Creating a company website can be both time-consuming and expensive. To make sure it’s worth the effort, it’s important to help your customers find you online more easily. This is where SEO comes into play.
One of the most important elements of SEO is keyword research. These are the terms and phrases people use to find the information they need through Google. Knowing the type of keywords that individuals are most likely to use to find your products and services can give you a significant edge over the competition when optimizing your website and content to include them.
So, how do you get started with this process? This guide will walk you through the ins and outs of keyword audits and how you can leverage them to improve the visibility and ranking of your web pages.
What is a Keyword Audit?
So, what exactly is a keyword audit? Think of it as taking a health checkup for your website, specifically focusing on the relevancy of the verbiage and content structure that you use. It involves looking closely at how you’re presenting information and the impact it has on your ability to attract unique visitors to your site.
However, a keyword audit isn't just about what you're already doing. It's also about exploring what other terms and phrases you could be using to reach even more individuals. This might include new ways to describe your products and services, exploring topics relevant to your industry, and seeing what is working well for your competition.
Why Are Keyword Audits Important?
Although there’s nothing wrong with focusing more on the message you’re trying to deliver and less on the type of words you use to deliver it, a keyword audit is still important. Below are some of the reasons why this is the case:
- Helps You Refine Your SEO Strategy - When you conduct a keyword audit, it helps you to understand what marketing efforts are working and which could be tweaked. Since your keywords will play a large role in your ability to bring in more organic search traffic, they can point you down a better path to take with your content.
- Targets More Relevant Website Visitors - Bringing in “more” traffic doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the “right” traffic. A keyword audit will help you to identify keywords that have the intent you’re looking for. Typically, this means finding keywords or phrases often used to show a willingness to purchase or, at the least, progress well through your marketing funnels.
- Uncovers New Opportunities - Many times, businesses can inadvertently lock themselves into a box by not using a wider range of terms and phrases on their website. Keyword audit helps you to avoid this but gives you a larger amount of semantic words that can be used. While these tend to describe the same points in different ways, they can help you uncover new traffic opportunities simply by saying the same thing in more unique formats.
- Leads to Higher Traffic and Sales - The primary reason for doing a keyword audit is to help you generate more leads for your business. Knowing which keywords are likely to bring you the most qualified traffic increases the chances that you’ll be able to make additional sales.
When Should You Perform a Keyword Audit?
While a quality keyword audit can take a bit of time to complete, the good news is that you really don’t need to perform them too often. However, there are certain times when conducting an audit is highly beneficial. This can include:
- Quarterly SEO Assessments - In most cases, it’s recommended to conduct a keyword audit around every three months. This is a good way to keep a finger on the pulse of your SEO campaigns and ensure that they’re providing the intended results to your web traffic.
- After a Major Google Algorithm Update - Google is notorious for releasing game-changing search engine algorithms that can significantly impact page rankings. While some of these changes can be beneficial, others can cause a considerable loss in web traffic. After any major algorithm change, it’s a wise decision to check on ranking statuses and adjust your keyword strategy as needed.
- Before a Website Redesign - Before you move forward with a website redesign or migration project, it’s a good idea to perform a keyword audit. This helps you to benchmark how your current site is performing against any changes you make to the new site structure. This will help you to identify if the changes you’ve made hurt or helped your ranking efforts.
- When Launching a New Product or Service - When you create a new product or service, you’ll likely be venturing into new keyword territory. Conducting a keyword audit lets you add new terms and phrases to your SEO campaigns that directly target opportunities to bring more eyes and ears to your new landing pages.
Key Metrics Commonly Analyzed in a Keyword Audit
There are various metrics used when conducting a keyword audit. These help to ensure you’re looking at the right combination of relevancy and traffic potential before settling on certain keywords and phrases.
Some of the most commonly analyzed metrics in a keyword audit include:
Keyword Rankings
The most common metric used in a keyword audit is ranking. This shows you whether or not your website shows up after a particular keyword is used in Google. Knowing where and how you rank is important to tell whether or not your content is viewed as useful to Google. Although it’s very common for newer websites to have to take a bit longer to see SEO results, a lack of keyword rankings for too long can mean something important is missing on the site.
SERP Positioning
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are what users will see immediately after typing in a search engine query. From top to bottom, Google ranks the priority of certain pages of content based on its perceived value and relevance. These pages can also have featured snippets that show, which give even more visibility to a site by adding helpful previews of the content. Knowing where your pages land on these SERPs is another important variable to track in a keyword audit.
Traffic and Conversion Rates
While overall traffic is one important metric to track, the most important thing to understand is whether or not that traffic is converting. Knowing the conversion rates of your landing pages and the terms used to land customers helps to ensure you’re moving in the right direction.
Competitive Keyword Analysis
Keeping an eye on competitors helps businesses uncover new opportunities based on the SEO efforts of other businesses. This can give you some great ideas for keywords you might be missing out on or ways to improve your own ranking for keywords you're both targeting.
Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Keyword Audit
To get started conducting your own keyword audit, you should follow some important steps.
Step 1: Define Your Business Goals and Offerings
Getting to the root of what your business is trying to achieve and the audience it’s targeting will naturally help you to choose optimal keywords to track. A big part of this process is identifying what makes you different from the competition and the unique aspects of your product and services.
The deeper you’re able to go during this process will help you to target more meaningful keywords. For example, if your company markets electronic products, identifying all the product and sub-product categories you carry is a good starting point. You might be more focused on computer products and gaming consoles or be segmented into home appliances. In either case, the more you explore each category, the more you’ll discover specific use cases or customer types that you can focus your keywords on.
By getting to know your business better, it will help to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and better understand how they’re searching online for products like yours.
