How To Choose Keywords In Positioning? Effective Phrase Strategies From Semalt



Keywords in positioning not only reflect the names of products, services and the specificity of the offer. A good keyword strategy for positioning also takes into account the needs and intentions of users at every stage of building awareness about the product and making a purchase decision. 

And the final selection of phrases takes into account your financial capabilities and readiness in anticipation of the first positioning effects.

To understand better and better, how to proceed, we invite you to discover a step-by-step procedure through this content. As a bonus, we offer a free option to check the current status of your website

Moreover, before finishing this article, we will share with you the best tools for website promotion.

Keyword selection process

The effect of website positioning is to be sales, so a natural direction for people choosing phrases is to focus on describing the offer well with phrases. Therefore, the most popular phrases describing a product or service are included in the SEO strategy. 

This approach, however, does not include building reach among users who are just looking for possible solutions, have doubts, and need advice. Another difficulty is the high competition for phrases. Conducting optimization activities for phrases such as positioning, advertising on the Internet is difficult because all agencies around the world would like to be visible on these phrases. 

How to beat the competition? Difficult and may mean trying to outdo the number of phrases and the volume of the text. So consider enriching your keyword strategy and consider your users' intentions instead of using keyword popularity.

Keywords and user goals

When selecting keywords, we should analyze the goals of users searching for information on Google. A person who faces a problem and looks for a hint of a solution has a different goal. A person who enters the name of a specific product into Google has a different goal. It is worth building a keyword base for the campaign in such a way as to optimize the website for users who pursue various intentions on Google.

This can be easily visualized by applying given sentence types at different stages of the customer journey on Google and on the website. To do this, you need to effectively distinguish your users in order to categorize them.

Here are the steps to follow to effectively achieve this goal:

1. Seeking a solution

The user is often unaware of the product or service. His need is to find a solution to his problem. So he looks for advice, hints, information, in short, he wants to get knowledge on a given topic. For this purpose, he will search using phrases that are structured like questions: how, what is it, why.

Examples of phrases at this stage include: how to arrange a small kitchen, what is Internet marketing, why they hurt their backs, what to wear for the first communion, etc. 

A user looking for a solution most often expects pages with specific information. If you want to meet his needs, take care of valuable and rich content in the form of a blog or a guide. The phrases that should be used when targeting content to this group can be found in good SEO tools:
  • In Senu to in the "questions" tab;
  • In SEMSTORM, in the "question generator" tab;
  • In Ahrefs in Keyword Explorer under Questions;
  • In Surfer, in the Keyword Research tab in Questions.
You can even use the questions generated by the tools as article titles.

2. User aware of the solution

The stage of building user awareness is the time when he begins to understand what product or service he needs. He doesn't know about specific products yet, but he knows roughly what to look for. Keywords that correspond to its goals are all phrases that describe product categories, products, services, and brands.

Examples of phrases at this stage include: women's running shoes, 70l tourist backpack, business card printing, English course for beginners, etc.

The user knows what product/service he needs but is not tied to a specific brand, searches within a product category, and compares similar products from different brands and price categories. It is therefore important to present the offer attractively and to optimize both pages and product categories for phrases with the name of the product and brand.

At this stage, we can also deal with a user who is well acquainted with a specific brand and will search within its offer. That is why brand phrases and strengthening the popularity of a brand or store name on Google are so important. Such a user may be a returning customer, purchasing the same product, or purchasing another product of the same brand.

3. A user looking for feedback

Online shopping is in many aspects no different from stationary sales. In both cases, the customer has a lot of doubts and needs confirmation that what he has chosen is the best possible solution at a certain price. Before making a purchase, he searches for opinions, reviews, and product comparisons.

To answer such a user's goal, it is worth including phrases such as: product name + opinions, product category name + best / good / recommended, product name vs. product name + what to choose / which is better, etc. For example Samsung vs. iphone what to choose. 

4. Converting user

We believe that the closest to making a purchase are users who search for products and services by entering their names in Google along with the following: price, cheap, store name, location, etc. 

