Finding the perfect keywords for your site can be a complex task

Spending the time with the right tools can make your job a lot easier and the good news is these tools are free and easy to use. When you define the primary keywords you want to rank for on your website it acts as a guide to keep all your content focused around those keywords. Having consistent content will help the overall SEO ranking of your website.

How to decide your what keywords to use?

Keywords are the words you want to rank for on search engines. When a user is looking for something they typically type a phase or a set of keywords to find information on search engines. If you sell sports memorabilia such as baseball cards of player jersey’s you’ll want to pick a set of keywords around those terms such as “Basketball jersey” or “Professional Basketball Player Jersey” those should be candidates for your keywords.

Long Tail or Expanded Keywords

Long tail or expanded keywords are more specific keywords that relate to your primary set of keywords. To expand upon our example above a set of expanded keywords might look something like “Michael Jordan Jersey” or “Bo Jackson Baseball cards” as you can see they’re more specific results but are related to your primary keywords for sports memorabilia

Tools for keyword research

One of the more popular tools is Uber Suggest you simply put a website similar to yours or type in a keyword and it will provide you with a large amount of potential keywords, how popular they are and how difficult the competition is for those keywords.

My personal favorite is to use google’s search engine and their suggestions tool. To use this tool head over to google.com and simply start typing a keyword. you’ll notice the dropdown will provide a list of suggestions based on the keyword you start typing. This is a pretty simple hack to get keywords based on what people are searching for and is good for spotting trends.

Once you have a list of keywords put them in a spreadsheet and from there you can make a list of content you want to create based on those keywords. The more content you create the better change your site has to rank well organically. I like to write 20 or 30 subjects for potential articles I could write based on each keywords. From there I can decide which ones to write or possible hire a freelance writer to work on these articles.