“Coming up with a structured SEO plan is crucial for ranking your websites.

If you are consistently putting your effort and still that is not enough to rank your websites, this post really needs your attention.

As we all know that SEO is the lifesaver of websites, are they really the lifesavers of websites?

If yes, then why are your websites still not getting ranked?

Here the role of a structured plan of SEO arises.

So let’s change our thoughts from “SEO are the lifesavers of websites” to “Structured SEO are the real lifesavers of websites”.

 

Wondering how to set a structured SEO?

Let’s start from the basics.

The first step.

What should be the first step of a structured SEO plan?

Before looking deeper into it,

 

Table of Contents

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What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website from search engines.

In simple terms, it is the process of ensuring your business gets listed on the top of the first page on Google.

As we know there are different types of SEO; On-page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Technical SEO. Apart from these, there are other types of SEO too.

What are On-page SEO and OFF page SEO?

What are the other types of SEO? let’s check out.

 

Types of SEO

There are mainly three types of SEO, needed for a well-rounded organic search strategy.

●On-page SEO:

On-page SEO focuses on the content of your website. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the content on your website.

●Off-page SEO:

Off-page SEO is the process of link building, increasing link popularity, etc. Off-page SEO focuses on increasing website ranking by using various tools.

●Technical SEO:

Technical SEO focuses on the optimization of websites to improve organic ranking.
Technical SEO prompts the search engines to rank the websites higher.

As mentioned earlier, there are other types of SEO too:

●Local SEO:

Local SEO is a type of SEO that enables the websites to be more visible in local search results on Google.

●White hat SEO:

White hat SEO refers to any practice that improves website ranking without breaking search engine guidelines.

●Black hat SEO:

Black hat is a disapproved practice, used to get websites ranked. It is against the search engine guidelines. Black hat SEO is also known as negative SEO.

●Grey hat SEO:

Grey hat is another practice that improves the website ranking but is riskier than White hat SEO.

 

Hence SEO is all about ranking your websites at the top of search engines.

However, getting ranked on the top of the first page of Google is not as easy as it sounds. Right?

Don’t worry.

This guide will help to take your first step in SEO carefully.

Let’s look deeper into it.

Here is the answer to your question: what is the first step in SEO.

The first and foremost step of structuring an SEO plan is “KEYWORD RESEARCH.”

Let’s take a look at “What is keyword research in digital marketing.”

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the search queries that people search on search engines.

Keyword research provides you an insight into the actual search terms of your target audience.

It gives you the idea of topics people are searching for, how many are searching it, and in what format do they want the results or information.

Now you might’ve been thinking about how can I do the perfect keyword research.

We’ll elaborate it on you.

But before entering into it, you should have a clear idea about the business that you are trying to grow through search engine optimization.

You should have a clear idea about: the business, its objectives, and its buyer personas.

Since so many people are not aware of this procedure, they just find some words and thus their first step becomes a failure as what they want to rank for and what their audience actually wants are widely two different things.

Having a complete idea about these will help you to do keyword research easily as you already know what you want to be ranked.

Focusing on your target audience and then using keywords on that insight will surely give you much more successful campaigns than focusing on some arbitrary keywords.

But focusing on your target audience will not give you the actual terms they are searching.

Then how can we discover the terms that people are searching for?

How can you choose the right keywords?

   Before learning about how to choose the right keywords and best keyword research tools you should first know the different types of Keywords in SEO

There are mainly five types of keywords:

 

1) Targeting Keywords:

●Market segment keywords:

Market segments are searched for general information by the target audience.
eg: sports shoes

●Customer-defining keywords:

Customer-defining words are searched with phrases or words by the customers to define themselves.
eg: sports shoes for women

 ●Product Keywords:

Product keywords are searched by phrases that are directly related to a company’s product or services.
eg: Nike’s flex shoes 

●Branded Keywords:

Branded keywords are searched by the brand’s name by the customers.
eg: Nike’s sports shoes.

●Competitor Keywords:

Competitor Keywords are targeted brand names of competing businesses’ products or services.
eg: For Nike, competitor keywords could be Adidas sports shoes.

●Geo-targeted Keywords:

Geo-targeted keywords are searched by the users to get the results near them.

