What is a "Good" Keyword? | Insurance Marketing HQ

You’ve heard it before. You need to have good keywords on your site. But what exactly is a good keyword you ask? Well for starters, a good keyword or keyword phrase is one people are actually using in their searches. There is no reason to optimize your website around words not searched for by potential customers. If everyone is searching for ice cream and you are optimized for frozen milk, how well will your site do? You might rank #1 for frozen milk, but you probably won’t be seeing any traffic. And isn’t the whole point to drive good traffic to your site?

People can also run into a problem with wanting to use their professional or industry buzz words as keywords. Just because you think you know what potential clients are searching for doesn’t make it so. Most potential customers probably won’t know those specific terms so their search would be a bit broader. Therefore, it is important to do the research and find the keywords that will actually bring the customers to you.

Another key ingredient to a good keyword is for it to be relevant to what your website is about. Your goal is to not only bring in visitors, but visitors that will find what they are looking for and on an e-commerce site, fill out a form. If your website sells blue cars and you optimized for red cars, when visitors see that most will “bounce” from your site without filling out a form or visiting additional pages. Obviously “red cars” was not a good keyword for your site even though it brought in visitors.

As an SEO specialist, part of the job is to research what people are searching for in relationship to what you are selling and find the best keywords to bring in conversions through your site. Of course finding the right keywords is only the beginning. How they are deployed is just as important. But that is for another day…