Plan Your Site

Plan Your Site
With an understanding of what consumers want and the keywords they use to find those products and services, identify pages on your website to address those search queries.

Having a list on paper or a spreadsheet of all top-, mid-, and low-tier web pages and their corresponding keyword focus forms the basis of your website’s architecture. Each high- and medium-priority keyword from your keyword research should have a corresponding page to optimize on your site.

Use long-tail keyword themes that drive fewer searches and are typically much longer and more specific — such as “how to get red wine out of carpet” or “where to buy wooden hangars” — in blog posts and FAQ pages.

Understand Your Competition

Search for the most important products and services you offer and note the most prominent websites in the search results, those that share your business model as well as the ones that are dissimilar to yours but compete for the same searches.

What are they doing well?
What content themes do they have that you’re lacking?
Do they structure their site differently to target more valuable keywords?
Do they have interesting features to better engage their prospects?
Also, study their reviews and benchmark their social media activity to learn what their customers think versus what you hear, or not, from your own.

Master Keyword Research

Always start with keyword research. Don’t assume that you know what consumers want.

You likely understand your industry jargon. But your prospects might use different terms than trade colleagues to refer to your services or goods. Keyword research provides an understanding of the words and phrases that consumers use to find your products. It also helps to gauge the demand for them. It identifies the keyword themes that real searchers use in their search queries.

The best keyword tools offer a quantitative demand score that helps determine the relative value in targeting each keyword theme. Google Keyword Planner is the go-to keyword research tool, though you’ll need an active Google Ads — formerly AdWords — campaign to get the most useful data.