Keywords are a Big Part of a Good SEO Strategy

One thing that most search engine optimization experts agree on is that including keywords in your web content is a good strategy. Think of keywords as the most pure version of your website’s content… if you wanted to sum up this content in just a word or a phrase, what would that phrase be? Let’s go into how you can determine what your keywords should be, and how you can use them to your advantage.

Why Do Keywords Matter So Much?

Keywords are important for your website to use because they help give the search engine crawlers responsible for ranking a website on the search engine results pages (SERPs) more context into what the website delivers. This means that, as you try to draw attention to your business’ managed service offering, it pays off to use them to draw the attention of these search engines so the people looking for information are directed to you as the source.

Keywords can also help you use your website’s content more effectively. Let’s say you have some service offerings designed to meet the needs of certain industries. Involving that industry in your keywords for those service pages can help you more precisely target your ideal audience.

Ultimately, the goal of your keyword strategy should be to ensure that your content is presented in organic search results for the audience that best fits your business. An outcome like this is generally associated with improved click-through-rates (CTRs) and conversions.

Where Should You Be Using Keywords?

In a word: everywhere. However, there are a few caveats to this, as we’ll get into.

On your website, keywords can be a valuable addition to a variety of areas:

• Titles
• Headers and subheaders
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Image tags
• Alt text
• Within content (keeping primary keywords towards the top of the page)

You can also use keywords to help draw your audience to your business’ social media profiles by adding them in places like:

• Your profile name and description
• Post captions
• Hashtags
• Video subtitles and captions
• Your profile URL
• Alt text

Keywords are Best Used in Strategic Moderation

Having said this, it is important to strike the right balance with your keywords. Your first priority should be to ensure that the content on your website is of a high enough quality to deliver what your audience was looking for in the first place. Sure, you may get a higher rank by including a ton of keywords, but it isn’t going to help if your reader finds your content unhelpful.

Further to the point, overloading a piece of content with keywords actually has a name—keyword stuffing—and is something that search engines actively seek out and penalize. After all, these search engines build their whole business model on being able to deliver the content that their users are looking for. If a bunch of low-quality websites were to appear on page one of these searches, the search engine’s reputation would suffer. When in doubt, always choose higher quality content over adding another keyword in there.

How Do I Pick the Right Keywords for SEO?

Effectively selecting keywords for your content to use is a bit of a balancing act. Generally speaking, there are a few variables you should always consider when selecting the search terms you want your content to target.

Search Volume

This is important because you want to be sure that people actually are searching for the terms you’ve selected. Try to pick keywords that enough people are searching for that also won’t get you buried under larger providers or unrelated content with similar phrasing.

Relevance

How well do the keywords you’ve selected relate to the content of your webpage and (crucially) its intent? Like we touched on in search volume, you need to be sure your keywords match the intent of your target audience.

Conversion

The ultimate goal of your website is to help you make sales and generate quality leads and contacts. More actionable keywords will therefore perform better than other, more generalized ones.

Competition

Unfortunately, there’s little chance that your MSP website will ever get top ranking for something like “computer” or “internet” or  “IT.” Once you have a properly optimized website, dedicate your efforts to ranking for things that people in your area are likely to more specifically search for that you can dominate. You can actually figure out how promising an idea is by searching for your proposed term and evaluating what comes up.

There are a variety of tools available to assist you in determining these values.

The Right Keywords Can Significantly Help Your SEO Strategy

Note that we said help, not make. SEO is a complex animal and can take a significant amount of time to manage.

Fortunately, we can help an MSP who wants to make the most of their online presence. Give us a call today at 888-546-4384 and ask about the SEO services we provide.