SEO Basics: How Do You Find the Right Keywords?

Before the content, comes keyword research. Here you try to figure out which keywords visitors use to find content like yours. In other words, it’s about making it clear to search engines that your blog text or website is relevant to the topic. Because search engines are essential for driving traffic to websites, texts are written with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind from the very first word — otherwise you risk being lost among pages and pages of more relevant search results.

Like target group search, keyword research aims to identify commonalities among your users — specifically, search words they use frequently. In terms of SEO, this is hugely important — after all, you want to be found.

However, if your blog promotes a product using keywords that your potential customers rarely or never use, you will not get the expected traffic, no matter how high your Google rankings are. By doing keyword research, you make sure that you use the same keywords as your visitors.

How do you get started?

First of all, you should be aware of what exactly the article should be about. What does it stand for? What is the focus? What makes it unique? Write down everything that comes to mind.

Then, from your answers, pull out a few important keywords that describe your article. The more you write down here, the better — you are not limited in this step and the list can be as long as it needs to be. Also keep in mind what your potential readers might be looking for. Does your vision of good keywords match what an average Google search of your visitors reveals? What words are your visitors using? What questions might readers have that your article answers? What makes your text stand out from other texts? Avoid obscure vocabulary or technical terms if you’re not sure your visitors know them. On the blog, as in writing a book, the author is not writing for himself, but for his readers.

For relevant keywords, there are also web tools. They also provide deep insights into the search volume of the past months as well as click numbers on websites. With these, you can estimate whether there is a lot of competition on search engines for “your” keyword. In the case of very hard-fought terms, it is worthwhile to switch to other words.

Of course, if in doubt, it’s also worth simply running a few Google searches for your keywords. From the results, you can often tell what kind of content is being delivered for certain terms and whether it’s more or less relevant than your own (planned) content.

What are your readers looking for?

You can also narrow down your keyword research based on what your visitors are looking for. Ask yourself whether your readers have certain questions, want to find out about products or want to buy something. This can also help you determine whether certain keywords make sense for you. Important: Search engines now also sort their results according to the presumed search intention.

Short-tail or long-tail keyword?

Basically, you can and should use both! A long-tail keyword is defined here as a keyword that consists of not just one word, but an entire phrase. These keywords are more specific and thematically limited than single words and are therefore used less often. However, a few phrases in the text are the salt in the SEO soup, because phrases basically land easier in the Google search results.

How many keywords are needed?

That depends entirely on what you are creating your content for. A commercial website should combine a few hundred keywords on average; blog texts, on the other hand, get by with just under half a dozen. Because blogs are built up organically over time, a lot of keywords come together after a while and are spread across the combined blog posts.

Of course, you don’t have to distribute all the keywords directly across your site. Start with a few and then build out your content step by step. Once your keyword list is in place, you can move on to the actual content. The key here is to find the right balance — each keyword should make up between 0.5% and a maximum of 2.5% of your words in the body text. Anything above that could be construed as spam by search engines; anything below that doesn’t have enough relevance for Google.

Be sure to use keywords that are relevant to you — niche terms with no connection to your site may bring in quick traffic, but disappointed visitors will quickly bounce back. Google punishes such behaviour with lower rankings.