What are SEO keywords? How to optimize website 2022.

What are SEO keywords?

As a newbie in the SEO field, I am sure that you have heard a lot of concepts and knowledge related to SEO including planned SEO keywords. Don’t worry, I am here to help you.

If you have had background knowledge, I think that you have visited the wrong website. You can learn more about keywords research efficiency, which GTV SEO applied now.

This post will help you understand what are SEO keywords, how to research SEO keywords, and build strong background knowledge about SEO. Besides, I will give you some other related skills that you can apply for the best SEO content.

Let’s start.

What are SEO keywords?

SEO keywords are words or compound words inside the website, which describe the website’s content. They are chains that are very important to help bots of search machines and customers can easily to find and understand the website’s content. Through them, the website can improve its rank on the search result page.

When people search Google the word “man basketball shoes”, Google will try to understand the title and purpose of customers. Therefore, Google gives a list of websites related to that title.

If your website uses the correct words that customers search, a part of the word (such as “basketball shoes”) or relevant word (like man shoes, Adidas, top basketball shoes), Google will show up your page first.

What is optimizing the keyword?

Optimizing the keyword is a tip and the most important step that results in the website’s rank in the search machine. It includes a lot of stages to bring keywords to hit the top of search machines.

What is the Organic Search?

Organic Search is the natural search behavior of customers on the search engine to find a fixed result. Organic Search does not include paid search results.

Organic search mentions Google algorithm results to satisfy the demands of customers.

Organic search accounts for 94.95 percent all of traffic searches and 35.21 percent of total traffic, which means only 1.97 percent of total traffic comes from customers directly clicking paid advertisements. These advertisements contain above-the-fold content show-up content in the view of customers.

Therefore, determining the target keyword is not only efficient but also saves cost.

You only get ROI when you know exactly the target keyword list.

91.5 percent traffic searches come from the top of search result pages, including top 3 result account for 61.5 percent click and the top 1 account for 32.5 percent. If you can not get the top 10 on the search results, you will have a little bit of traffic.

Do you admit that you will also never click on page 2 on the SERP.

Good SEO help:

• Increase the traffic and the rank on the SERP
• Bring more Conversion, Engagement better.
• Enhance the Brand awareness level

According to the recent survey of marketing professionals: 48 percent of participants choose Keyword Research becoming one of the most strategies efficient SEO, it helps to decide the rank of the website. It ranks behind the “relevant content creation”.

In other words, the important element than the right keywords is to write on the website what customers want to see.

And the important content is to provide real value for readers.

Why optimize the keyword is very important?

SEO marketing is called a “variation” website to Google like and rank it higher than others. It is an essential factor leading to the success of the company. In fact, keywords play a huge role in SEO, the efficient keyword will bring high ROI levels.

Customers can access your page in many ways, including:

• Referral
• Social media
• Direct traffic (text your URL or click bookmark link, even search keyword attach your brand name)

However, for online shopping, organic search accounts for 38.98 percent (the highest traffic). It is higher than direct traffic (35.88 percent), referral (19.34 percent), and social (3.91 percent).

Through these numbers above, you can see the importance of SEO. Therefore the specific strategy will become necessary for your company.

What SEO keywords should be explored?

Depend on the keywords you want to aim for. There are some keywords that are not high scores or related to products that will be efficient.

Instead, let’s understand the kind of keywords and use them to provide customers with the content that they demand.

Let’s introduce some kinds of keywords.

Some kinds of basic keywords

Based on the meaning of keywords, there are 3 kinds of keywords you have to pay attention:

Transactional Keyword

The transactional keyword is the keyword that customers texted when buying products or services. All the keywords in “Quan ao” is a transactional keyword. They can be general keywords (like “dam vay”) or small-scale keywords “damvaydutiecsizelontaiTPHCM)

Transactional user queries are more likely to convert better. However, its level of competition is fierce.

Therefore, finding a good Long-Tail Keyword with low competition is important.

• Some words that help you target keywords more effectively include: Adjectives (best, promotion, red)
• Brand name (Nike shoes)
• Specific product description (men’s basketball shoes)

Don’t try to compete with products or brands that you don’t sell. This does more harm than good.

Informational Keyword

Informational Keyword is a keyword that users use when they want to know new information. They often contain question words such as “what” and “how”.

For example, “Vietnamese history” is an informational keyword.

These keywords help increase credibility and brand awareness by sharing expertise with people.

However, informational keywords can also create conversions. Because people often search for information by topic before buying related products.

With informational keywords, you must avoid writing product PR posts. At this point, users only want to see trustworthy and well-organized posts.

