How Keywords Will Enhance Your SEO

In this section, I'm going to cover what is a keyword and understand the intent behind it. I'm going to explain the difference between short tail and long-tail keywords. I'm going to show you how you can find out what keywords you already rank for in Google. I'm going to show you how you can determine the keyword difficulty, and just how difficult it is to rank for a certain keyword, and I'm going to show you how you can find additional keywords to target for your website too. On top of that, I'm going to show you how you can find all the keywords that your competitors rank for. I'm going to show you how you can use Google Auto-Suggest to come up with tons of keyword ideas, and really importantly, I'm going to cover the importance of keeping your keywords organized. And lastly, I'm going to show you how you can validate your keywords using Google Trends. So without further ado, let's dive into this section. Section 4: What Is A Keyword + Understanding The Intent Behind It: What is a keyword? A keyword is simply a search phrase. For example, if you went over to Google and typed in vanilla ice cream, the keyword would be vanilla ice cream, the entire search phrase, not the individual words, so not vanilla or ice cream. The keyword would be vanilla ice cream. To be successful in SEO, you need to figure out what your potential customers would search for in Google to find your website and the service or product you offer. If we go back to my previous example of yoga mats, let's just imagine you have a website that sells yoga mats. One of the main keywords you would target would be yoga mats as that's the main thing you offer on your website. Once you know what keywords you want to target, you can then optimize your website to increase your online visibility for those keyword searches. Understanding keyword intent. Keyword intent, sometimes known as search intent, represents a user's purpose for the search. For example, if someone goes into Google and types in, "Are yoga mats worth the money?" Then from the keyword, we can tell straight away that this person isn't actually sure whether they need a yoga mat or not as the search phrase says, "Are yoga mats worth the money?" So from this keyword intent, we get two things. One, the person knows about yoga mats, and two, they're not sure whether they need a yoga mat. Even if that another keyword such as buy a red yoga mat, we can tell from this keyword that search intent is a lot more different. The person that's typed in buys a red yoga mat which means they already know that they need a yoga mat and they've gone even further and they actually described the yoga mat they need, which is a red one. So if you have a website and sell red yoga mats and someone types in to buy a red yoga mat, then they land on your page showing red yoga mats, the person is most likely going to buy one if the price is right. However, if someone types in, "Are yoga mats worth the money?" then they land on the same page showing red yoga mats, the person probably isn't going to buy. The person still needs convincing. Understanding the difference in search intent will make a massive impact on your SEO campaign. Essentially, when you understand the buyer intent, you can make sure the page a person lands on is relevant to what they typed in and will result in more sales and a much better user experience.