Effectively Integrating Search Terms with Articles & Blogs

By Katie Wojciechowski

Integrating popular search terms, or keywords, into your blogs or articles is a great way to leverage SEO for your business—but it can also be a bit tricky to know if you're doing it right. The secret is that there is no secret: it's a combination of research, patience, and a bit of educated guessing. Let's explore some fundamental SEO definitions—what is SEO? How does it work?—and build out a few keyword-related action items for you to apply to your articles and blogs.

What does SEO mean?

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

Most folks go straight to Google, or another search engine, to get their information about everything—from the hours of a neighborhood restaurant to the best point-of-sale system to use in their own restaurant. When they type in (or ask Siri, Alexa, etc.) a question, or a topic they want to know more about, Google's algorithm uses a variety of factors to show the searcher what Google deems most relevant to their search.

Google's algorithm is proprietary, but there are a lot of SEO professionals with insights into how they work. Whether it's keyword strategy, exchanging links with related sites, or more technical tools like schema, there are lots of ways to optimize your website for Google and other search engines, so that your site appears to more searchers.

How can search terms help my content rank better on Google?

One of the ways that Google prioritizes websites, blogs, and articles is through relevant keywords. Say someone is interested in finding out the best accounting software for their start-up software company: if they enter "best accounting software" into Google, Google's results page will serve them a selection of web pages. One of the factors Google's algorithm uses to choose these results? The search term "best accounting software"—if the page or article contains this phrase, Google reasons that it's a helpful search result for what the searcher typed in.

You might be able to see where this is going. Proactively including relevant search terms, also known as keywords, in the copy of your article or blog could help more people find it on Google.

How do I choose which search terms to incorporate?

The best way to choose keywords is to focus on one or two that are, ideally, high volume and low difficulty. This process involves research, and there are some great tools to help you with that. SEO and marketing specialists often use SEMRush, Moz, KWFinder, or Ahrefs to dig into various search terms' popularity on Google.

Once you've decided on the tool you want to use, take a quick tutorial or watch some YouTube videos to get familiar with the platform. In the case of SEMRush, you might use the Keyword Magic Tool to find out more about search terms related to your topic.

Alright, back to the accounting software example. In the Keyword Magic Tool, you might type in various wordings you think users might be searching for if they've got accounting on the brain: "best accounting software," for example. The tool will show you a list of real search terms pulled from Google's recent history, and you can see statistics like how many times per month Google gets this search, and how competitive it is (i.e., is there a lot of other content competing for these same searchers?).

The best keywords will have a high ratio of monthly search volume to competitive difficulty. Maybe the term "best accounting software" already has a lot of content competition, but a slightly more niche term, like "best accounting software for small start- up," doesn't yet. People are poking around the internet for answers about this topic, but no one is really giving great answers—yet! As long as you've genuinely got something to say about accounting software for small start-ups, there's an opportunity for you there.

Incorporating keywords into your articles

So, you've chosen the keyword "best accounting software for a small start up." The next step is weaving it into your article or blog post. Best practice is incorporating the keyword into your article's title, and several times throughout the article. Don't "keyword stuff", though—more is not necessarily better! Google wants to see keywords used in a way that's authentically helpful to the user. Work "best accounting software for a small start up" into your article as naturally as possible.

Maybe your article's title would be "What's The Best Accounting Software for a Small Start-Up?" In the first paragraph of your article, you might include a sentence like "Finding the best accounting software for your start-up can be a bit overwhelming." Then, make sure you include the phrase "best accounting software for a small start up" (or loose variations like "accounting platform" or "accounting for start-ups") a few times in the article.

Congrats—you've successfully optimized your article with keywords! Be sure to track your content's performance in Google Search Console.

Keyword optimization is crucial for any business with an online presence—which, in 2021, is nearly everybody. Even if your actual conversion doesn't occur online, you should still be harnessing SEO tactics to bring folks into the top of your sales funnel. Try incorporating a strategically-chosen search term into your upcoming article—it might be just what your next client or customer is searching for.

Katie Wojciechowski is an SEO and content expert with experience in the online auto sales, vacation rental, and tech education spaces. When she’s not strategizing title tags and sorting spreadsheets, she’s playing with her corgi, traveling in her RV, or writing for fun.