What are keywords?

If you have a website and have never done detailed keyword planning for your content, this post is a good starting point. It assumes no significant knowledge of keywords or website SEO.

A simple definition

Keywords are the words or phrases that people use to find information on the internet. They are the words you would type into your Google or other search bar when you are looking for something online.

47% of Irish consumers say they have become more digital in the last six months.

Pwc Irish Consumer Insights Pulse Survey 2021

What are keywords used for?

When you type keywords into your search bar, the search engine uses them to try to identify the information on the internet that is most likely to meet your needs. The longer the key phrase, the more accurate the result is likely to be.

For example, if you want to search for red shoes with laces, the term ‘shoes’ is likely to be too broad. The results would be narrowed down by adding the words ‘red’ and ‘with laces’.

Google's search market share in Ireland has consistently been around the 95% mark in the 12 months to November 2021

GS Statcounter.com (December 2021)

How keywords bring web traffic

The main goal of search engine is to provide the user with answers to their search questions. One of the ways that they do this is by evaluating the match between the words that have been searched and those in the content on your website.

Over the last decade, search engines have become increasingly sophisticated. They combine huge amounts of data and artificial intelligence, not only to contextualise what you actually typed, but also to contextualise its meaning. They do this by processing literally billions of searches every day and evaluating, from the users’ subsequent behaviour, whether their search needs were met.

Love it or hate it, it’s highly effective and it’s almost certainly the way that your potential clients and customers find what they are looking for on the internet.

87% of Irish consumers searched online for a product or service in January 2021

Datareportal.com Digital Ireland 2021

So what are your keywords?

So do you think that internet search engines would accurately pick up on what your website is really about from the words you have used in your content? You might be surprised.

Without a reasonable awareness of how keywords are used, it’s easy to find yourself completely off course. Remember, keywords are just one way that search engines decide whether to direct traffic to your site, but if your content isn’t using the right words, your efforts could be doomed to failure.

Just for the sake of curiosity

Head on over to Tagcrowd.com and choose website URL as your source. Enter the URL address from an important page of your website and click ‘Visualise’. If you want to look at your site as a whole, you can try out a free tool such as SEO Site Checkup. Once you have the results, check out the ‘most common keywords’ and the ‘keywords cloud test’ sections. Try comparing your website keyword results with the keywords that come up for similar or competing sites.

Any surprises?