The Role Of Keyword Research In Optimizing Your Press Release
When it comes to optimizing press releases, keywords are essential to the process for a number of reasons.
What is a keyword?
A keyword, or key phrase, is one which is related to the niche or industry you are working in. Search engines like Google or Bing each have an algorithm, or formula, for determining page rank and the position a site will appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
There isn’t much you can do about the algorithms because they change fairly frequently and are pretty much a deep, dark secret, but writing good content that will suit search engine spiders and human readers alike is all about keywords.
Your keyword universe
Your keyword universe will be a matter of common sense to begin with. What niche or industry are you working in, and what are the most common words and phrases related to it? For example, imagine you are working in the golf industry. Logical keywords that spring to mind are:
Golf clubs
Balls
Courses
Shoes
Clubs
Clothing
Bags
And so on. Depending on what you are selling, you would make sure that each product page was keyworded as needed to attract the right traffic to it.
Keywords for your niche doing the research
Once you have made a list of your most logical keywords, it’s time to do some research. The research will be for 2 reasons:
– to see what the search volume is on the words you are using, that is, how many people search for that word each month
– find more keywords and keyphrases that are popular, so you can add them to your pages, and also plan content and product offers based on those searches
If you go to one of the main keyword tools, such as Google’s or Bing’s keyword tools, Wordtracker or SEMRush, you could then enter the word golf and run a keyword report on it. This is what we get if we run a search at SEMRush:
top golf 246,000 90.50 3.98 0.01 54,900,000
golf 246,000 87.66 0.55 0.37 769,000,000
golf courses near me 74,000 74.91 1.70 0.15 7,070,000
callaway golf 60,500 83.24 0.28 0.37 1,010,000
golf clubs 60,500 79.96 0.90 1.00 22,100,000
golf shoes 60,500 83.44 1.03 1.00 18,500,000
Each report is slightly different on each site, but there are some key numbers to look out for. The first is search volume. We can see from the examples above that the phrase top golf is #1, with a volume of 246,000 searches each month. Top Golf is a gaming franchise, sort of like a golf obstacle course, but it might also be part of a keyword phrase, such as top golf clubs.
The second number is how competitive it would be to try to rank highly. This is a percentage out of 100, with 100 being the hardest, so top golf has a 90.5 keyword difficulty rating. The next number is the cost per click of ads being run in relation to that keyword. We can see that at nearly $4 per click, it is expensive.
The next column is how many advertisers you have to compete with. The number 1 is highest. 0.1 in this case is quite low, which is not surprising given how expensive the cost per click is. Finally, the last number shows the number of URLs related to that keyword, in this case, 54.9 million pages. That is going to be a really tough keyword to rank highly on. That is not to say never use it, but it might not be the best choice when it comes to creating your content, particularly your press releases, because you don’t want anyone to think the release is about Top Golf.
Where you should use your keywords
Use your keywords on each page, and in the title, metatags, tags, names of images and more. Then see what a difference it makes to the free traffic you can get to your press release, and site as a whole.
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