Boost your SEO to maximize your chances of getting found online! You’ve likely heard that keywords are critically important to the content on your site, blog, and URL. On the other hand, if you use certain keywords or too many of them they can be a hindrance to your rankings.

Although keywords might not be the most noticeable factor, they do play an important role in helping small businesses get found online. So let’s get right into it by breaking down the long and short (tail) of it.

Do Your Own Keyword Research

Keyword research is a never-ending process that needs to be worked into your marketing strategy and should be based on how you do business and what industry you’re in. Including keywords that are specific to your business and industry will help to ensure that the right customers are being driven to your door rather than just any customer. We want to increase our customer base, but we don’t want to target consumers who won’t benefit from our product.

Using the Right Keywords

Searching for short tail keywords might seem appealing because they’re searched more often than long-tail keywords. However they’re also a lot more competitive. Writing for a smaller business means you don’t want to enter into a field dominated by bigger brands with deeper pockets.

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, may not be as frequently typed into a search engine—think, “Egg” vs. “Poached Egg with Avocado and Bechemel”. By including more long-tail keywords into the content on your page, you’ll attract a larger number of customers who are likely to search for any combination of those long-tail keywords.

Location based keywords are keywords that directly relate to the physical location of your business. For example, if your business is a restaurant in a popular neighborhood in Cape Coral, FL, like Sandoval or Pelican, you’ll want to mention the name of that specific neighborhood. Your customers are probably searching for things like “restaurant near Pelican” or “restaurant near me”. This can help you target people near your business rather than farther away.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

It is a taboo for businesses to use a wide range of keywords in order to mislead customers who may not find value in their services. Have you ever heard the saying ‘less is more’? Less “generic” marketing and better content means higher conversion rates. Content should ideally contain keywords in a natural way. But for those who want to keep their content keyword-optimized, you will need to use strategies that don’t make it look forced. One strategy is to repeat your keywords occasionally and randomly through a sentence, paragraph or article.

If you’ve made it this far, then hopefully you’ve learned a thing or two about SEO that can help everyone with their content marketing and advertising efforts.