The issue of keyword selection for SEO contracts can be highly controversial. Despite the growing popularity of solutions focused on overall website visibility—without specifying specific keywords and paying for results—there's no shortage of clients who are happy with focusing on specific keywords.
The question then arises: which keywords should you choose to most effectively promote your website? Keyword selection will then be the foundation of your collaboration.
Who chooses keywords for positioning?
As we pointed out in the introduction to this article, despite the growing trend of website positioning focused on increasing overall visibility, without focusing on specific keywords, positioning for specific phrases, combined with their regular, daily monitoring, is still important.
That's why the selection of keywords included in the SEO contract is so important. We know from experience that keyword results and the presence of keywords in the top 10 are one of the key factors in assessing client satisfaction with SEO services, alongside increased visibility and website traffic.
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Our clients have unique knowledge about which parts of their product range are crucial to their business, what questions people are asking about their products, what phrases they use, and so on. This information is very useful in developing keyword sets. Therefore, in-depth customer interviews regarding keyword expectations are crucial.
A good keyword set is a combination of the knowledge of the client and the account manager. The account manager is the person who knows their business best, what generates the most money, what is an important and profitable niche worth promoting, which products will soon disappear from the offer and, as such, are not worth advertising, etc.
A Verseo account manager is a specialist who has an overview of search engine trends, has access to tools dedicated to keyword selection, knows from experience what works in promotion, and monitors changes in the Google search engine (e.g., local positioning).
For this reason, it is worth cooperating with each other when selecting keywords – for the common good, it is not worth underestimating the knowledge of both the client and the account manager.
What characterizes a good set of keywords?
Despite the specific nature of each SEO website and the unique set of keywords selected for promotion, there are a number of common characteristics that characterize well-chosen keywords. We'll outline them in this section:
- Matching keywords to the offer visible on the website – this is related to the structure of the Google search engine itself, which relies on the content of the websites to match the results displayed in the search engine.
In short: if something doesn't appear literally on a website (this primarily applies to content and relevant meta tags), Google's search engine spiders are unable to match the page to the search query – keyword. Therefore, it's impossible to effectively position for phrases that aren't present on the page or "just in case" (unless the website includes a subpage announcing the arrival of a new product or service – a kind of pre-launch presentation). For the same reason, it's also impossible to effectively position for phrases related to competitors (leaving aside the ethical implications of such a situation).
An interesting case related to the selection of phrases is a situation in which some customers searching for a given product or service use an incorrect term – a colloquial one, not a professional one, with a spelling error, etc. In the distant past of SEO, keyword sets for positioning included keywords with common spelling errors, but today, in the Polish version, Google is good at understanding the intentions of the user and correcting spelling errors, and there is no need to promote, for example, also "makeup brushes" – "makeup brushes" is completely sufficient.
The situation is somewhat different when it comes to synonyms, colloquial names, etc., which are often considered incorrect from an industry perspective, and clients themselves don't want them on their websites due to their "unprofessional" nature (even though they want to promote them effectively). Their Google robots don't yet readily match the correct terminology.
In such a situation, a compromise solution is, for example, to use these colloquial terms in blog texts rather than on product category subpages. The blog post format allows for greater flexibility and clarification of the relationship between colloquial and professional terminology. This is a compromise, though not ideal, solution. However, it allows for a meaningful connection between the website and the desired keywords. - Varying keyword lengths – general, specific and long-tail phrases. We have already covered the topic of long-tail phrases on our blog., we also have a video on the Verseo YouTube channel dedicated to this topic. In this post, we also want to present the trend regarding the length of phrases entered into search engines in more detail. The relationship between shorter and longer phrases clearly indicates a reversal of the "one-word" trend.
- Matching phrases to business locations This is particularly important for local service businesses. City names appearing in keywords must correspond to the actual location of the company (headquarters, branch, store, stationary location, etc. – anything with a physical address). Positioning for a location other than yours will not be effective. Due to Google's preference for matching displayed results to their location, it's definitely worth including your physical address on your website, even if the service is largely provided remotely or at the company's clients' premises.
- Linking phrases to each other If you decide to position your website for related keywords (forming a family), you can expect better results than with several unrelated keywords. It's even better to focus on several groups of keywords that refer to different elements of your offer, rather than on unrelated keywords. When planning a keyword set, it's worth consulting with a keyword consultant, who, based on their experience, will recommend the right set of keywords to support the positioning process and properly present the company's offerings.
- Competitiveness of phrases and the speed of entering the top 10 search engine results – It's worth focusing on a set of keywords that will ensure your website's visibility from the very first stage of the SEO process. For this reason, it's also a good idea to include less competitive keywords, which will reach the top 10 search results more quickly and ensure visibility and traffic to your website at an earlier stage of the SEO process. Therefore, it's not worth focusing solely on highly competitive keywords, which will take longer to produce results, and therefore, the associated benefits.
What do people type into search engines?
Contrary to popular belief, generic keywords aren't the most popular or frequently entered. Research shows that over 80% of keywords entered into search engines consist of two or more keywords.
It should be noted that these more complex long-tail phrases are less likely to be described as separate queries (which is a logical consequence of their greater diversity), but overall they constitute the majority of phrases that are entered into the search engine.
Therefore, it's crucial to properly interpret the results regarding the keywords that lead potential customers to a given website. Long-tail phrases won't be at the top of such results, but that doesn't mean they should be abandoned.
There is also the issue of a potential customer's readiness to buy – a person who enters a more precise phrase is closer to adding a product to the cart than one who searches for general terms.
General or specific keywords?
In this case, much may depend on the budget allocated for SEO services. The budget largely determines the planned and feasible activities. Therefore, it's crucial to determine from the outset the amount that can be allocated monthly for SEO.
Our clients sometimes suggest using the most general keyword phrases possible, believing that such phrases will attract the most potential customers. It's best to use general and highly diverse (unrelated) phrases in small quantities, as this will be cheaper. A set of keywords like "windows," "doors," "gates," "drives," "blinds"—this is a recipe for ineffective SEO.
For a small budget, it's better to focus on diverse keywords, including those that will yield results and gain visibility more quickly, and therefore reveal their potential for attracting customers more quickly. We're talking about a small budget because it imposes the greatest limitations on positioning and keyword selection.
It's also worth realizing that the term "small budget" is relative, and a small amount might be different for a local business in a small town than for an online store. Therefore, sometimes it's important to realize that a certain amount may be too small to conduct effective SEO activities.
In this situation, we inform our potential clients of this, not wanting to expose them to unnecessary and unprofitable expenses. Similarly, we inform our clients before signing a contract that a given website is extremely unsuitable for SEO and should be updated before an SEO specialist can begin working on it.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- The appropriate selection of keywords is the foundation of effective positioning and is crucial for customer satisfaction with the results of cooperation.
- Effective keyword selection requires close cooperation and a combination of the client's business knowledge with the analytical experience of the project manager.
- A good set of keywords should be precisely matched to the website content, differentiated in terms of the popularity of phrases, and take into account the business location and thematic connections between phrases.
- Most search queries are precise, long-tail phrases that are more effective at attracting customers who are determined to make a purchase and allow for better budget utilization than risky, general phrases.
