June 10, 2020

Keywords & Content [Tips From Our Content Director]

Keywords are one of the most important aspects of your SEO journey, as without good, relevant, and researched keywords on your page, Google doesn’t know what your purpose or services are, or when to show you in search results!

This means that no matter how beautifully designed your website is, without great content and relevant keywords throughout…no one will ever see that gorgeous website. And as a company that makes beautiful websites, we want to make sure they are seen!

Keyword 101

Let’s start from the beginning – keywords are words or phrases that your customers are typing into Google when they want to find your industry or services, like: ‘best practices for web design’, ‘SEO agency near me’, or ‘how to do keyword research’.

Make sure you use relevant and local keywords throughout your webpage in order to clearly let Google know what you do and where you do it (are you a local business or do you ship/work around the US or world?).

And though ‘put relevant keywords in your content’ may seem simple, it’s almost so broad that it doesn’t help at all. So, make sure you have keywords in these four places:

Page Titles:

Your page title is one of the most important places for your keywords to appear. Your page title is essentially the page ‘name’ or title that shows on search engine results pages for users to click to visit your webpage. Your page title is the purple text below:

Meta Descriptions:

Metas are the grey text above, showing a snippet of what is on your page. This is a great place to put keywords, so the user knows what to expect. Make sure you have a unique meta for each of your pages – because each of your webpages gives unique information.

Headers (H1, H2, H3):

Your headers are like an outline of your content with H1 being your subject at the top of the page (in the biggest font). You can have multiple H2, H3, H4, and more per page, but only one H1. Since Headers are ‘subject lines’, they are weighted more heavily by Google and therefore a great place for keywords!

Content:

Content is any of the written words on your page. Of course, having your keywords in your H1, Title, and Metas are more visible and therefore most helpful, but if you are going to talk about a subject fully and thoroughly, then these keywords and phrases will naturally be throughout your on-page content as well.

Google likes to see ‘in-depth content’ that shows you know what you are talking about – it’s one of the ways it judges your expertise! So make sure your content is long enough to fully explain your services or products, and has adequate keywords to make the subject clear.

Content & Keywords: Putting it All Together

The content throughout your website is important, but making sure the content on your home page shows your value, or why you are a better choice than all the other companies out there, is paramount. What makes you unique? What benefits do you give? What’s your ‘elevator pitch’ of why someone should choose you over a competitor?

Having at least 700 words on your Home Page is ideal – and this is just a minimum. Remember, Google likes to see ‘in-depth’ content that fully answers a customer’s question or fully informs them.

Look at the below example that ticks all the style, H1, Call to Action, and content boxes for a homepage. Of course, there is more content below the fold – but this is a great snapshot of the ‘first look’ of a homepage.

The above H1 has great keyword placement, as does the H2 and content. Additionally, the banner image (the black and white photo) is clean, attractive, and lends to a modern web design.

Next, the CTA, or Call to Action, leads your customer to your main goal (blue button, or ‘contact’). After you scroll down the page, you should also see sections on:

Who you are (link to your About Page)
Your services/products (link to your Services/Products Page)
Testimonials, awards, benefits, or other trust factors
Updates or connectors at bottom of page (social media, blog, mailing list, contact form)
Try to have all pages of your website represented in small sections on your Home Page

Here are some more content tips for your other pages:

About Page: Having an About Page shows your history and is a great place for your values, why, experience, journey, and purpose. Try to shoot for at least 400-700 words here.

Products or Services Page(s): This should be a keyword rich page, as most people will be searching for a specific service or product that they need. Write a section on each product or service that ‘sells’ it to the customer and includes relevant keywords.

Resources or Blog Page: Content freshness shows you didn’t just ‘make a website and forget it’ but are constantly updating and caring for it. It also allows you to put out new content in the form of blogs or articles where you can put more keywords and inform your readers and website visitors. Aim to write at least one 600+ word post per month.

Contact Page: Unless you are e-commerce, this is the ultimate goal of your website: to be contacted or visited, so make sure you have accurate NAP information: Name, Address, Phone (email or online submission forms are great, too!)

Need Content, Keyword, or Web Design Help? JSL Are Your Trusted Experts for a Reason!

JSL Marketing is your go-to company for web design, keyword research, digital marketing, and content marketing.

