How to Pick Keywords for Your Website
Keyword research has a reputation for being complicated. It doesn't have to be. Here's a useful way to think about it before touching any tool.
Start with how your customers talk, not how you talk
Every business has its own internal language. The words you use to describe what you do often aren't the words your customers type into Google. If your services page says "strategic brand communications consulting" and your customers are searching "help writing website copy," there's a gap.
The goal is to find the words your actual customers use, not the words that sound most impressive. Think about the questions you get asked on sales calls. Think about what someone would type if they'd never heard of you but needed exactly what you offer. Start there.
Understand what a keyword is actually telling you
Every search has an intent behind it. Someone searching "what is content strategy" wants to learn something. Someone searching "content strategy consultant Atlanta" is probably ready to hire someone. Those two searches look similar but they're completely different.
Search engines prioritize ranking content that best matches the user's intent, so matching your page to the right intent matters as much as the keyword itself. A services page optimized for an informational search is going to underperform. A blog post optimized for a transactional search is going to feel pushy. Getting the intent right is half the work.
Broad vs. specific
Broad keywords like "SEO" or "marketing" get searched a lot. They're also dominated by enormous sites with years of authority behind them. A newer or smaller site competing for those terms is going to have a hard time.
Long-tail keywords are highly specific phrases with lower competition and search volume, which makes them easier to rank for, and they often attract people who are further along in a decision. "Content strategy consultant for B2B SaaS" has fewer monthly searches than "content marketing," but the person searching it knows exactly what they want.
For most small sites, specific beats broad almost every time.
A simple starting process
Write down ten to fifteen phrases your customers might actually search to find you. Include some broad ones and some specific ones. Then open Google and start typing them one at a time. Pay attention to the autocomplete suggestions and the "People Also Ask" and "Related Searches" sections at the bottom of the results page. Those are Google telling you what real people are searching for.
From there, a free tool like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs' free keyword generator will show you search volume and difficulty, which helps you prioritize. You're looking for terms that are relevant to what you do, specific enough that a larger site hasn't locked up the top results, and searched often enough to be worth targeting.
One keyword per page
Each page on your site should have one primary keyword it's built around. That keyword should show up in the page title, the first paragraph, and a few natural places throughout the content. That's it.
If you find yourself trying to make one page rank for ten different things, that's a sign it needs to be split into multiple pages, each with its own focus.
This doesn't have to be a big project
For a small site, an hour of keyword research done thoughtfully will take you further than a complicated ongoing process. Pick the right terms for your core pages, build content around them, and revisit it when your business changes or you add something new.
The goal is to show up when the right person is looking for what you do. That starts with knowing how they're looking.
Further reading: Google's Keyword Planner is free and a solid place to validate your ideas with real search data.
Sources used for this article: