Joshua Lyons Marketing

When it comes to actually doing keyword research there are several things you will want to do. - Identify your target audience, on a high level. For example, our target audience includes people who need help with digital marketing. All our SEO efforts should be centered around this one audience. - Identify your "seed keywords." These are the really short one to two-word keywords used to find your business. For us, those might include SEO, web design, website development, digital marketing, etc. - Find other related keyword phrases that branch off from the seed keyword concept. An example of these keywords would be something like "How to do keyword research for SEO." - Move on to looking at search volume and competition. Figure out which of those keywords deserve your search engine optimization attention, and how much of your focus they should receive.

A "keyword" is the individual word, or phrase, someone gives when using a search engine to find a product, service or information. For example, if you're looking for a roofing company in your area, you might type in "roof." That's an example of a keyword. Or you might type in "roofing companies near me." That's also considered a keyword; though technically it would be better to call that a "keyword phrase." When it comes to keywords for search engine optimization, you ultimately want to identify the most important keywords your target audience is using, then make sure you show up on Google [and other search engines] for those keywords. In our blog post titled "What Exactly Are Keywords for SEO?" we give a good bit more info on keywords and how they work. Feel free to check out that blog post.

There are many facets to search engine optimization. But, if you're just getting started, there are a few key points you should consider. First, make sure to optimize your website for the keyword phrases your target audience is searching. For example, if you help people get over addictions in Pensacola, Florida, then don't target "addiction recovery pensacola" as the words you think your audience is using. I say that because they're more likely to be searching "behavioral counseling in pensacola," "mental health pensacola" or something along those lines. Also, focus on creating great content on your website, and inspiring other high quality websites to link to your website. It would be a good idea to speak with a professional too, so as to avoid any pitfalls and make sure you're pointed in the right direction. Or if you're able, consider hiring someone who specializes in SEO.

E-A-T is an acronym that stands for "Expert," "Authoritative" and "Trustworthy." These are the characteristics Google is looking at when trying to decide how to rank your website. Is your level of expertise clearly able to be seen through your website? If not, you may want to improve that, particularly through blogging or some other form of education. Be sure your website is as authoritative as possible. You can do this is by creating pillar pages/posts, or cornerstone content, to make you appear more authoritative. You can learn more about being seen as "Expert," "Authoritative" and "Trustworthy" by search engines in our blog post titled "What Does E-A-T Mean for SEO?"

Every website page has a page authority (PA) score. This works in the same way that domain authority scores work, and they range from 1 to 100. This calculation is done by a company called MOZ and the score is largely impacted the quality and quantity of the websites that link to your web page. The better quality the links, the more your PA score will improve. The opposite is true as well. If there are a lot of poor quality links, linking to your website, that can damage your overall PA score. If you haven't already checked out the previous search engine optimization FAQ, which talks about domain authority, you may want to check that out.

Every website has a domain authority (DA) score which will range from 1 to 100. It is calculated and run by a company called Moz. There are a number of factors that will impact what your DA score will be. A major contributing factor is the number and quality of other websites that are linking to your website. This is an excellent metric to use if you want to compare how well your website might perform on Google, in contrast to your competitor websites. We regularly look at the DA score of our website, and also that of our competitors. This helps us identify how effectively our marketing efforts are helping us on Google, in relation to our competition. And while you can go to Moz to check your DA score, we’d recommend using another tool by WebsiteSEOChecker. Moz is much more limited on how many times you can look up a DA score per month, with a free account.

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the practice of making a website rank better in search engines. Some common search engines are Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. If you want to increase the number of people who find your website through search engines, then SEO might be something for you to start doing. There are other marketing channels that will drive traffic to your website. But on average, there is no digital marketing channel that will generate a lower cost per lead than SEO.