Keywords 101: How to Increase Your Organic Search Traffic

Whenever you search online, you type text into a search bar. Through this process, Google – or whichever search engine you’re employing – uses your input to find websites with similar content.

The words that Google uses to place websites on the search results are known as keywords. Savvy digital marketers angle to end up on the first page of search results through keyword optimization, which is the process of fine tuning a website to better show up in organic search. There are a variety of strategies marketers utilize for keyword optimization–selecting smart keywords, using keywords throughout page content, and creating swiftly loading pages. Here’s how you can implement them for your website.

Choosing the Right Keyword(s)

When you think of the term “keyword,” it can be somewhat misleading. Page keywords can be up to a sentence long. Although some keywords are one or two words, it’s often better to try and rank for longer phrases, known as long-tail keywords.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is competition: shorter, more generic keywords have more sites vying for the top ranking. This means you would need to beat many, many websites just to get on the front page of search results. Most people searching won’t look past the front page, so be sure to keep this in mind when devising keywords.

Furthermore, long-tail keywords attract more qualified leads than broader keywords. Think about it this way: if you sell luxury resorts in the Caribbean, what kinds of page titles are going to attract your ideal customers: Your Beach Vacation or The Top Caribbean Resorts for a Luxury Experience?

Visitors searching for a beach vacation could be looking for something completely outside of your niche. Travelers searching for a trip to an Italian beach certainly wouldn’t be interested your services. Ranking for luxury Caribbean resorts, however, will attract leads to your site who are already intrigued by your niche, and therefore more likely to book with you.

On-Page Optimization

Once you’ve chosen the perfect keywords for your page, you need to sprinkle them throughout for search engines to “understand” what your page is about. Your keyword(s) should be in the title of your page and show up in subheadings if appropriate. Prioritize readability when thinking about where in your article or blog post to place keywords. Overdoing it will hurt your search placement as well as irritate or confuse your site visitors.

When setting up the page title, meta description, and slug for your website, you should include your keywords. These are different technical elements that websites have to aid browsers in communicating with Internet users, and each one serves an important role in expressing what your website is about.

A meta description is the little blurb of text that shows up underneath the clickable link in search results. Clickable text refers to the page title, while that page title will also show up in your browser tab when you’re on the page. And the slug is the little bit of text that occurs in the URL after the website’s domain name and .com.

For the above page, the keyword would be “FAQ”. With that in mind, if a marketer wants their site to show up when people search for “FAQ,” the title, meta description, and slug should all include “FAQ.” Even better, your website builder should allow you to edit all these things–try searching their documentation to find out how you’re supposed to do it.

Technical Optimization

Loading speed is another factor that determines where your website will place in search engine rankings. There are a variety of free tools online to see if your website meets loading speed benchmarks. If it doesn’t, you may have to troubleshoot a little bit. Slow websites can be caused by many things, but bad web hosting and uncompressed images are two common culprits. If you’re having any trouble, make sure all your images are compressed to speed up your page.

Keywords are an effective way to increase your marketing reach without spending any money on advertising. However, they do take work. Don’t be alarmed if your new page doesn’t rank right away, as it takes time for websites to build enough domain authority before search engines will rank them. Working on improving your travel agency website’s keyword optimization is a great way to increase the number of qualified leads you receive.