You should add CTAs and product ads where appropriate, but the post needs to bring valuable information, not a PR post.

Navigational Keyword

Navigational keywords are keywords that users use to get to a particular page or website because they don’t remember the exact URL or don’t want to type it all out.

For example: “Microsoft Home” or “GTVSEO”.

Optimizing rankings for your page’s navigation keywords is very important. But if it is someone else’s keyword, it will be a waste.

For example, users search for “Microsoft Home”. They will not click on Apple or Debian Linux even though these two names also appear on the SERP.

The important factors of SEO keywords

The average monthly searches

The name Average Monthly Search says it all. The higher this number, the more people search for this keyword each month. And the potential traffic to your website also increases, thereby contributing to increasing your website rankings for that keyword.

However, this number is not all. “What is a keyword” – it is a Long-Tail keyword, which means it easily meets people’s search standards.

Example: The word “keyword” has a much higher average monthly search volume but it is too general. Therefore, it cannot become the target keyword.

Keyword competition

Keyword competition is exactly keyword competition. Competition here refers to how many advertisers “bid” for a keyword (paying to appear in the ad results at the top of the search page).

Those keywords that compete in paid search definitely compete in organic search. Simply because you don’t need to pay for organic search. Therefore, you are also more difficult to compete for rankings. There are 3 ways to help you measure this difficulty.

2 ways to evaluate the keyword difficulty

Use the Keyword Planner of Google AdWords Keyword to find out the number of keyword searches, the higher the number of searches, the higher the difficulty.

Use keyword efficiency index – KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index). Accordingly, KEI = (Number of Searches)^2 / Number of pages competing for that keyword.

Suggested Bid and CPC

The suggested bid is the average cost-per-click (CPC) – the price an advertiser typically pays each time someone clicks on a particular keyword.

Typically, words with high CPC are more valuable to the business. So you can use this material to consider choosing the right keywords.

Note: I only recommend that you CONSIDER these factors to choose. That is not the core factor to decide to choose keywords.

Other factors affecting keyword choice

There are some keywords when looking at the data that shows that this is a good keyword to get to the top, but the results for that keyword are not related to the topic or harder to rank than we thought.

Therefore, to find SEO keywords, you can consider other factors. Such as:

• What do customers want?
• What are your competitors’ target keywords?
• How is the quality of page 1 of search results?

If you see results on Google and think you can do better, that keyword will be easier to rank for.

SEO keyword research process overview

Keyword research process overview

Google has secret algorithms for ranking websites. These algorithms are also constantly being updated in a more complex direction.

For the in-depth keyword research post, I will go into 3 important parts:

• Guide to Google Keyword Research & Deployment Taxonomy
• 4 Ways to research keywords for an existing website
• Content implementation plan

You can bookmark the page to spend some time learning. Here I will just outline an overview keyword research process in 5 steps for you to easily understand.

• Step 1: Determine the main keyword (Parent Keyword) – based on the topic of the post. You need to define keywords that you will implement throughout the content
• Step 2: Research the subkeywords. This is when you should use the support tool
• Step 3: Check the combination of key terms and long tail keywords in each group. To be able to increase the variety of keywords, unique content and still ensure a high conversion rate
• Step 4: See how competitors rank for these keywords. From there, select a list of keywords to compete with
• Step 5: Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to trim down your keyword list.

That’s it, you have a list of keywords to implement a content strategy. But you’re wondering about the support tool I talked about in step 2, right? I will explain right here.

Keyword value research tool

How much value can one keyword bring to your website?

The following tools I recommend will help you answer the above question:

Moz Keyword Explorer – Enter keywords into Keyword Explorer and get information like Search Volume and SERP Features are ranking for that words. Tool to support keyword research using Clickstream Data. Bonus! Keyword Explorer’s “Difficulty” score can also help you narrow down your keyword options to the words most likely to rank for. The higher the difficulty, the harder to rank for that words.

Google Keyword Planner – Google’s most commonly used AdWords keyword planner for SEO keyword research. However, Google Keyword Planner restricts Data Search Volume by grouping keywords together into large Search Volume groups. To learn more, check out Keyword Research: Effective Keyword Research Methods 2021.

Google Trends – Google’s Keyword Trend Updater is great for finding seasonal keyword fluctuations. For example, “fun Halloween costume ideas” will peak in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

AnswerThePublic – A free tool that gathers frequently searched questions around a specific keyword. Bonus! You can use this tool with another free tool, Keywords Everywhere, to prioritize ATP recommendations by the search volume.

SpyFu Keyword Research Tool – Provides some really neat competitive keyword data.

