How to Select the Right Keywords for a Successful SEO Campaign

When using SEO to drive traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure that you use the right keywords that will improve your ranking organically. While this can be difficult for some more competitive spaces, the right keywords ensure that you are representing your business properly and using the terms that will get you found when people are looking for your services. Blue Fire Media offers some tips for choosing the right words that will get your business found and drive more traffic to your website.

Choose Long-Tail Keywords Whenever Possible

The more specific you can be with your keywords, the better your chances of finding people who are looking for your specific services. This means choosing what are called “long-tail keywords” when creating content and meta tags on your website. Quite simply, a long-tail keyword is a group of 2 to 4 words that identify a specific product or service that your company provides. Using a single word for SEO is okay, but it can be extremely competitive.

For example, think of the word, furniture. There are number of things that furniture can mean. There’s living room furniture, dining room furniture, baby furniture, patio furniture, wicker furniture, etc. By just focusing on the word furniture, you are tagging your website in an extremely large, competitive market and doing yourself a disservice. But look at all those types of furniture we just listed. All of those are long-tail keywords. They tell search engine algorithms the specific type of furniture you sell. This helps people looking for a specific type of furniture find you more easily. Below are some other examples of using long-tail keywords to specify your products and services:

• “Pizza Delivery” instead of just “Pizza”
• “Emergency Plumber” instead of just “Plumber”
• “OSHA Employee Training” instead of “Training”
• “Cabinet Painting” instead of “Painting”

In each of the instances above, we have narrowed our focus from a much broader, ambiguous single word. This ensures that the customers looking for those specific services have a much better chance of finding your business than if you had just used the single, broad term.

You also want to use terminology that is accessible to the people who are looking for your services. For example, there are any number of problems that someone may have with their computer – bad battery, hard drive failure, WiFi issues, etc. While some people may know what is wrong with their computer, as vast majority will not. In the case of a computer repair shop, it is not a bad idea to list some specific issues, but at the end of the day, most people will just type in “computer repair” when looking for a company to help with computer issues. This increases accessibility for computer users out there who don’t know much about computers but still need your help getting their systems to work again.

At Blue Fire Media, our team will work with you throughout the design of your responsive website to ensure that you are focusing the content on terminology that will help customers find you. Contact us for more information about our responsive web design and search engine optimization services.