How to Choose Your Website’s SEO Keywords in 3 Steps

Writing your website content and selecting the design of your website calls for the right side of your brain to step up to the plate. Choosing your SEO (search engine optimization) keywords is where your left side takes center stage. Here, we’re going to review the importance of the right keywords for your website and how to choose yours.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases that users search for on search engines and words that frequently appear on your website. In relation to SEO, good keyword density is between 2 and 4 percent, meaning your select keywords make up 2 to 4 percent of your total content.

Within our website setup, we ask you for your keywords and terms. Based on the keywords you choose, we ensure proper and effective usage on your site. If you’re using our copywriting service, we make include these keywords within your content and the backend of your website.

Why Do I Need Keywords?

While there are no guarantees in the world of SEO, the goal of incorporating select keywords into your website and content helps you rank higher in search engine results. Keywords can help someone search for an advisor in your geographical region or area of specialty by making use of certain words.

How Many Keywords Should I Use?

There’s no specific number, but generally, you want a minimum of three and no more than ten. More keywords don’t necessarily mean more search results. Too many keywords can be seen as excessive and hurt more than they help. Push for a balance of quality and quantity when using keywords. Too many poor words and too few good words won’t help when it comes to correct keyword usage. 

Within your website content, you should aim for your keywords to appear 2 to 4 percent of the time. If you choose ten keywords, it will be hard to organically incorporate ten different words and phrases multiple times within your pages.

How Do I Choose the Right Keywords?

For this task, we’re going to let the analytical side of your brain take the reins. There are thousands of articles on strategies for creating keywords and it can be overwhelming. If you aren’t careful and dive too deep into the rabbit hole of SEO, it can get messy. Here are some steps to help you find the best keywords for you:

Create a List of Keywords

Jot down a list of five to twenty words or phrases that come to mind when you think about your practice and what you do. This is all about instinct, so don’t self-edit. These keywords could be as vague as “financial advisor” and as specific as “IRA rollovers for executives in Walla Walla Washington.”

Narrow Down Your Keyword List

Next, narrow down your list. For vague terms, such as “financial advisor,” “investment advice,” and “retirement planning,” work on specifying them. There are tens of millions of results for these terms. You want to compete in a smaller pool. Look at what happens when we search for “financial advisor” versus “financial advisor San Diego” versus “San Diego advisor:”

This search shows over 75 million results.

 

While this one we narrowed down the results to just over 5 million results by specifying the location where we want to search for financial advisors.

 

Beyond that, we were able to reach under 2 million search results by adding even more specifics.

We learned two things from this search. First, look at how the number of results drops when we add our city. The more specific you can get, the better. Second, we get different results when we add our state. Your keywords can be iterations of one another. So if you’re in San Diego, you may include within your keywords several variations of San Diego, such as “San Diego CA,” “San Diego California,” etc.

Use Specialities to Focus Your Keywords

Now that you’ve selected keywords that include variations of your location, focus on your specialties. What special services do you provide, or what types of clients do you enjoy serving? Try running some Google searches to see the results you get.

For example, some specialty keywords you could use are “financial advisor for affluent families,” “private wealth services,” “financial advice for divorced women,” “IRA rollovers in Dallas,” “Social Security planning for couples in Florida,” etc. The more specific you get, the more likely your site will rank higher in the search results.

Aim to create keywords with at least three words. Ideally, your search terms yield under 1 million pages of content in a Google search. Anything more than 1 million represents a very saturated niche. You’re a true SEO rockstar if you can create keywords with under 100,000 results.

Let’s look at how our results fall far below the 1 million mark when we get more specific:

 

 

Now, let’s try getting really specific:

 

 

But what are the chances that your target client base will search for these terms? While it largely depends on the financial fluency of your client base, you should generally avoid using too technical of jargon that the average investor wouldn’t search for.

Long-Tail Queries

While we’re on the topic of specific searches, let’s take a look at an important variation of SEO. Long-tail queries are long questions on specific topics. For example, “How long should I wait to claim social security?” Long-tail queries make use of very specific questions to rank high in the search results, much like long chains of keywords such as those above. 

To create effective long-tail queries within your content, think of questions that your clients might come up with. If you were in their shoes, what type of questions would you have about your business? What would you like to know? What would you ask?