What Are Target Keywords & How Do They Help Your Business?

June 23, 2017

In the business and marketing world, there are often phrases and buzzwords that are thrown about regularly. One of the most common terms you hear all the time is ‘target keywords’. This is something you come across when you’re reading advice on marketing your business, advice on setting up your website, or even when you’re looking for content writing tips.
Many experienced entrepreneurs and marketers know what target keywords are and how they help a business. But, for the newbies out there, this is just another term they hear and don’t really understand. The thing is, it’s very important that you understand this phrase as it is so important to your marketing strategy online.
In this piece, you’ll learn all about target keywords and how they play such a vital role in marketing your business.

What Are Target Keywords?

We’ll start with the most obvious and pressing question, what are target keywords? It’s very simple, they’re just different words or phrases that are most relevant and relatable to your business. They’re things you think people will be searching for to find a company similar to yours online.
As an example, imagine you have a business that sells yoga mats. Your target keywords will be things like ‘yoga mats’ ‘buy yoga mats’ ‘yoga equipment for sale’ or even just ‘yoga’ itself. These are all things people that are interested in your business are likely to search for.

How Do You Use Your Target Keywords?

It’s not enough to find the right target keywords, you have to use them in the right way. There are many ways you can do this, it all revolves around your website. Ask any SEO agency their top keyword tip, and it’s that you need your target keywords in the title of your web page. This helps you rank higher, and is just the most basic step.
But, you also need to use these keywords in the headings on each page, as well as the meta descriptions, tags, and the content itself. Slip them in here and there, and the search engines will soon boost you up the rankings.

How Do They Help Your Business?

Target keywords help your business by helping you bring relevant traffic to your site. If you use the right target keywords on your website, you’re likely to start appearing in search results that include them. As a result, your site is more likely to be seen and clicked on by your desired audience.
Going back to the earlier example, if you’re using keywords revolving around yoga mats, you will get people on your site that are searching for yoga mats or something similar. But, let's say you decide to use random target keywords, which a lot of businesses do. You may try and use keywords you think will help bring in more traffic as they’re popular searches. Now, the people that see your site are unlikely to be relevant to your business as your target keywords aren’t relevant. So, you may get traffic, but it will be useless as they won’t be interested and they’ll just leave your site straight away. By using the right target keywords, you can bring in traffic that converts successfully.
Hopefully, you now know more about keywords, how to use them, and how they benefit your business.

Mark Asquith

That British podcast guy, Mark is co-founder of Captivate.fm, the world's only growth-oriented podcast host. A Harvard, TEDx, Podcast Movement and Podfest speaker (amongst many more!), he's a wildly approachable Brit and Star Wars/DC Comics geek.

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