Most keyword research tools (SEMrush or Ahrefs, etc.) can search for keywords related to the main keyword you want. As a result, you can improve the SEO status of your website by finding additional keywords to your blog post or target keywords in the future.

However, these figures are just numbers.

Each tool has its own features and ways of processing data. Therefore, it is best to combine multiple tools to get the best effect. You can learn more details here.

Effectively use SEO keywords for content strategy

Keywords are not simply attached to your post, but you also have to help devise a reasonable SEO keyword planning strategy.

Let’s see how to plan and use SEO keywords to help your overall SEO strategy and content strategy work efficiency.

Note the keyword density

Keyword density is how often a keyword appears on a page compared to a percentage of all the words on that page. It is also a way of informing Google about the topic of the post.

If the main keyword only appears once in the whole post, it will not be effective. So if repeating the same keyword over and over again will help increase post rankings?

I am talking about inserting related keywords, not having to repeat the same keyword too many times is good. That is keyword stuffing.

Avoid keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a Black Hat SEO technique that many people use to increase their rankings by stuffing as many related keywords as possible.

In the past, post quality was not a big issue. Content can be just an article containing a list of keywords. At that time, Google was not smart enough to judge the quality. So black hat SEO can climb to high rankings just by posting poor quality content and using a few tricks.

There was a time when Google and Marketers had to compete with each other.

When Google gets better at recognizing languages, marketers can’t just post lists of keywords. However, they can still beat Google by using poor-quality articles with a certain keyword density.

Fortunately, this method no longer works efficiently and Google will immediately penalize spam websites with keyword stuffing.

You should insert reasonable keywords into the post (in the title as well as the headings). But keyword stuffing is no longer effective, even very risky.

In my opinion, the matters are the quality and readability of the post.

Note the quality of the content

For example, your website ranks 15 for the keyword “top men’s basketball shoes”. You decide to add more content that matches the user intent. The right content will push your page higher on the SERP and bring in more traffic.

On the other hand, if you rank high for a keyword but get few clicks then…

That is a sign that your content is not providing value.

Or your company sells clothes to students. You want to introduce users and raise fashion brand awareness. So, you decide to target “college fashion trends” and other keywords related to “college fashion”.

After a few months, you reached rank 5 for the above keyword and reached the top of Google for a few related keywords.

If the traffic doesn’t improve, or the user doesn’t stay on your page after clicking on the post, you are wasting effort.

Reason

The problem may be that your clothes are just casual fashion instead of high fashion. Keywords may lack this element. Because your market is not only identified by the word “college” but also the word “clothing”. Users can use keywords according to the following factors:

• Area: clothes in Hanoi, clothes in Ho Chi Minh City
• Season: summer fashion trends
• Price: cheap fashion clothes
• Hobbies: clothes for cute girls
• Material: chiffon shirt
• Brand: Viet Tien shirt

The problem may also exist in the content itself. The post is not attractive enough, headlines are not attractive. Testing a keyword can’t provide much information. But look at the whole set of seo keywords – dozens, hundreds of keywords affect your page metrics.

For example:

• Which page leads the user to?
• How long do they stay?
• Convert percentage?

This can help you build better content strategies to increase traffic and users to stay on your website longer.

Long-tail Keyword: can’t be ignored

Keyword conversion rate based on word count

The following chart will show you the performance of long-tail keywords when compared in terms of Competitive – competitiveness and Conversion – a conversion rate of Single Word Phrases (Single Keyword), 2-3 Word Phrases (short keywords), and 4+ Word Phrases (Long Keywords).

The more content satisfies a specific customer interest, the more effective it is.

Keywords too – the closer to the customer’s interest is better.

If you’re like the clothing company in the example above, you should review your existing Long-Tail Keywords. If the keyword “college fashion trends” is not attractive enough, the phrase “fashion trends” is still effective. You can exploit more options. For example: “Fashion trends in Ho Chi Minh City”.

The post you are reading is also a great example of how to use long-tail keywords effectively. I write this post to share the basic knowledge of SEO and keywords for businesses, even those who want to hire a content team for Digital Marketing.

I also wanted to appeal to people outside of marketing. So in the title, I put “What are keywords”. This is the Long-Tail Keyword that people can type into Google when looking for basic information. On the other hand, Long-Tail Keyword helps to clarify user intent to search.

This has two advantages:

• Google will rank my website based on the searches of my target customers.
• Long-Tail Keyword in the title “What are keywords” helps users see posts that satisfy their query.

In the next section, I will talk more specifically about how to optimize keywords in the title.

You can see some more basic mistakes when it comes to Long-Tail Keyword.

