The question of how many keywords should you focus on for your homepage, or your blogs, wouldn’t even occur to most business owners. Or Marketing Directors. Or Sales Managers.
As a matter of fact, as a Columbus website design company, we’ve never even had one person ask us about it. However, they do ask if we can get them on page one of a Google search.
So why are we writing about keyword research? Two reasons:
- To educate you, and
- Because we’re total SEO nerds.
If you’re interested in being found on Google, keyword research is critical.
People most likely know the importance of using keywords, but not about the number of keywords they should focus on for their homepage, or blogs.
The more you understand what it takes to appear on page one of Google for your keywords, the more you’ll understand the role we play in that process, as well as the role you play.
Of course, the question “Can we get on page one of Google for our keywords?” is a much larger question that isn’t the focus of this blog. There are so many different elements that need to be addressed for companies in competitive industries, addressing them will the subject for another blog.
“OK, is there is a simple answer to how many keywords I should focus on for my homepage?”
As you might imagine, there isn’t really one simple answer. It’s like asking a home builder “What’s the best number of square feet should I get in my home?” Ask 5 different home builders that question, and you might get 5 different answers.
Ask 5 different Columbus website design companies “How many keywords should you focus on for your homepage,” and the answers you’d get might range from “I dunno, maybe 10 to 20?” to “Only 1.”
But if you ask us, we’d say 2-3. Then, your next comment might be:
- OK, I’m bored. Gotta go…
- Why only 2-3?
- Wait… I’ve heard we can use lots of keywords for our website.
All three of those comments are legitimate, and we’ll address the 2nd one here.
Why you should to focus on 3 keywords on your homepage.
Page Titles and Meta Descriptions.
Those are the words search engines read before anything else on your website. Watch a few seconds of the video below to see how Google uses your Page Title and Meta Descriptions.
SEO experts agree Page Titles should only be 65 – 70 characters and spaces. Why is that? Because that’s all the characters that show up in Google’s search results page.
Since the content on any page is supposed to reflect the Page Title of that page (and vice versa), using 2-3 keywords on your home page makes sense.
“Wait… I’ve heard we can use 100s of keywords for our website.”
This is also a true statement, but…
…using 100 keywords for your site is what happens when you’re running Google Ads, opposed to using them as keywords on your website. You can run Google Ads with the cost-per-click being $30, or 30 cents. The more popular keywords for your industry might cost you $5 or $50, while more obscure ones might be pennies per click.
As you can see from the screenshot below, for one of our main keywords: Columbus web design, Google recommends we pay $32.42 per click. That’s in order to be in the number one position in the “Sponsored” (meaning ads) position. Not that cheap, but if it got us a client or project, definitely worth it.
For 95% of the websites out there, if you used 100 keywords throughout your website, you wouldn’t be able to use them often enough for search engines’ algorithms to make the connection between those keywords and your website. You’d just be spreading your keywords too thin.
Imagine having to write your website’s homepage and naturally incorporate 10 or 20 keywords. That’d be tough. But by focusing on 2 or 3 keywords allows the synapses of the internet to make that connection.
Next step: blogging regularly.
Writing the content for your website for the initial launch, but not regularly blogging, will result in your website not ranking well with search engines.
The more often to update your website (ie: blogging) the more often search engines re-index your website. And the more often you blog, the more likely it is you’ll show up in Google (or other search engine) search results. But that takes time and a commitment to blogging every 2-3 weeks. Once a month at a minimum.
We write 300-word (minimum) blog posts every other week using a variety of keywords. This blog is about 1,000 words.
We also post them on 4 social media platforms. This way, we show up on page one for Google searches part of the time (no, not always) for our keywords. Ours is a very competitive industry, so it’s tough to be on page one every day.
Here’s what not to do for your homepage’s Page Title.
An article on Tactical SEO by Moz had an excellent example of what not to do: overstuff and repeat keywords. Their example was for a clothing store. And if we were to use a fictitious clothing store in Columbus (let’s say “Sam’s Clothing Store), our example of what not to do for keywords on the Page Title, would be:
{ Sam’s Clothing, Sam’s Clothing Columbus, Sam’s Clothing Short North, Sam’s Clothing for Men, Sam’s Clothing Collection }
This practice makes your SEO:
- Not trustworthy from Google’s perspective (it’s called “keyword stuffing” and is a red flag),
- Viewed with suspicion by for those shoppers sophisticated to know what they’re looking at on Google’s search results page, and
- Seen skeptically by other websites that might link back to Sam’s Clothing Store.
And one very important point: No website is too small to benefit from keywords and SEO.
Now that you’ve read this article, you know enough about the exciting world of keyword research to make it work for you!