Keyword research is quite often the starting point for any digital marketing campaign. Keywords affect everything from the design of the website to its messaging, navigation, and content. If you’re not already, I recommend you read up on how to perform keyword research.
Once you’ve got the hang of it, there are a few things you need to understand about how keywords impact the visitor’s experience on your site.
Searcher Language: Keywords give us extremely valuable insight on how searchers think about our products or services.
Searcher Intent: Every phrase typed into a search engine has a specific intent. Sometimes the intent is clear, sometimes not.
When it comes to optimizing your site, keywords themselves are not enough. You have to align the keyword with the intent with the content.
Checklist for Using Keywords to Improve User Experience
- Search Keyword Suggestions: Businesses often use language that is native to those within the industry. But that language isn’t necessarily aligned with how others think of the product or service. Most keyword research tools have an option to search for the topic while excluding the actual phrase. This can give you a broad range of alternate keywords that mean the same or similar to the phrase you used.
- Look for Keyword Phrases that Represent Problems: This can give you a whole new paradigm of keywords to optimize and content to produce. You may sell a great water sealant, but if you only optimize for that, you’ll miss those searching for “flooded basement”.
- Look for Keyword Phrases that Represent Solutions: This is another opportunity to find related keywords that can produce really targeted traffic. Someone looking for a way to “stop leaks in roof” won’t find your “roof patch” product or service if you’re not targeting the solution.
- Review search results for intent: Not all keywords or phrases mean what we think. A person searching “website audit” could be looking for a tool, a contractor, or a template. Scan the search results of your main keywords to ensure the solutions Google provides are the same solutions you provide.