2) Keywords by length

●Short tail keywords:
Short tail keywords are high competitive keywords for ranking. These keywords contain only one or two words.
eg: sport shoes

●Mid tail keywords:

Mid-tail keywords are the keywords that have less competition and higher conversion rates. It will only contain three or slightly more words.
eg: best sport shoes.

●Long-tail keywords:

Long-tail keywords which have typically low competition and less traffic are easier to rank. They contain more than four words and have higher conversion rates.
eg: best sports shoes for women who have bad knees.

3)Types of On-site Keywords

●Primary Keywords:

The primary keyword is the main target term on a webpage.
eg: Women’s sport shoes

●LSI keywords:

Latent semantic keywords (LSI) are semantically related to, or synonyms of the primary keyword.
eg: If the primary keyword is women’s sports shoes, the LSI keywords will be best women sports shoes, women sport shoes sales, etc.

4) Types of Google Ads Keywords

●Broad match keywords:

In simple, broad match keywords are the terms you target in Google Ads. 

●Phrase match keywords:

The specific terms that you target in Google Ads are phrase match keywords.

 ●Exact match keywords:

Exact match keywords are the target-specific keyword in Google Ads.

●Negative match keywords:

Negative keywords are the terms that are intentionally excluded from search campaigns within Google Ads because they don’t closely relate to the ad copy or target page content.

These terms may be semantically related but not related to the ad concept.

5) Types of Buyer keywords

●Informational keywords:
They are the terms users search for what they want in general about a topic.
eg: Which is the best sport shoes.

●Navigational keywords:

Navigational keywords are terms searched by the users for visiting a specific website of a brand.
eg: Reebok sports shoes.

●Transactional keywords:

Transactional keywords are searched by the users to make a purchase, that they already know what to buy.
eg: best Reebok sports shoes for women.

 

How to choose the best keywords for SEO

Choosing the best keywords for SEO is not an easy task.

It should be done carefully. Even though we have discussed the basic things you should note before choosing the keywords, that’s not enough to find the correct, best keywords.

Let’s check out how to choose the best keywords for SEO.

➥Think like a customer:

After finding your target audience, think like them, that is how they will search in search engines.

➥Study the competition:

After finding the keywords make the list of the main competitors and search their websites to see the words they are targeting.

➥Try to choose long tail keywords:

Always try to set long tail keywords as they are easy to rank and have high conversion rates.

➥Use keyword research tools:

Use keyword research tools to identify your potential target keywords. There are several keyword research tools available.

 ➥Analyze the results:

Do not forget to analyze the results after choosing the keywords as there are chances to have changes in the trending of those terms along with your competitors’ new keywords.

Try to insert your keywords in social media posts, blog posts, etc. to receive more traffic that it will make the audience easier to find you

Here is a list of the best keyword research tools for SEO.

▫Google trends
▫SEMRush
▫MOZ
▫Soovle
▫Jaaxy
▫Ahrefs keywords explorer
▫SECockpit
▫Google keyword planner
▫Keywords everywhere
▫Ubersuggest
▫Wordstream
▫Question-DB
▫KW finder
▫Keyword Tool.io
▫Keyword snatcher

 

❒ Google Trends:

Google trends are one of the best keyword research tools for SEO. It also shows you the trend of that keyword.

In Google trends, you can first search for a specific keyword and can take a look at related queries.

Secondly, you can check whether a keyword is growing or not.
Google Trends is a free SEO tool for keyword research.

❒ Google Keyword Planner:

Compared to other keyword research tools, Google keyword planner is the most used and easy-to-use tool.

The data Google keyword planner provides comes straight from Google makes it unique.

It specifically shows the volume of search of the keywords.

❒ Ahrefs keywords explorer

Ahrefs gives in-depth information on each keyword.

It shows you the difficulty of the keywords.

❒ Keywords everywhere:

Keywords everywhere is a paid keyword research tool that displays the data on the top 10 websites.

It also shows the people searching for. The list of keywords that are related to your search item in Google search results.

❒ Soovle

Soovle is a keyword research tool that provides you keyword ideas from Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo, etc.

You can easily save and drop your favorite keyword ideas with Soovle.

❒ MOZ

MOZ is a smart keyword search tool as it shows the lateral keyword ideas.

For example, if you search for a keyword like height in MOZ it will show you the lateral keywords like height gain pills, height gain exercise, etc.

