Keyword Research is one of the first steps to creating an SEO plan for success. There are a numerous keyword research tools that will help you to identify keywords with the highest traffic and conversion potential; however, even with all of that cool data at your fingertips, measuring search volume at the keyword level is only the first step to identifying the best keywords to target your potential blog readers and customers.
Informational Keyword VS Intentional Keyword VS Branded Keywords
It’s important to understand the difference between informational keywords and intentional keywords. This will help you to select which keywords you will need to meet your goals. There are two primary keyword types:
- Informational Keywords are common phrases or questions used for researching a topic or to gain more information. An example would be “How to” questions or something like “What’s the difference between a horse and a pony?”
- Intentional Keywords are used to find a local service or a specific product. Either way, there is some implication that the audience has “intent” to make a purchase in the near future.
- Branded Keywords: Branded keywords are the search words or keyword phrases that include the brand name or a variation of the brand or company name.
- Navigational Keywords: navigational keywords are search query entered with the intention of finding a particular website or webpage. For example, users may enter “PayPal login” or hdfc net banking login into Google’s search bar to find the Paypal.com Login Page or HDFC Netbankign Login page rather than entering the URL into a browser’s navigation bar.
Align Keyword Types with Website Architecture
For an eCommerce business, this is one of the most crucial steps in the SEO process. If your business relies on lead generation or online products sale, you would like to identify intentional keywords for the key pages on your website.
However, if you are optimizing your website to attract blog readers or newsreaders for your news and tutorial blogs you need to focus on identifying informational keywords for your website.
Structuring Your Website Content for Success
As you can see, the Home page, Product or Service Category page, and Product / Service pages are optimized to target intentional keywords. For a local business, these pages are most likely geo-targeted, while an online store will typically start by optimizing their home page with broad – categorical keywords, breaking each sub-level of the site architecture down into more specific categories or products.
Read more: Free Classified Posting Website List for SEO
While businesses generally are more interested in generating leads, it’s a good idea to provide informational resources on your site as well. This is where informational keywords can play a role in your content strategy.
In the example sitemap above, you see two pages optimized with informational keywords:
- FAQ pages are great for SEO. You can load a ton of relevant content on one page while optimizing it for informational keywords with high search volume. Users driven to the FAQ page using an informational query are usually at the interest level of your funnel.
- Blogs are the most powerful SEO tool you can leverage. Consistently publishing high quality, relevant content will most definitely increase search engine traffic, while hopefully picking up a few inbound links in the process.
Conclusion: if you are starting SEO for your eCommerce website and for news/blog websites first identify your keywords and keep in mind that there is a difference between intentional keywords and informational keywords always.