Step 2: Assess Existing Keyword Rankings
After you’ve taken the time to understand your primary ranking objectives, the next step will be to evaluate how you’re currently achieving these goals. This means carefully tracking how each of your content pages are performing and where they rank on SERPs.
While, depending on the size of your website, this process can be incredibly time-consuming, there are helpful tools you can use to streamline your efforts. Commonly used tools for this include:
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Moz Pro
- SE Ranking
These tools are a great starting point for quickly crawling your website and helping you visualize how much visibility and traffic the site is getting. The most important function these tools provide is being able to track your SERP positions over time. This is incredibly valuable during the course of an SEO campaign, as it will help you identify if and when certain initiatives are having an impact on the amount of site visits you get or the sales you make.
Step 3: Conduct a Competitive Keyword Analysis
It’s important to remember that while you’re trying to rank pages on your own website, your competitors are doing the same. This is why there is often a lot of fluctuation when it comes to search results, and they’re rarely the same from one day to the next.
Tracking your competitors over time is an important element for your keyword audits. The good news is that the same tools you use for your own keyword research can be used on your competitor's sites. This lets you see exactly where your competition is focusing their SEO efforts and gives you more information to work with for your own campaigns.
Another important element of competitive keyword analysis is that it helps you to limit your expectations in certain areas. If your competitors have well-established websites with years of credibility behind them, chances are you’ll have difficulties ranking for the same keywords they do, especially if your website is brand new.
Step 4: Use SEO Tools for Deeper Insights
There are a large number of available tools (free and paid) online that can help you get more value from your keyword audits. For starters, free tools like Google Keyword Planner leverage the audience target features of Google's paid advertising platform to help site owners identify more relevant terms for their site based on where they’re located, their industry type, and target audience demographics.
Outside of identifying new keywords to target, tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs go a step further by providing businesses with a comprehensive list of features to help them understand deeper insights related to their site performances. This includes analyzing pages to look for broken elements or loading issues, analyzing backlink profiles, measuring keyword difficulty scores, and tracking all sources of incoming traffic.
Step 5. Identify Areas of Improvement, Opportunities and Ongoing Campaigns
Because of the amount of effort that goes into planning and executing an SEO campaign, it can be easy to get in the habit of becoming complacent when looking for areas to improve over time. However, an important element of a keyword audit is to help create a healthy pattern for tracking and updating your SEO initiatives as the need arises.
Tracking your page rankings is a great high-level strategy for achieving this. While minor fluctuations where your pages end up on SERPs are normal, they can also be a warning sign that larger improvements may be required to maintain the same amount of traffic you’ve been generating.
It’s important to regularly look for opportunities to optimize your existing content or capitalize on new opportunities to publish content on topics that haven’t been covered comprehensively online. You’ll also want to regularly evaluate the quality of the backlinks you’ve gained and work toward continuously improving your link-building strategies.
Troubleshooting Guide for Common Keyword Strategy Issues
Even when you’ve taken the time to carefully plan out your keyword strategy, issues can come up. However, there are certain tips you can follow to mitigate these problems and continue seeing positive results from your efforts.
1. Keyword Cannibalization
Most businesses have different web pages that are focused on similar products and services and, therefore, very similar keywords. This can lead to keyword cannibalization, where you end up competing against yourself for better SERP rankings.
There are certain tactics you can follow to circumvent these issues. One of the best ways to address this issue is to consolidate your competing pages. You can also create better categorization on certain topics, which will allow you to sub-niche topics that don’t necessarily compete with one another.
Another way you can avoid this issue is to only focus on a primary and secondary keyword for each page of content. This keeps the messaging on each page more concise and will help to avoid one page outranking another for the same target phrases.
2. High-Volume Keywords Not Converting
When tracking the metrics for your website, you can get a false sense of security by watching your visit counts increase over a period of time. However, when looking closely, you may find that this increase in traffic isn’t brining you much value when it comes to the amount of leads your gaining or your conversion percentages.
In this case, you may need to take a couple of approaches. The first thing to confirm is that you’re targeting the right user intent in your keywords. If you’re looking to convert more sales, focusing on purchase intent with phrases that use “best of” or “where to buy” can help you to avoid targeting keywords that don’t add much value.
Another think you may want to review is the effectiveness of your CTAs (Calls to Action) on your site. Make sure they’re pointing to relevant pages on your site and are compelling enough to inspire users to take action.
3. Difficulty Ranking for Target Keywords
While certain pages on your website may not take that time to see ranking improvements, others may be much slower or not ranking at all. Depending on the keywords you’re targeting, this could be content related or you may be targeting keywords that are too difficult to rank for.
When conducting a keyword audit, it’s important to take into considering the difficulty ranking of keywords and phrases. Most SEO tools will assign a kyeowrd difficult score based on how many other websites are ranking or competing for these terms. It’s important to steer away from overly generic of highly competitive keywords, as these can take considerable time and resources before you’re able to see any ranking results.
4. New Competitors Outranking You
Over time, you may find that your competitors start to outrank you with certain keywords. This can happen even if you originally were ranked much higher than them in SERPs.
Conducting a thorough competitive analysis can help you identify areas where they’re outshining you. This could be in the way they structure their content, the overall quality and in-depth perspectives they provide, or the amount of backlinks they have pointing to the page.
By identifying the gaps in their SEO approach versus your own, you can start to unpack some of the key areas you should focus to get back your better ranking status.
Keep Your Keyword Auditing Processes Effective
Keyword audits are a valuabe tool for helping you to improve your website's visibility online. By following the guidelines discussed, you’ll be able to identify more webpage ranking opportunities, address potential issues with your site’s structure, and keep your continent relevant. All of this will naturally result in more business leads and increased sales percentages.