Keyword SEO process overview

Besides the general SEO services that are widely applied today, keyword SEO services were also very popular. But with the inadequacies due to keyword stuffing and many other incomplete points, keyword SEO is no longer as popular as before.

Even so, I will still introduce you to the overview keyword SEO process for you to have more information. This process consists of 5 basic steps:

• Analyze and evaluate website: fields, topics, strengths, …
• Keyword research: choosing main keywords and related lists of keywords
• Build a content strategy with the selected list of keywords
• Implement SEO – optimize onpage, offpage website with list of keywords
• Monitor, test and evaluate for continuous strategy improvement

Keyword SEO services are no longer popular, but selecting a quality list of keywords is still an SEO-er’s top priority. Basically, the following ways can be mentioned to increase website rankings sustainably through keyword optimization.

Optimize keywords to increase website rank

Search engines not only look at the text in the post but also the code. When you search for a query, Google displays the title, URL, and profile description for each page through the meta description.

In many cases, Google also offers images, videos, and featured snippets.

Tag announcements to Google (Bing/Yahoo) the information will be provided to users in the post. And each type of tag is suitable for each type of keyword separately.

Title tag

The title tag is the bold text displayed in Google search results. They are also the title displayed on the top of the user’s browser.

The title tag should be short because Google will shortcut such titles to more than 50-70 characters. Preferably no more than 55-60 characters.

The title tag should contain the main keyword, but sometimes this is not possible because it will exceed the allowed number of characters.

This is the reason most marketers try to include keywords at the beginning of the title. So even if it is cut, the readers still understand what the topic of the post is. Unlike the name “title tag”, it is not exactly the title that appears at the top of the blog – this is called the Header Tag.

Header Tags

Header tag is used to mark the beginning of an article or the beginning of a section. The title of the blog post is the header tag <h1>. But it also has added <h2>, <h3> in case you want to split the page into small sections.

Each page should have exactly one tag <h1> containing the main keyword.

Many pages use titles similar to Title Tag and Header. There is a lot of controversy surrounding whether these 3 titles should be written the same or not.

In general, as long as both the Title and Header have keywords, describe the content accurately, and are attractive to the reader, it will be effective whether the same or not.

Meta Description

Optimize by setting the appropriate Meta Description

The Meta Description appears under the Title Tag on Google search results.

This section is 1-2 lines long to help introduce the basic content of the post. Meta Description should be short (usually under 155 characters) and written as interestingly as possible. Users will quickly view at the title and description, so you can insert keywords to attract readers. However, don’t overdo it.

You do not need to insert keywords for your entire post. I have shared the details of optimizing Meta Description in previous posts. You can review to understand this issue.

Optimize URLs with SEO keywords

A standard SEO URL needs the following 3 elements:

• Contains the main SEO keyword (with the highest search volume)
• Be brief, but get the whole idea (top 1 URLs typically have an average of 59 words).
• Related to the article content

Note: It is recommended to combine many SEO keywords with the same search intent into the same URL to be able to SEO a series of keywords at the same time.

Internal and External Links affect SEO

A link on a website is a link that takes users to another page/video/website/image when you click on it.

Internal Link – is a link that leads to another page on your own website. It can improve SEO and help users navigate the page, thereby purchasing products.

External Link also has the same effect in some cases. But usually in favor of the page is directed to. That’s why backlinks are so important in Content Marketing. You can see, I inserted Internal Links in GTV blogs as shown below:

Let’s see an example of the External Link of GTV:

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the part of the Hyperlink that contains the keyword you clicked on.

It’s best for links to use Anchor Text instead of an image. Because Text Link promotes SEO and is easy to understand.

Links can use exact keywords or not. Partially matched keywords or related keywords can also boost SEO and help users find your page.

For example, GTV uses Anchor Text “Overall SEO Services” as shown below:

There are still some other important factors that affect SEO

Keywords are important but not everything.

Good content remains one of the top priorities, and other factors that determine a website’s success include:

• Backlinks
• Website design
• User experience
• Photos and Media
• Technical SEO (how to build a website)

Besides, goals also play an important role in SEO strategy. Conversion optimization (like selling products or getting customers to sign up for a webinar) is different from optimizing for clicks.

Similarly, a company that owns an old, reputable, and well-ranked website will need a different content strategy than an online business with no reputation.

In general, Digital Marketing is the process of interacting with users. And keywords are just one of many tools that help you find and attract customers for your business.

Hopefully, the knowledge I share will help you know what SEO keywords are and how to optimize SEO keywords for your website. Comment below the post to share your thoughts!