Keywords are one of the most important elements of the positioning process – check how to choose them! They play a major role, because they decide under which phrases the website is visible in Google search. However, many people do not know what keywords are, why they are so important and how they work. This translates into inaccurate or ineffective and inefficient website positioning activities. In this text we present all the most important information about the keywords in the process of positioning, and we suggest where to get them and how to place them on the website.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words under which you want your website to be visible in the Google search engine. These words are chosen consciously and are placed on the website in such a way that Google knows what our website is about. The keywords are placed in an intensive manner, putting special and most emphasis on them as compared to other vocabulary found on the website. They are what tell Google’s search engine when we want our website to be displayed on the internet and what questions it answers.
Phrases and keywords are one of the most important ranking factors that determine the position of our website in Google search, as well as when our website will be displayed for a particular query. Generally, there are many types of keywords that are meant to inform Google about the topic of our website in a specific way. Most often – when positioning a website globally – we choose a few or a dozen of the most popular phrases under which we want to be visible in a given thematic category and we put emphasis on such keywords on our website.
Why are they so important in the positioning process?
Keywords are a very important element of the website, because only they inform Google about the topic of the service and suggest when our service should be displayed in the Google search engine. The search engine has no other way of interpreting the service than through the text – especially the words that are intensively exposed on the page. Google’s search engine has a variety of algorithms that can recognize keywords and interpret the site’s subject matter on that basis. Recognizing the subject matter of a website is extremely developed, so adding keywords to a website in a thoughtful way will be very well understood by the search engine. When positioning a website, it is therefore important to pay close attention to keywords so that our website appears in Google searches through deliberate actions and not by chance.
Types of keywords
The keywords that we can place on a website are divided into several types. The first of them are keywords. These are the most popular keywords from a given subject category used in standard positioning – global. Only a few or a dozen of them are used and they are given by far the most emphasis on the website. Main keywords are usually the most competitive in the given thematic category, but they also allow you to gain the most organic traffic. Top phrases are usually the most general and popular topic terms in a given category, which are used by the most people.
The second type of keywords we use when positioning a website are local phrases. These are keywords with a specific topic but containing an additional city name or region name. Local keywords can be the names of cities or locations themselves. Local keywords are used for local SEO. They are meant to inform Google about the topic of our site and also about the local nature of our site. With local keywords, our website is displayed only in the local context of a particular city or region. Their task is to prevent the site from being displayed globally, and to display it if a particular query is about or from a particular city.
Secondary phrases very often escape our attention, but they are the background and basis for the functioning of the main keywords. These are medium to low-popularity phrases that are added in low volume on the website. They are used for both general website positioning and local positioning or many other types of positioning. They are meant to complement the main keywords that we place the most emphasis on. Most often they are used once or several times on the website and their task is to strengthen the context of the website in the eyes of Google search engine, as well as gaining some traffic from less popular keywords.
Long tail phrases are the so-called long tails. This is one of the most interesting types of phrases, which is also quite poorly known. Long tail phrases consist of several single words. Most often they are detailed and less popular terms for specific topics. Long tails are primarily used when positioning a website for voice search. They very well reflect colloquial speech and naturally asked question voiced in the search engine. They are also used to get specific topic traffic and users to the site who are looking for specific products, services or news.
Brand phrases are one of the most used groups of keywords. These are phrases that reflect the brand name. It may be the name of our company as well as global brands of products or services. Such phrases are most often used in the positioning of online stores, where their owners want to acquire organic traffic and customers looking for products of specific brands.
Where to get keywords from?
Another important issue related to keywords is where to obtain them from. This is quite an important question, because when planning website positioning, if we do it on our own, we usually do not know which keywords to use to promote our site. First of all we should determine the largest – maximum number of places from where we can obtain keywords. Thanks to this we will have a choice from a large pool of words and we will be able to better determine the set of keywords for our website, under which we will position the site.
First of all, we should start acquiring keywords by visiting Google’s keyword planner. This is a free tool available in the Google Ads system, which allows you to learn the most popular phrases for a given thematic category or keyword. They are often available with basic statistics, although this is not the rule. In this way we can get many suggestions of keywords for a given thematic category, under which we will position our website. On a similar basis external tools work, so called keyword generators, which additionally offer detailed statistics on specific keywords for a fee. They work by simply typing a keyword or keyword topic in the appropriate main field, and display a proposal of the most popular keywords. Using both Google’s keyword planner and external keyword generators, we will certainly be able to obtain a wide set of interesting and valuable keywords, from which we will choose the most important ones for us.
However, we can determine the keywords for our site in many more ways than the above two tools. We can also obtain keywords from the Google search engine itself. We can do this by typing the main keyword into the search engine. At this point, on the drop-down list we will see several popular similar queries for the given topic. After searching for the query we entered into the search engine at the bottom in the search results page, we will find many more similar queries. This can be very inspiring as well as surprising. We can also source keywords from the Google Trends tool, which is free and allows us to get popular keywords. A method of acquiring keywords, which mostly not too many people are interested in and which is actually quite surprising, is the analysis of competitors’ sites. Before we start positioning, when we will analyze with which sites our website will be competing, we can, for example, with the help of free SEO audits, check what keywords occur most often on the most popular sites in a given thematic category. Thanks to this we will learn what positioning strategy has been adopted by particular competitive websites and we will be able to use keywords with the greatest potential for us.
How to place phrases on the website?
If we have already determined the keywords under which we want to position our website, it is also worth telling how we can place them on our website. First of all, we can do it in SEO texts, which are dedicated to this task. These are texts written according to the principle of SEO copywriting, that is mainly for the search engine, so that it can easily find out what our website is about. We can write SEO texts ourselves according to SEO standards or order them from copywriters. Another place where we can put phrases on the website are elements like menus, footers or tabs of contacts, about us etc. A non-obvious place that many people forget about is the URL. We can put keywords in the addresses of individual subpages. We can also add them in the titles and descriptions of subpages, which will be visible as search results in Google. All this will make our website more readable for users, and the Google search engine will reward such action with a higher positioning of the site for given keywords.