How To Find Keywords For Your Squarespace Website
SEO, or search engine optimization, is how people find your website through Google and other search engines. People can only find your website if you have words on it that are related to what people are searching for.
This process doesn't have to take a ton of time or cost any money. In fact, you can use Google Keyword Planner for FREE to find your website keywords.
What better tool could you use than the one connected with the largest search engine in the world, right?
Here’s how to use it for free:
Use the Chrome browser and open a New Incognito Window.
Go to ads.google.com, then click “Sign in.” Sign in with a Google account and click “New Google Ads Account.”
Now, the trick to get around sharing your credit card:
Click “Switch to Expert Mode.”
Click “Create an account without a campaign.”
Confirm your business settings and click “Submit.”
Then click “Explore your account.”
Click “Tools & Settings” and choose “Keyword Planner” from the drop-down menu.
You’ll get two options:
“Discover new keywords”
and
“Get search volume and forecasts.”
Use the first option to get keyword ideas.
You can now input topics or words related to your business, brand, product or service.
Also, think about:
What words or phrases would people use to find what you offer?
What questions are your customers always asking?
Notice that Google will give you suggestions to broaden your search. This can be helpful to direct you to terms or categories you didn't know about.
You’ll now see different categories:
Your keywords on the far left, then average monthly searches, competition and cost-per-click range.
Keywords that have a high amount of search volume and a high amount of competition are what we would call your primary keywords.
Finding Your Primary Keywords
Primary keywords are the words your business has to go after no matter what.
They are so closely aligned with what you do that it doesn't matter if you aren’t able to rank for them within one month. You want to invest time now so you rank for them eventually.
I recommend finding 50 of these keywords. This smaller list will make it easier for you to cover them within your core pages.
You'll notice two prices, too: These are your PPC or price-per-click prices. Google Adwords allows people to pay to have their content appear on the first page of Google. These numbers give you a high and low range.
If you use Adwords, every time someone clicks your website's link you get charged the price for that keyword.
If the range is high, you can bet that other companies are paying for those specific keywords. Sometimes, even if a keyword has a lower search volume, it might have higher buyer intent.
If I typed in "car dealerships in Bloomington," this is a high buying intent phrase, even though Bloomington is a small town and may not have a ton of monthly searches.
Finding Your Secondary Keywords
You need to get some points on the board, even if they do not have the highest search volume. This is where secondary keywords come into play. These keywords are less competitive but are still related to your product or service. Ranking these words will eventually increase your site traffic and build your search engine rankings.
Shoot for well over 100 keywords here. Think about each keyword set as being worthy of a blog post or its own content page.
Look for keywords with a good amount of searches with low or medium competition.
This makes them easier to rank for.
Apply filters to narrow down the competition category.
Click the “Add Filter” button.
Click “Competition.”
Click matches that say “low” or “medium.”
The more competitive keywords will be removed.
To make it even easier, click “Avg. Monthly Searches” and it will now display keywords from the highest to lowest monthly searches that are also low in competition.
Now select keywords that:
Align with what you offer.
Align with what your audience wants to know.
Notice that as you check off keywords you can add them to a group. I recommend having one group for primary keywords and one group for secondary keywords.
Another way to find keywords is to type in the URL of one of your competitors. If you haven’t already, it’s good to have an idea of what kind of websites are appearing in search results for the terms you want to rank for so you can do it better.
If you go back to the Keyword Planner page, you’ll notice a tab that says “Start with a website.” Click the tab and enter a competitor's URL.
Voila! Now you can see what search terms they rank for. It’s worth creating another list just for the overlapping keywords that you will also need to rank for.
By doing this for a few competitors, you can see the keywords they have in common, as well as the keywords they may be missing out on.
Once you have your primary, secondary, and competitor lists, click “Download Keywords” and you’re good to go.
For now, I would recommend you copy these keywords and put them into Squarespace School’s free fillable Website Design Guide to keep all your content tidy and in one place.
Using Primary Keywords When Website Building
So now you have a list of keywords. As you are writing the website copy for your core pages, you are going to want to include your primary keywords. You’ll want to make sure to use them on your:
Homepage
Services page
About page
Portfolio Page
Contact Page
How NOT to Write Keyword Content on Your Squarespace Web Pages
If you try to spam or stuff keywords by placing them all throughout your site in an unnatural way, this will not help you.
Google is smarter than that.
This will hurt you.
Don't do that.
You will begin to discover how keyword research actually makes you a better writer and business because you are prioritizing the words of the customer when you’re creating content instead of what you think they want.
When you start to think about your content as being helpful and value-driven above all, you are on the right track.
This is the beginning of helping searchers find your content and having it rank on a search engine results page (or SERP for short). However, in order to support these web pages, we are going to have to create content. More on this later.
Also, you don’t have to go at this alone. Schedule a free web design consultation call and I’ll give you an SEO keyword plan specific for your business.
Written by Clint Mally