If you want to get any kind of traffic to your website or blog, you need to use keyword phrases in your content.
Is this the only way to get traffic?
No, but it is the best free way to attract visitors to your site.
With a free or paid keyword tool, you’ll type in the word you want to target and see what results show up. Typically, you’ll end up with a long list of keyword phrases that you can use for your content. At first glance, this list looks great, but are all these phrases really going to produce the results you want?
No.
The next step in your keyword research education is to learn about long-tail keywords and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. These are two additional elements to keyword research that you need to be aware of in order to get maximum results from your efforts. This knowledge alone can put you miles above your less informed competition.
Long tail keywords
While conducting your marketing research online, you will often come across discussions of long-tail keywords. Ok, so what are they?
Long tail means, not as popular or ripe fruit. Basically, some keyword phrases are more popular than others. The most popular phrases naturally produce the most searches and therefore the potential for higher traffic numbers. However, due to their popularity, every Tom, Joe, and Mary will use them in their content.
This means that the competition to rank well in the search engines for the most popular keyword phrases will be pretty tough. So what’s an eager internet marketer to do?
Go for the low hanging fruit, of course. Yes, this means you’ll be giving up a lot of potential traffic, but your chances of ranking in the top 20 for those phrases are pretty slim to begin with, so why not give yourself a better edge?
You can drastically increase your chances of ranking in the top 20 results by using long tail keywords.
This is how to search for these gems:
Let’s use the keyword – mortgage.
Go to your keyword tool and type – mortgage. You get the following results:
Mortgage rates = 9617 searches per day
Home mortgage – 1798 searches per day
Mortgage how much can I borrow = 298 searches per day
How low can 30-year fixed mortgage interest rates get = 19 searches per day?
Well, this is how you will analyze your results and quickly decide if these keyword phrases are good options or not.
Go to Google and do a search for each of the keyword phrases above; be sure to put them in quotes, ie “mortgage rates.”
By using quotes, you’ll get an accurate picture of how many sites are using the exact same keyword phrases. The fewer sites that use these phrases, the better your chances of ranking in the top level of search engine results.
These are the results of our Google search:
“Mortgage Rates” = 51,300,000 Competitor Pages
“Home Mortgage” = 43,300,000 competing pages
“Mortgage how much can I borrow” = 16,500 competing pages
“How low can 30-year fixed mortgage interest rates get?” = 0 competing pages
Mortgage Rates and Home Mortgage receives thousands of searches per day, but look at your competition. Wow. There’s just no way you’re going to get a good ranking on those two sentences. The best thing you can do is forget about them. Make your way down the line to find some ripe fruits.
Ideally, you want to find phrases that have fewer than 50,000 competing pages.
Mortgage How Much Can I Borrow has 298 searches per day and only 16,500 competing pages.
How Low Can 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates Get has 19 searches per day and zero competing pages.
If your niche is mortgage and you put these two great phrases on your site, you will be in a prime position to rank well. You might get less traffic for these, but these folks are just as hungry for information as all of the higher-traffic people. Using long tail keywords can result in getting highly targeted traffic to your site.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords
LSI is something fairly new on the scene. Google and other search engines now take LSI into account when ranking web pages, so this is something you should be aware of.
LSI is basically a set of related keywords that spread throughout the content of your web page, or article, in a completely natural way. These words tell search engines that your content has a high relevance value to people looking for certain information.
Kwbrows.com is a good free tool that can help you find LSI keywords.
Let’s look up some LSI keywords for – mortgage.
Here are the results:
FHA, home loan, second mortgage, mortgage broker, mortgages, interest, calculator, bank.
Using these words in all of your content, in addition to regular keywords, can result in higher search engine rankings for your website pages.