Mastering Website Keywords to Boost Traffic to Your Site

Mastering Website Keywords to Boost Traffic to Your Site

Optimising your site with the right website keywords is a crucial aspect of your marketing strategy, ensuring your ideal clients can find you online. You’ve probably heard the experts emphasise its importance, but actually executing it correctly can be challenging without proper guidance.

But fear not! Mastering this task is more achievable than you might think. Just like many other things, there’s a formula to follow that simplifies the process. Once you have that formula, everything falls into place. All you need to do is follow the steps and witness your results skyrocket!

In this article, I’ve provided a simple 7-step checklist on how to implement your website keywords effectively. By the time you’re done, you’ll start attracting more high-quality leads to your website, ultimately boosting your business’s success.

First, let’s quickly cover the terminology:

Website Keywords

These are words or phrases that convey to search engines (e.g. Google) the content and topics of your website, as well as align with what people enter into search engines.

When the keywords on your site match what users are searching for, it increases the likelihood of appearing in search results. Your ranking in those results depends on various factors, and getting your website keywords right plays a crucial role in your overall SEO strategy.

Ensuring your keywords are optimised and aligned with user intent is essential for improving your search engine visibility and driving organic traffic to your website.

Focus Keyword

A Focus Keyword refers to the primary keyword or phrase that you specifically target when optimising a piece of content or a webpage for search engines.

It is the main keyword you want your content to rank for in search engine results pages (SERPs). It should accurately represent the main topic or theme of the content and align with the search intent of your target audience.

It should be used in your title, URL, meta description, text and images. By optimising your content around a focus keyword, you can enhance its visibility and increase the chances of attracting relevant organic traffic from search engines.

Long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that usually consist of three or more words. Unlike broad or generic keywords, long-tail keywords are more targeted and specific to a particular topic, niche, or user intent. They tend to have lower search volume but higher conversion potential.

For example, while a broad keyword might be “Life Coach,” a long-tail keyword could be “Melbourne self-esteem coach for women.”

The long-tail keyword provides more context and helps attract more relevant traffic to your website or content. By incorporating long-tail keywords into your SEO strategy, you can reach a more qualified audience and improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results for specific niche queries.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising a website or online content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

By implementing various techniques and strategies, such as keyword research, on-page optimisation, content creation, and link building, SEO aims to make websites more search engine-friendly, ultimately driving organic (non-paid) traffic and improving online visibility.

The goal is to align the website with user intent, enhance user experience, and increase the chances of appearing higher in relevant search queries, leading to increased website traffic and potential conversions. As this article is focused on optimising your website keywords, we’ll just stick to that.

So, ready to get started? Let’s dive into the 7-step checklist…

Step 1: Choosing which website keywords to use

Selecting the right website keywords for your coaching business first requires thorough research and an understanding of your target audience. By delving into their demographics, needs, challenges, and goals, you can identify the keywords they are likely to use during their search for coaching services.

For instance, imagine you specialise in providing support to individuals navigating through a divorce. Potential clients might search for terms like “How to cope with divorce” or “Dealing with divorce.” By crafting articles that address these specific topics and optimising the corresponding keywords, you not only increase the likelihood of ranking higher in search results (thus attracting more clicks) but also target a focused audience of high-quality leads.

It’s also important to recognise that your knowledge of the coaching industry may differ from the mindset of your target market. Some individuals may be unaware of coaches specialising in divorce support, causing them to search using more general terms.

By catering to their initial queries, such as the aforementioned search terms, they can stumble upon your website, find valuable articles, and initiate their customer journey with you. This approach expands your reach and facilitates engagement with a wider audience.

Tools to help you with your website keywords research:

• AnswerThePublic – get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers. You can search 3 keywords per day for free.
• Google – pop in a keyword and look through the results for inspiration for more. Plus, down the bottom, Google even generates a list of “Related Searches”
• Google’s Keyword Planner – Find the right keywords with their research tool.
• Google Trends – This is a handy tool that analyses the popularity of search queries and compares search volume
• Ubersuggest is great for helping you discover new keywords. You can get a lot of data with the free option.