Check out our own homepage to see the styles that are most successful for web design lately. Or, see our past work, testimonials, and resources to learn more.

Contact to get your content, keywords, and more in tip-top shape!

March 09, 2020

Content Marketing 101 – The What, The Where, & The Why

Content marketing is more than just putting some words to the page or writing blogs. Content marketing actually covers all of the words you read on a screen. From website copy to emails, case studies and white papers and yes, even blogs.

Here are just a few of the areas that content marketing can include:

Website Copy – think keywords and your brand’s unique online ‘voice’
Blogging – answers, articles, information, and entertainment
Emails – from personalized to automated, email marketing is content marketing
Infographics and eBooks – writing to inform and creating lead magnets along the way
Scripts – video is huge, and writing for your video scripts needs just as much care as designing them
Case Studies – these tell your company’s story, successes, services, and build trust
Social Media – every tweet, post, or photo caption should reflect your business and your voice

Content Marketing for Any On-Page Copy

The words on your website aren’t just for your customers, in fact, in order to even get those customers, you should be writing with Google in mind.

A large part of content marketing is, of course, the keywords – but where should you put these keywords? How many? And how many should you even target per page? Luckily, we’ve been at this for a while, and we know just how to craft the perfect content for your webpage.

Keywords

We recommend targeting 3-5 keywords (or keyword phrases) per page. Make sure you have your keywords in these four locations for the biggest impact:

Page SEO Titles: Your page title is one of the most important places for your keyword to appear. Your page title is the purple text below and is the ‘title’ that shows on search engines for users to click to visit your webpage. Each page of your website should have a unique title between 40-60 characters that includes relevant keywords for that page. A recommended formula is: Page | Relevant Keyword | Company
Meta Descriptions: Metas are the grey text above, showing a snippet of what is on the page. This is a great place to put keywords, so the user knows what to expect on the page. A good meta is between 140-160 characters, too short and you are wasting prime real estate, too long and it will be cut off by Google. Like titles, metas should be unique to each page.
Headers (H1, H2, H3): Your headers are like an outline of your content with H1 being your subject at the top of the page (in the biggest font). You can have multiple H2, H3, H4, etc per page, but only one H1. Since headers are ‘subject lines’, they are weighted more heavily by Google and a great place for keywords! Instead of having your H1 be your name (JSL Marketing) use keywords (Web Design & Digital Marketing That Convert | Dallas Web Design) as this gives multiple keywords and includes location factors. Keep headers under 70 characters for the best results.
Content: Content is any written word on your page, the text you read. Of course, having your keywords in your H1, title, and metas are more visible and therefore most helpful, but if you are going to talk about a subject fully and thoroughly, then these keywords and phrases will naturally be throughout your on-page content as well. Google likes to see ‘in-depth content’ that shows you know what you are talking about – it’s one of the ways it judges your expertise!

Blogging

Blogging is essentially like on-page content, in the way that it is a new ‘page’ you are able to create weekly that gives you more space for content. This content can teach, entertain, or inform your readers and should be both in-depth and keyword rich – just like your webpage copy.

If you can write a solid Home, About, our Services page, then you can create a great blog too – just remember to update it often (weekly or at least monthly) and provide helpful topics related to your industry. You really are trying to give value to your readers when you write a blog, so give them useful and actionable information!

Email Templates

Email templates should be personable and personalized – because no one wants a generic email sent out to thousands. And if that’s what they think yours reads like, it will go right into the trash bin

Write in a conversational way, show your value, and never be pushy. Writing emails or email templates are less about keywords, and more about making connections and (once again) giving value to your readers.

Scripts

As video marketing grows and shows no signs of slowing, then the art of creating content for scripts must also be growing, right? Unfortunately, a lot of people write scripts like they would an email template, with little thought towards SEO. But actually, the words you say in a video can and should be uploaded as the transcription. And if they are words on a page, then Google is reading it!

Think of your scripts for videos more like blogs than email templates, as you are producing content that gets ‘read’ by Google and should therefore include relevant keywords and have a length that shows you know what you’re talking about.

Additionally, make sure you are still being friendly, conversational, and interesting, as most people don’t want to watch a droning 15-minute video that will put them to sleep.