Such users are difficult to convert, so if you want to establish new relationships, you should go back to the first step and start by reaching unsuspecting users. Optimizing for the conversion is very important, but has a low reach, so consider enriching your keyword strategy with phrases from the previous steps as well.

To sum up this stage - an effective keyword strategy allows you to reach various users - from those who require advice to those who are determined to buy. It is worth taking care of all user groups, because with each stage the group of users is smaller and smaller, which is usually depicted in the form of a funnel, the narrowest part of which corresponds to the conversion stage.

Keywords and competition

The keyword strategy for positioning involves analyzing your competitors' words. By competition, we mean pages that are visible in the top 10 for the phrases we choose. Since they are well-positioned, you can assume that they may have well-chosen phrases. It is worth checking whether the prepared list of phrases is missing something that the competition has. It's very simple - the times when the phrases of competitors were checked manually are forgotten. Most good SEO tools will allow you to automatically analyze your competitors' phrases.

For example, Semalt has tools that will return a report that will show which phrases you have in common with the contest, which phrases you have that the contest does not have, which phrases the contest has and which you do not have. 

Also, you will receive information about the page positions for these phrases.

Another interesting list will be generated by the Surfer. It allows you to analyze the content of a specific subpage in comparison with a similar subpage from the competition. Thanks to this, we learn, based on the analyzed competition, how many times it is worth adding individual keywords in the text and the headings. We receive a list of phrases along with an assessment of whether we have enough of them and what action we should take (add / remove phrases).

Keyword competitiveness

When building an SEO phrase strategy, it is worth paying attention to the competitiveness of keywords. We will get to know her in tools, among others free Ubersuggest or paid - Ahrefs. In various tools, it is called a little differently, e.g. as SEO Difficulty, but it means the same - how difficult it is to position a page for a given phrase. Typically, short phrases that can be assigned to the first stage of the customer journey are the most competitive. Whereas long phrases, the so-called long-tail phrases are less competitive, and at the same time indicate a converting user. This is a big simplification and each phrase should be analyzed individually, using tools and observation of effects.

Why take into account the competitiveness of phrases when building a keyword strategy? The high competitiveness of the phrase promises a lot of work, so a large budget will be needed. If at this point in the company's development, the client does not have a large budget, it is worth considering other, less competitive phrases. Low competitiveness does not mean that the phrases are not valuable and do not bring sales. It means that few companies and websites have so far decided to optimize them.

Niche phrases are an opportunity in competitive industries. Where is the line between a niche phrase and a phrase that no one will use? Again, tools that will show the average monthly number of searches will help us. It's good to know that the popular Keyword Planner provides data on paid search results. It is better to check this indicator, for example, in Senuto or Ahrefsa. Niche phrases allow you to target SEO activities, as opposed to general phrases that build reach. What's more, niche phrases are easier to position. 

Here you can find the accusation that positioning for niche phrases is a scam because it does not require much effort. However, please note that these types of phrases complement your keyword strategy, not the basis of your actions. Usually, we use such phrases at the stage of building a company blog or when we want to focus on a narrow part of the offer.

Summary

Creating a keyword strategy is a multi-stage process that involves both an in-depth analysis of user needs and an analysis of the competition. 

Best tools like AutoSEO and FullSEO are used for the strategy, but business knowledge is equally important. In the case of cooperation with an agency, it is therefore important to provide information about the behavior and preferences of existing customers. Although the phrase strategy for positioning is developed at the beginning, in the course of positioning it is permissible to modify the selected phrases according to the new customer needs.

From all of the above, it is obvious that choosing the best ones for your niche will not be a piece of cake. 

The basis for success will be built around a better strategy and the consideration of all available options to easily achieve your goal. 

This is the main reason for the existence of agencies such as Semalt, which will help you in a short period of time to effectively promote your brand and get you to the top of the search results of search engines such as Google.

Now you know the whole process to follow from A to Z to promote your business and take full advantage of it. Nevertheless, if you still have questions, do not hesitate to contact our team of experts available 24/7 to provide you with the necessary support and guidance.

We will be more than happy to read your comments on how this content has been useful to you.

Nevertheless, if you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our blog.