Send your questions to: carl@hewittmatthews.co.uk
reece@hewittmatthews.co.uk
Dear Carl and Reece
I've just enrolled on a digital marketing course to help me develop my business. As part of the syllabus, I will be learning about keywords. I'm intrigued to find out more about how these work.
Elizabeth
Thanks for your email, Elizabeth, and good luck with the course! Digital marketing is such an important part of any business.
WHY ARE KEYWORDS IMPORTANT?
Search engine algorithms crawl over websites looking for specific keywords every time someone types these into Google or Bing. The algorithm then generates a list of websites where these words are embedded. If you were a florist based in Emsworth you'd want to include 'florist' and 'Emsworth' as your keywords. Choose longtail keywords and your website will appear in a wider set of search results. i.e. 'Emsworth award-winning florist'. Make sure you don't overuse your keywords as not only will these spoil the flow of your writing, Google will penalise you for them. This will result in your website appearing lower down the list of search results.
Use a keyword search tool such as UberSuggest, Moz or GoogleAds' Keyword Planner and you'll find keywords that are relevant to your sector. Neil Patel provides a range of excellent content which can help you further understand which keywords will work best for you but, in short, pick keywords that are as relevant as possible to your business and offering and be aware that highly competitive keywords are usually most valuable to rank for but take the longest to get to the top spot!
Whenever people ask us about their websites, we advise them to look at the keywords they are using and audit these on a regular basis. It's also a good idea to look at your competitors' websites to see if there are any particular phrases that you could use.