Contact JSL Marketing Today for More Tips, Help, or Our Professional Content Marketing Services

We’re here to help you in any way you need, whether that be an on-page content audit, information about digital marketing, email marketing or blogging, or in case you want someone to take the whole project off your hands so you can focus on your business.

We are here and we are ready to help!

Contact JSL Marketing & Web Design to start your content journey today!

October 25, 2019

Keyword Research Fully Explained (From Start to Finish)

Keyword research isn’t as scary as it sounds – in fact, we like to explain it with a stock market analogy: you research the stocks (keywords), buy them (implement them on your site), and monitor the market (monitor your rankings). That makes it sound quite easy, right?

The phrase ‘keyword research’ gives many the same feelings as ‘dissertation’ but it really can be summed up in just three simple steps, three steps that JSL Marketing & Web Design would love to share with you.

Of course, everything takes practice, and our keyword researchers and SEO gurus have thousands of hours of practice – but that doesn’t mean you can’t understand the process too!

Let’s dissect keyword research together, and hopefully, make it a little less intimidating.

Step One: Understanding Keyword Research

Before you can begin creating your SEO strategy, it’s important to be absolutely sure that the proper keyword research has been done. But what is keyword research exactly?

In short, keyword research involves determining what words or phrases are being searched by your target audience – or, put more plainly – what are your customers typing into Google currently?

Let’s say you sell tacos (yay for you!), what words would your taco-searching customers be typing into their preferred search engine in order to find your restaurant? Maybe they’re searching for phrases like ‘best tacos in ___’ or ‘Mexican restaurants near me’.

If you are in the area, then you want to be sure that your business pops up at the top of the search results for searches/phrases (keywords) like these. Otherwise, you’ll never be found.

After you know the words/phrases (keywords) your customers are already searching for, you are ready to begin using SEO to climb your business to the tippy-top of those searches. By being in the top three results, you can beat out your competition and bring more traffic to your website.

Step Two: Prep & Strategy

This step involves discovering what those frequently-searched words are from above. After all, what if only 3 people are searching ‘best tacos in ___’ a month? That will hardly help your business when the average price of a taco is just a couple dollars. The keywords you want to target should not only be relevant to your industry, but also have high search volume, meaning lots of people are searching for it.

Let’s say ‘best tacos in ___’ gets 15 searches a month, but ‘best tacos near me’ gets 1,500. Which one should you be targeting on your site? Obviously the second, right?

Knowing some of these key analytics can guide you in the correct direction – which means you have to have an analytics tool. We recommend SEMrush, but there are many options out there (in fact, a simple ‘keyword research tool’ search on Google will give you many great tools of differing price points).

Step Three: Implementation & Content Calendars

Now by this step you know what keywords are, you know how to research them to find the one that works best for you and will give you the best return on your investment, but what do you do with them?

You use them, of course!

First, we usually create an editorial calendar, or a content calendar, where we show our clients exactly what we will be posting on their behalf, and when. Everything we post for them will include direct keywords or what’s called ‘semantically related keywords’ which are similar enough that Google can recognize and helps both the SEO and the readability of the content.

Next, we begin to work on their content, making sure that the keywords that have been selected and researched show up in their H1, H2, H3s, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, copy, etc. Of course, this could get weird if you just keep writing ‘tacos, tacos, tacos’ over and over, which is why we usually recommend 4-5 keywords targeted per page.

This means one H2 can read ‘The Best Taco’s in ___’ and the next can read ‘Desperately Searching for ‘Tacos Near Me’? Search No More!’ and so on.

And after you implement your keywords – all you have to do it wait, monitor, tweak, and repeat. SEO is a constant process, and though it’s time-consuming, it isn’t overly difficult to learn.

See, Keyword Research Isn’t So Bad! Not Convinced? Want Someone to Do It for You? JSL Marketing & Web Design Is Here!

If you don’t have the time to discover and learn a research tool, find your keywords, make a calendar, implement your words on your site, and monitor your rankings – you’re not alone! JSL Marketing works with many clients who understand the basics of keyword research and SEO but just don’t have the time to do all the work or practice enough to become efficient.

I mean, you have a business to run, right? We think that’s work enough.

Contact JSL Marketing & Web Design today to learn more about our SEO Packages, custom packages, pricing, and strategies.

Tag: keywords