The unique feature of MOZ is that it lets you know how many clicks you can expect to get your target keyword.

❒SEMrush

SEMrush is an all-in-one tool. It specializes in Keyword research, competitor analysis.

SEMrush shows you a list of long keywords that are related to the keyword you entered.

For example, if you enter a keyword height gain which is a short tail keyword and is too competitive,

SEMrush provides you with the long-tail keywords like how to gain height in one week, height gain yoga for adults, etc. which helps you to rank easier.
SEMrush is a free SEO tool for keyword research but with a limit of ten queries each day.

 

What is competitor keyword research?

Competitor keywords are the keywords that are used by the companies or businesses you are competing with, to achieve search engine rankings. Competitors keyword research is the process of finding the competitor’s keywords.

Here is a list of competitor keywords research tools:

▫ Buzzsumo
▫ SEMrush
▫ Spyfy
▫ Ahrefs
▫Adwords Auction insights
▫Tag clouds
▫ WordStream’s a free keyword tool

Since there is a powerful reason you need to do SEO for business, you now have an idea about What should be the first step of a structured SEO plan.

But to acquire more traffic to your websites you also have to increase search engine visibility to your websites.

 

Search engine visibility is the traffic that websites receive from their rankings from the organic results.

if your search engine visibility is not where you want it to be, Here are some tips to improve your search engine visibility:

1. Target on long tail keywords

If your website’s traffic is not what you want it to be, one of the reasons should be you are targeting short-tail keywords that are way too competitive.

This is a mistake followed by the majority of people.

At the time of keyword research, you should be more careful that it is the first step of a structured SEO plan. Remember if your first steps fail, everything you do after that will fail too.

While doing keyword research you should be very aware of super-high difficulty keywords.

So we highly recommend you to focus on long tail keywords as they are less competitive and have high conversion rates.

2) Increase your website’s mobile-friendliness

Unfortunately, most people’s websites are not mobile-friendly and that becomes the main reason for a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google search.

So try to make your website mobile-friendly and user-friendly.

Learn more about how to provide a better user experience in your websites.
You can use Google search console or Google’s own tool to know whether your site is optimized mobile-friendly or not.

3) Improve your title and description tags

The higher your CTR( click-through rate) the higher your site will rank in Google.

For increasing CTR, you should write more compelling title tags and meta descriptions.

By increasing the quality of your title tag you will be able to get more CTR and subsequently, your search engine visibility will increase.

4) Build more backlinks

Backlinks are a must factor to increase your site’s visibility.

So if you want to increase your search engine visibility, build more backlinks to your website

5) Optimize your content

Optimize your content for dwell time.

Dwell time is one of the UX signals Google uses to figure out if the site is a good match for a specific keyword or not.

6) Improve the pages that are ranking on page 2 of Google

Improving your page from page 2 to page 1 of Google is one of the best ways to increase search engine visibility.

For that analyze the website that is on page 2 and figure out how you can improve that website’s SEO. 

7) Add more LSI keywords

Adding more LSI keywords will help your site to increase ranking.

But while adding LSI keywords you should be more aware of it. You should only add the ones which are relevant to your website.

8) Add internal links between pages

Add more internal links between your pages.

What is internal link?

An internal link is a kind of hyperlink that connects to other web pages of the same website or domain.

Increasing the internal link can improve your search engine visibility to an extent.

9) Run a website audit

Your technical SEO is an important part of SEO visibility.

If Google cannot crawl index your site, it will be hard to get ranked.

So you have to do an SEO audit this time by using SEO audit tools.

10) Expand your SERP real estate

Expand your SERP real estate through featured snippets as featured snippets significantly take more space than a traditional snippet.

And helps to show up on top of the page.

Adding a table of content sections at the top of the page will help you to acquire more clicks.

There are SEO tools that help to grow your website.

SEO tools that helps to improve your website.

Here is a list of some SEO tools that help to improve your website:

●Google Analytics
●Ubersuggest
●WooRank
●Ahrefs
●SEMrush
●Screaming frog
●Spyfu
●Moz
●Yoast SEO

 

 

The wrap-up

Since SEO is essential for your website, We hope this post helped you to know about the first step of a structured SEO plan. To learn more from us, stay connected with us.