or potential customers. It helps someone with something. So when a prospect is researching ways to solve their problem on Google, you want your product (their solution) to appear in their search results.

First, you need to identify what words prospects are searching while researching their products. Keep in mind, keywords aren’t what you want prospects to search for.

Keywords are what people are actually searching for. I’ve heard horror stories of executives preferring to use terminology based on their personal convictions. A CEO might not like the term “trailer,” but if prospects search for it over “mobile home” the keyword needs to be trailer.

Second, you need to incorporate your keywords into your content. You don’t want to “stuff” keywords or overload you content with them in a way that isn’t natural. You do want to include keywords in heading tags, body copy, image alt text, links, etc.

Keep in mind, you achieve relevance based on what search crawlers see. Make your keywords obvious to crawlers, and you’re more likely to get indexed and appear in searches. You can write a lot of great content, but if search engines don’t see it as relevant, you can’t get in front of prospects in their searches. 

Learn more about keywords in this guide by Moz.