SEO For Beginners (Keeping it Mom-and-Pop)
Part 2: Keyword Basics
So you’ve done the 30 backlink challenge. Congratulations! Now, let’s strengthen your backlinking game by looking at your keywords.
We started all of this because you want your project to be easier to find online, but what are people actually searching for when they try and find you (or someone who offers the sort of service you do)? That’s the question behind the whole topic of keywords.
You’ve probably already done some research on what a keyword is, and seen that it can be a daunting task – not unlike the whole backlinking thing. But it doesn’t have to be. Let’s contain this challenge by identifying just a few words and phrases people might use to search for you (or again, at least someone who does what you do):
- Your URL (yep, from time to time people will actually search for a direct URL such as www.thecharacterconsultancy.co.uk or www.mauricemypetemu.com. I don’t know who these people are or what they want, but they exist. Let’s humour them.
- Your project / company name
- Your name
- 3 words closely associated with your project
Some of these deserve more attention.
Your Project Name
You might already have given your project a name, but I want to add a cautionary tale, here. Hopefully you’ve named your project something distinctive enough that the same words won’t be used in irrelevant searches.
Example: I knew someone who ran a clerical business writing inventories for rental homes. She created a new arm of the business called About Inventories. It never got traction and she eventually mothballed the idea. Perhaps the launch was so underwhelming because the word “about” is used on millions of web pages, including on pages already talking about inventories that aren't actually discussing About Inventories. See? I already did it without meaning to! Something more distinctive, such as Centurion Inventories, might have made her company easier to find. People rarely talk about centurions at the same time as they're talking about inventories. (Oops, there I go again!)
Names
Do you want your real name to be associated with your project? Perhaps you actively want that, or perhaps it feels too intrusive. It’s very much your choice what to do.
However, if you choose to use your name as part of your SEO campaign then you might run into a number of problems. If there’s a celebrity with the same name as you, you might have some difficulties getting Google to prioritise your name highly enough to be seen among the sea of references to them. I have the same name as the sister of one of The Wiggles, and the Watkins sisters are quite the active pair.
Uncomfortable using your real name but don’t want to miss out on the benefits? Try a distinctive internet handle instead. The author of the web serial novel Worm is often known as wildbow, and that’s a reliable way of searching for his project, so you might choose to use that.
Bonus tip: just in case you ever want to make business cards, consider a shorter company name. “The Character Consultancy” is a bastard to fit onto a teeny tiny business card.
3 Words
When it comes to keywords, you could pick 50 of the things, but that’s going to be too much. You're just one person. Go easy on yourself and let’s just focus on 3 to keep this manageable.
So, pick three words that are relevant to your project. For my worldbuilding project, Kaleida, three reasonable choices would be “worldbuilding”, “hopepunk”, and “speculative evolution” (okay, so that last one’s a phrase. You can do that). For my counselling web site, Cactus Counselling, “transactional analysis”, “childfree”, and “estranged” are three good words. For the Twilight fanfic Luminosity, the words might be “vampire”, “rationalfic”, and “Twilight”. You get the idea.
Finding Yourself: Internet Style
Open Google or whatever other search engine you like, and search for your project using your URL, then your company name, then your name or internet handle if you're using either of those, and then your 3 keywords. How often do you come up in each search?
You probably got different results for each search. Am I right?
Tip: if you made more backlinks very recently then they may not be helping you out much yet. Search engines can take a few weeks to update their details. Not always, but sometimes.
Who Else Is Out There?
Notice your competition – both relevant and irrelevant.
For example, there’s an electronic pop/rock band called Kaleida who I got lots of results for when I tried to search for my worldbuilding project. I don’t want to compete with Kaleida the band, so I want to make sure I’m easy to find by someone who wants to see Kaleida the worldbuilding project instead. I don’t know what the band’s keywords of choice are, assuming they’ve made a deliberate choice about their keywords at all, but let’s assume they have, and that their keywords are “electronic”, “band”, and the name of their most popular album, which seems to be “Think”. That will help me make sure my 3 keywords are definitely different from Kaleida the band’s. Which, if you were paying attention earlier, they are.
But just in case you're not, they were “worldbuilding”, “hopepunk”, and “speculative evolution”.
So I’ve Done All Of That. What Do I Do Now?
Remember all those accounts you made when you were doing your backlinking work? Go back into them and add as many of your keywords as you can! Your name, your company name, and your 3 keywords.
It’ll take a while for the search engines to catch up to the work you’ve done and improve your SEO, but you’ve laid the groundwork. Great work!
So, what’s next? Images!
Credits
Title image by Pixabay and used with their kind permission.
