1. Know your market’s language
At this point, you might already have a list of keywords that you want to optimize for. These keywords could be general terms commonly used to describe your product or your category. You might be thinking that the more general the terms are, the more ground you’ll cover and the more traffic you’ll get.
It could be true that you’re getting high traffic because of generic keywords. However, have you checked how many of these translate to sales? Do they even belong to your target market?
The better you know your market’s language, the better keywords you’ll come up with. Generic keywords attract a generic audience. On the other hand, niche keywords attract your niche market. These people are the ones who will contribute to your bottom line, if you do everything else right.
Find out how your niche talks about your product and others that belong to your category. Visit related blogs, forums, and social bookmarking websites. Participate as much as you can to get more detailed information on how people use and react to certain words.
2. Optimize for words and phrases
After coming up with the list of niche keywords, you can begin to optimize your online content. You can combine the keywords in your list to form niche keyword phrases that more advanced searches use.
For example, an individual interested in owning a dog will initially search for dog for sale. The more information he finds online, the more specific his searches will become. Eventually, his search bar input could become pedigree Yorkshire Terriers with papers. Hence, you need to optimize for both words and phrases.
Although you won’t be able to read people’s minds, being prepared will require very little adjustments in the long run, as opposed to a keyword overhaul every time the market shifts.
3. Strategically place your keywords
Having a niche keyword list also helps you naturally integrate the keywords into your content. It is important that in every article you post, you maintain a conversational tone. Your market does not want to read page after page of sales pitches. They want something informative and relevant. If you can make it naturally entertaining, even better.
It is integral that your keywords appear on your title or headline, the first and the last sentences of your content. Within the body, it would help search engine spiders if you put keywords in bold or italics.
4. Check your keyword density
Keyword density measures the frequency of your keywords relative to the number of non-keywords in your content. The acceptable percentage is 3% to 8% and anything beyond that will be considered spamming by most search engines.
There are free tools online that you can use to compute for your content’s keyword density before publication.
5. Update your keywords
No matter how specific your market is, changes will still occur. The only way for your content to be consistently relevant is if you stay on top of the changes that happen to your niche market.
Regularly come up with a qualitative market research that can give you valuable consumer insight. Keep in mind tip number 1, so that your keywords will always be specific to your niche.