Choosing keywords is a simple task, but it requires time and dedication.

A keyword is the word by which you will position an article or page of a website in a search engine. Usually, the keyword corresponds to the term or the way of searching that a person has, naturally, in a search engine. For example, if we were looking for a coffee shop where we could have specialty coffee in Madrid, we would look for it as follows: “speciality coffee madrid” or “cafeteria specialty coffee madrid”.

It is therefore important that in your pages and web content keywords are defined so that searchers can identify them and locate the information when someone asks for it.

Depending on the keywords we use, we will obtain some or other results. The more generic the keywords are, for example, terms like “trip” or “bag”, it will be very complicated that our contents appear in the first results because they will be competing with thousands and thousands of pages that have used those same keywords. These types of keywords are called “head” or “short tail”.

However, if we are more specific and focus on a specific or more “niche” topic, we will surely obtain better results. With the previous examples, we could refer to keywords such as “trip to Mallorca” or “velvet bag”. These types of keywords are named “middle tail”.

So, do the keywords have to be a single word, or can they also be a short phrase? That the term of which we speak is called a keyword does not mean that it must be a single word. If we talk of a specific word and that is already segmenting, we can use it. But the normal thing will be that we opt for a short set of words that will help us to specify better the content we want to position. Also, we can also use slightly longer sentences if we need it, as a specific question or expression. This type of keywords or phrases are called “long tail”, and in the previous cases they would be, for example: “trip to mallorca with children” or “blue velvet bag”.

Thanks to the keywords, if we have correctly defined our SEO strategy, we will achieve successful results when positioning our website and content in search engines.

How to choose suitable keywords for my content?

The choice of a keyword must be considered, be consistent with the rest of the content and have logic. That is, if your goal is to attract your public website interested in buying healthy food products and supplements, it will not make sense to position your pages or prepare content on your blog with a keyword that had nothing to do, especially if your goal is conversion.

If, on the other hand, you want to draw attention to the user, then within your means, you can choose a keyword with a closer or viral content. For example: “premieres netflix spring 2019”.

Another fundamental issue is to choose keywords that have some volume of searches (more than 200-300 monthly).

On the other hand, position content with keywords related to your business or sector. You do not have to focus solely on your interests, but you can vary depending on the different interests of your target audience, always related to your brand, content, ideas or product/service.

Try to do not deceive the people who visit your website. If you are looking for specific content, give them what they need, do not position them with the keywords they use and then leave them without the information they need.

Analyse your competition: why are the keywords positioning other brands and companies in your sector? The fact of knowing the keywords by which your competition tries to position itself will make you think about your strategy in a more logical and concrete manner.

In addition to the positive keywords, about which we have been talking about, add some negative keywords to your strategy; that is, those with which you do NOT want to position yourself. If you have a hotel in Mallorca for adults only, you can choose to use the negative keyword “hotel in mallorca for children”, so you will not be reaching the public that you are not interested in.

Tools to choose perfect keywords

There are several tools to search and identify keywords, but we especially recommend two: Google’s keyword planner and SEMrush.

Although it is a free tool, to use the Google keyword planner, you will need to have an account in Google Ads. The planner will offer you the results based on the level of the competition, the volume of average searches per month and the cost that the keyword would have if you wanted to bid for it in the campaign.

For its part, SEMrush offers you the possibility, in addition to research on keywords, to know rankings, analyse the traffic of a web page, identifying the adds texts of the competition, etc.

Even though these tools are handy, they are not infallible. In the end, what will end up determining your page or content is positioned will be the effort you make in the whole of your SEO strategy-tagging images with keywords, meta-descriptions in conditions, and a long etcetera.

To complement your keywords study, you can open an incognito tab and directly use the Google search engine with a general term so that the platform itself suggests the related searches made by users. Or enter Google Trends and view the trends related to the sector or topic to which you are going to refer.

And now, as a culmination, we open another “bottle of champagne”: nowadays and increasingly, the success of attendees such as Siri, Google, Cortana or Alexa, is making more and more games with voice searches. What will this bring? Soon we will tell you in another article 😉