Keyword relevancy in practice

Find the keywords that are thematically related to you and your creations, products, and services. 

This above sounds self-evident, but I promise you that when you start digging into keywords, you’ll see, especially in the beginning, how hard it might be ranking for certain terms that are relevant to you, either because of their high volume or difficulty.

When that happens, you’ll maybe want to find keywords and subjects that are not actually that relevant to you but you think you may start ranking for them in search because they are low-volume or low-difficulty keywords. Forget this idea as soon as you think of it. Relevancy is key.

First, the Google algorithm is all about relevancy so if it finds that you are simply not a relevant source for the given subject, it’ll ignore you and put others first.

Second, if by any miracle, you start ranking for a keyword that is not exactly related to your offering, you will be misleading the people who click on your page’s URL in the search results and land on your site and see that you’re trying to tell them, or sell them, something that they didn’t want to hear, or shop. They will quickly leave and won’t buy a thing from you. With all the time you put into optimizing your content for that keyword, that’s the definition of counterproductive, in both hypothetical cases.

So what is it that you should do to find relevant keywords? Think about these, for instance: 

  • What do you do?
  • What type of creator are you?
  • What type of things do you create? 
  • Is there a theme to your art? 
  • How would someone else describe your work? 
  • What topics are related to your craft that you could write about?
  • What would somebody be interested in before/when buying your art?

The answers will lead you to topics, which are often keywords themselves, and other times, you just need to adjust them a bit to turn them into keywords.

In one of the next lessons, I’ll share more details on the different types of keywords that matter (main and secondary, informational and commercial) and where to find them.