Definition Keywords

Any sustainable natural search engine optimization strategy first involves a great deal of work on the keywords that best define your professional activity or the theme of your site. And with good reason, because search engines, whether Google, Qwant or Bing, base their results largely on the keywords contained in a page. And to get the best possible ranking, it’s not enough to stuff the page full of keywords.

Generic, brand and long tail, what is a keyword in seo?

The keyword or key expression is the basis of any SEO optimization of the site itself (on-site referencing).
Every day, billions of pages are published, modified or updated. These pages normally contain high-quality editorial content that enables them to be displayed according to the terms typed in by web or mobile users in their favorite search engine. These are known as queries.

The work of SEO.fr’s natural referencing specialists consists of identifying the terms that are relevant to your business and that can :

• Enable visitors to find a product or service that you sell
• Find the information they need on your site
• Find your company

The brands

The most relevant keywords obviously include your brand, but also all the brands for which you are a distributor.

Keywords or generic expressions

The keyword or generic expression has a very broad scope, like “SEO” or “advertising agency” for example. The results for such queries often number in the millions. However, they are fundamental because they accurately describe your professional activity. On the other hand, they are often highly competitive and require a great deal of effort to be well positioned on the first page.

The long tail

Unlike a keyword or expression, the long tail is more like a sentence. Since 2004, this has been known in SEO as the “long tail”.

Example: if “sports shoes” is a key expression, “black and yellow men’s sports shoes with Velcro” is a long tail query.

The latter is obviously more precise, but also much less competitive. So it’s easier to position yourself there, but also to benefit from even more targeted visibility. Internet users arriving on a site thanks to the long tail are logically more likely to become prospects or potential customers.

How do you find the “right” keywords and define your SEO strategy?

Keywords are therefore essential to any good natural referencing strategy. But how do you find the most relevant ones? What criteria must they meet?

What criteria should “good” keywords meet?

Beyond the simple SEO aspect, which is far from negligible, a “good” keyword is one that is the perfect compromise between four imperatives:

• Get the maximum number of requests per month
• Be as non-competitive as possible
• Best define the company’s activity or the theme of the site
• Trigger an intention on the part of the web user. For example, this intention could be commercial (online sales) or informative (request for a quote, getting in touch, subscribing to a newsletter, etc).

Keyword stuffing, a practice to be avoided

Text containing as many keywords as possible is essential to maximize the chances of appearing on the first page of Google. Unscrupulous of the Google guidelines, some sites have not hesitated to fill their pages with terms in order to artificially improve their SEO performance.

This technique is known as “keyword stuffing“. Instead of providing quality content to their visitors, with a balanced insertion of important terms, thus harmonizing the editorial and technical aspects, keyword stuffers form entire paragraphs of keywords or city names (for local SEO).

However, since 2011 and the roll-out of Google Panda and Google Penguin in particular, such black hat practices have systematically resulted in a referencing penalty. At best, this results in a very significant loss of ranking, or even total exclusion from the SERPs.

Keywords in urls: does it matter?

Back in 2010, Google indicated that inserting keywords into an URL could be useful from an SEO point of view.
However, this possibility must not be turned into keyword stuffing, as the search giant could then interpret this as spam and a desire to manipulate search results.

While not ignoring this opportunity, Google was already pointing out at the time that it is much wiser to offer visitors content that is interesting and well-constructed from an SEO and commercial point of view.

Your audit to determine the most relevant keywords

To choose the keywords that are most relevant to your business model, SEO.fr’s natural referencing experts draw not only on their experience in this field, but also on a rigorous methodology.

As each company is unique, it is obviously not possible to go into the details of a keyword audit here. However, in broad terms, it systematically includes :

• Use phrases rather than a single word. Internet users tend to type queries such as “Google Partners certified SEO agency Paris” rather than simply “SEO agency“. What’s more, the rate of conversion of an Internet user into a customer or prospect is greater when they have made a precise request.
• Make the most of the statistics and data in your possession (Google Analytics, etc)
• Analyze search volumes and the competitive aspect of the terms selected
• Analyze and monitor the competition
• Monitor changes in search volume for given expressions to anticipate trends. Reactivity that enables you to take full advantage of emerging markets

To develop or optimize your natural referencing strategy, are you looking to be better positioned on terms that are essential to the development of your business? Contact our web agency to get your keyword audit and boost your Google visibility.