Once you have chosen your website keywords and have determined a focus keyword for your page, post, product etc. It’s time to optimise them. Here’s how…

Step 2: The Title Tag

A title tag, also known as a meta title, is an HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage. It is displayed as a clickable headline in search engine results and appears at the top of a web browser’s title bar when a webpage is opened.

A well-optimised title tag should accurately reflect the content of the webpage, include relevant keywords, be concise yet compelling, and entice users to click on the search result to visit the webpage.

Optimising the title tag is an important aspect of on-page SEO, as it plays a significant role in improving the visibility, click-through rate, and overall performance of a webpage in search engine results pages.

Title Tag Optimisation Tips:

• Your focus keyword should be within the title and for best results, place it right at the beginning
• Your page title should be a H1 heading and there should only be one H1 heading, the rest should be sub-headings; H2-H6)
• Always try to include emotional words, power words or numbers to make it compelling (try Coschedules headline analyser to help with this)
• It should be no more than 55-60 characters in length to ensure the whole title is visible (on desktops and mobile devices)
• You should always have unique title tags, don’t duplicate the same title tags on more than one page of your website
• Keep it relevant! Ensure that the title accurately represents the content of the page. Misleading or irrelevant titles can lead to a negative user experience and harm your SEO efforts.

Title Tag Example:

Focus Keyword: coping with divorce
Title Tag: Coping with Divorce: How to Heal & Move Forward

Step 3: The Meta Description

A meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of the content on a webpage. It appears below the title tag in search engine results pages (SERPs) and is intended to give users a preview of what they can expect if they click on the search result.

Optimising your meta description helps improve the visibility and click-through rate of your web pages in search results. By crafting engaging and relevant descriptions that entice users to click, you can attract more targeted traffic to your coaching website and increase the chances of converting visitors into clients.

Meta Description Optimisation Tips:

• Include your focus keyword in the meta description. There isn’t an ideal location, just as long as it’s in there.
• Accurately summarise your page’s content, and make it engaging.
• Keep your meta description under 160 characters to ensure it displays fully in search results.
• As with title tags, you should always have unique meta descriptions, don’t duplicate them on more than one page of your website
• Create a compelling call-to-action: Use language that encourages users to click on your search result. Incorporate action verbs and emphasise the value or benefit they will gain from visiting your webpage.

Meta Description Example:

Focus Keyword: coping with divorce
Title Tag: Coping with Divorce: How to Heal & Move Forward
Meta Description: Coping with divorce can be intensely painful, causing substantial grief & stress. Our tips will help you process your emotions so you can heal & move forward.

Step 4: URL Permalink

A permalink, also known as a website address or page URL, is a unique web address that points to a specific webpage on your coaching website. It appears in the address bar of a web browser and serves as an identifier for that particular page. For example, www.yoursite.com

Permalink Optimisation Tips:

• Remove less powerful words or stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.) to make it simple and precise, just make sure your focus keyword is still in there and that it makes sense.
• Shorter URLs have been shown to have a better chance of ranking higher than long URLs. There’s no hard and fast rule for the length, but aim to keep it as close to 75 characters or less.
• Use hyphens (“-“) to separate words in the URL rather than underscores. Hyphens make the URL more readable for both users and search engines, improving the overall user experience.
• They should be easily readable both by humans and search engines. In this URL for example, www.mysite.com/post?ID77&kw=coping+divorce – you can guess what the page’s content will include but it isn’t as clear as it could be
• Avoid using dynamic URLs when possible. This is a URL where the content for the page is pulled from the database. You can usually spot them as they include characters like: ? + &. They look messy and aren’t SEO friendly
• Don’t keyword stuff, your focus keyword should only be in the URL once.

