Not everyone likes the process of keyword and semantic research. However, this work does not have to be trivial or boring.
There is a lot of information about semantic search for online sales sites, but there is less information about service sites, despite the fact that this niche is also very popular. Here are some strategies I have chosen and am using. I will show you how to do semantic research in practice using a bicycle site as an example. I will also use tools available on the market. Try these tips to make your search as effective as possible!
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words and phrases that define the content of a website page. They are the link between what people are looking for and the content. The keywords of your content determine the type of traffic you will get on your site.
They must therefore be relevant to what Internet users are looking for and to your industry. This makes it easier to search for your content among the results of the Web.
It is necessary to differentiate between the long tail keywords and the main keyword.
The long tail keywords are specific. They contain at least 3 to 5 words and correspond to less popular expressions and less searched by Internet users. However, they occupy almost 80% of the traffic and are easy to position well.
The main keyword is the keyword by which your page should be classified and the essential term to which your article relates. Put it in your page title and use it only once.
The importance of keyword research
The relevant semantic core is a first step in SEO promotion that is mandatory for the strategy. A correctly collected semantics reveals the customer's needs in his life, the solutions he wants to find in Google. Therefore, the more accurately keywords are collected, the more traffic and conversions your site will generate, thus satisfying the customer's needs. But how do we do this research?
Your target's interests and your own objectives
First of all, you need to know exactly what the interests and thinking of your audience are, and understand your own objectives.
Then, define the mission of your site and your unique aspects that set you apart from your competitors, your promises to customers, etc. Then choose a tool that can help you find all the possible suggestions. You can use Answerthepublic or Serpstat Search Suggestions.
How to analyze your competitors
Remember to analyze the competitive landing pages. You can find some interesting keywords on the pages of competitive services. Therefore, these strategies and keywords will save you valuable time and give you a lot of necessary information, such as the vocabulary the audience uses, popular articles and videos on the subject, questions and comments on Facebook forums and groups.
Competing sites are an additional source of semantics. Simply use competitive intelligence tools such as Serpstat, Searchmetrics or SeoQuantum. In addition, to compare a few domains you can use SEMrush.
How to clean the keyword list
You have compiled a list of keywords. Now you have to clean up this list of useless ones:
- All requests with a zero frequency (total frequency);
- Requests for information;
- Just inappropriate keywords for one reason or another.
Sort sentences by frequency. Pay particular attention to requests with the following words: buy, sell, order, price, price + name of the city under which the site is promoted. These are valuable keys in terms of conversion.
The list that remains after such a count will be as relevant as possible, it will not contain anything superfluous. From now on, all collected requests must be grouped, i.e. divided into groups which are then distributed over the pages of the site.
How to group keywords together
If you work a lot with keywords, you understand that it is difficult to group them manually. The automatic keyword grouping tool can do the job by grouping similar words together itself. For example, we will use Serpstat.
How to spread keyword requests over several pages?
To distribute the semantics of the landing pages, you must determine:
- The frequency of keywords in the content of landing pages;
- Places (blocks, fragments) on the site where you can use semantics.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to optimize the page for all the keywords of the subject. When you analyze competitive pages, you may find that some pages refer by more than 500 keywords. However, this does not mean that each of them is written on the page. This means that the page is well optimized on the subject and that the search engine recommends it for a number of similar queries.
So, where can you use this semantics?
- Navigation (anchor links, title in the navigation pane)
- Page headers (H1, H2-6)
- Metadata (title, descriptions)
- Name of the product sheets
- Through blocks above the page and the header of the site with general information
- Alt and Title Images
- Text of the page
- Different page blocks have different meanings for the search engine.
Collect the importance of keywords for a page.
How to optimize existing pages?
The optimization of your site must be regular. There is always something to improve. Optimizing existing pages allows you to increase your ranking and display frequency from 20 to 30% in Google's search results. This works every 2-3 months.
First of all, use visibility data via Google Search Console. Access the Research Analysis section. Click on "Pages" without selecting any other filters. The tool displays the best positioned pages.
Then choose the target URL from the list and look at the requests for which this page of a site is displayed in Google's SERP.
This allows you to identify the keywords of positions that are not close enough to the TOP. In fact, after your work with reference and text factors, you can increase the chances of attracting more traffic.
You can also use Serp Stat's "Missing Keywords" tool, which analyzes the landing page of the website. This tool allows you to find competitive queries that allow your competitors to be listed in the Top 10. However, you do not reference the same queries in the Top 100. You will collect the missing semantics and win your competitors by using missed sentences.
Conclusion
As you can see, the semantic search for service sites is not very difficult. You must select groups of queries as landing pages. This method improves the relevance of their search and increases convenience for your users.
Moreover, this aspect is the most ignored. Most entrepreneurs limit themselves to a minimum of pages, adding only the basic and most necessary services. As a result, they lose a lot of additional traffic that could generate new customers.
Develop a quality logical structure! Set priorities! These tips allow you to build processes in a practical format and allow you to start introducing an optimization strategy into reality.