Building a modern business - Part II - Keyword Targeting

First of all, allow me to address the excessive amount of time between this entry and my previous update. Over a year between updates is not an effective strategy for development. During that period of time a few things have changed, such as starting a new job and moving home. 

Both took up my spare time and did not enable any time for personal development but in particular my change in employment. Additional time had to be spent at home, during my spare time, to understand what I was working with. 

With that part out of the way, let's move onto this update and its subject matter. Improving my keyword targeting.

The website has been live for over a year at this point. During that time there have been minimal content changes or search engine optimisation. Some new journal entries have been added, but nothing that would suggest a specific approach to expanding the content and adding value. This post will focus on keyword targeting and the terms my upcoming batch of content will be based on.

Local notoriety, before global dominance

We’ve all been there. We’ve created a new site or startup and have grand dreams of being known the world over. Global domination is only a few weeks away so I’ll have to work out how I’ll spend my first million. Will I get a Ferrari? Or maybe an Aston Martin?

In reality, not even our own neighbour knows we’re in business. Global domination is going to be tough.

The target for my startup right now should be obvious. Focus my content on my local area, which is Inverness, and build from there. Once there are improvements locally then the plans for global domination can resume… 

Google Search Console is what I will be using to decide on my keyword targeting strategy. Under the performance tab I can see the site is gaining impressions for a number of Inverness-related search terms in the past 3 months.

‘Web design inverness’, which is currently the strongest in terms of impressions. Gaining 622. However, when it comes to ranking, it averaged 48.4. In other words, nowhere near page one, so it may as well not exist when it comes to potential clients looking for a web designer.

The other Inverness-related terms if has been ranking for performed similarly. ‘Inverness Web design’ gained 234 impressions and an average position of 51.9. ‘Web designer Inverness’ was 230 impressions and ranked 58.8 on average. ‘Inverness web designer’ got 215 Impressions, ranking 54.9 on average and finally, ‘Web design in Inverness’ gained 150 impressions and an average position of 40.7.

At this point I can get a good idea of where the site is in terms of performance. It’s way behind the ones I want to be competing with. To move up the rankings the content needs to be much stronger and I need to develop my keyword targeting strategy.

Before I change my content and focus it around specific keywords, I need to find out their value in terms of search volumes. For that, I need another tool. Google Keyword Planner.

Google Keyword Planner

Each keyword listed above seems to deliver 10-100 monthly searches with a medium to low competitiveness rating. This is to be expected for Inverness, considering its size. It’s a tourist ‘city’ that has a general population of around 50,000 so the number of searches, and those fighting for each click, will not be as high as Edinburgh or Glasgow.

Now I have decided on my keyword targeting strategy, whats next?

Expanding old content and writing new

At this point I think the best approach is to add some of the keywords to the existing content where possible. There is a fine line between creating valuable content, and keyword stuffing so I need to ensure I get this balance right to avoid getting a negative effect on my rankings.

Currently, my content is mostly generic with no keyword targeting strategy. I’ve placed some Inverness related content in areas of the site, but nothing that can be considered a targeted approach. 

On the current pages I’ll decide upon a target keyword to focus the content around and modify it to suit. As well as this, I’ll improve the titles and try to structure the content in a way that means pages are not ‘stealing’ traffic from each other.

In conclusion

This push towards improved keyword targeting should hopefully yield improved results. I’ll leave things a few weeks before posting an update, but I think this structured approach to adding and improving content will push the site further up the rankings.

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