Permalink Example:

From the title: yoursite.com/coping-with-divorce-how-to-heal-and-move-forward/
Shortened and stop words removed: yoursite.com/coping-with-divorce-how-heal-move-forward/
With focus keyphrase only: www.yoursite.com/coping-with-divorce/

Step 5: Focus Keyphrase in Introduction

Your focus keyphrase should also be at the very beginning of your content. Doing so helps search engines and users understand the relevance of your content and encourage them to continue reading your webpage.

Remember to maintain a natural and user-friendly flow though when incorporating your focus keyphrase in the introduction. It should seamlessly integrate with the overall content and not appear forced or awkward.

Keyphrase in Introduction Tips:

• Different plugins/apps will give different guidelines, such as it being within the first 10% of the content or within the first 100 words. A good rule of thumb is to make sure it is included within the first sentence
• This first sentence should be SEO-optimised, but as mentioned above, also still needs to make sense and sound natural.
• Another rule of thumb – Write for your site visitors first and Google second

Step 6: Focus Keyphrase use Within Body Content

In addition to including your focus keyphrase in your title, it should also be used within the body content of your page. This involves the sub-headings (H2, H3, etc.) and paragraphs. As always, it’s important to strike a balance between optimisation and maintaining a natural, readable flow.

Keyphrase use within the body content Optimisation Tips:

• Google pays the most attention to your H1 and H2 headings. However, the others are not ignored and should also be considered in your website keywords strategy.
• Many site visitors scan content, that’s why it’s important to include your keywords in your headings to help grab their attention
• Seeing as the focus keywords should be related to the topic of the post, including them within your content (paragraphs, not just headings) should happen naturally, just ensure you don’t overdo it. Not only does it get irritating for readers to see the same words over and over again, but including them too many times can be seen as keyword stuffing
• If in doubt, you are better off having a low keyword density than one that is too high. Keep your language natural; if the search engines don’t penalise you for it, your site visitors definitely will!
• There is no set rule for how many times your keyword should appear in your content, especially as the amount of content each page/post has can vary. As a guide, aim for a density of 1-1.5%. What this means is for every 100 words, the keyword should appear 1 to 1.5 times. You can use SEO plugins to help with this. The most popular include Yoast, RankMath and All-in-one SEO

Step 7: Image ALT tags

An Image ALT tag (alternative text) is an attribute that provides a textual description of an image on a webpage. It serves as an alternative for visually impaired users who may not be able to see the image and rely on screen readers or other assistive technologies to understand the content.

It also plays a significant role in SEO. Search engines cannot interpret images in the same way humans do, so the ALT tag helps them understand the content and context of the image. This allows search engines to index the image and display it in relevant image search results and drive additional traffic to your website.

Image ALT tags Optimisation Tips:

• Write concise, accurate, and descriptive text that provides a clear understanding of the image’s content or function.
• Make the ALT text useful, informative and use keywords appropriately
• Avoid filling all image ALT tags with the same keywords over and over (this is also keyword stuffing)
• Don’t forget the image file name: Name it appropriately with hyphens separating each word, no funny characters, and all lowercase

Here’s a handy article on how to add ALT tags for your WordPress website as well as some more best practice guidelines.

And voilà, you’re ready to nail your website keywords!

On a final note, I fully appreciate that for many people, optimising your website keywords isn’t as much fun as other aspects of your coaching business. Some put it off altogether because it’s boring, or they don’t think they will get it right. But even some SEO is still far better than none.

So, have a crack and do the best you can. Give yourself time to get better at it and before you know it, it will just be part of the routine that you barely notice each time you create new content.

The whole point of this article is to help improve your chances of getting more eyes on your coaching website, more leads and more conversions. Yep, this stuff isn’t glamorous. But, it’s a vital tool in making the above happen. Again, it may be tedious and individually each item on the checklist probably doesn’t seem that consequential.

Remember though, “A waterfall begins from only one drop of water. Look what comes from that…”