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So You Have Keywords, Now What?

So You Have Keywords, Now What? 

Having identified what keywords are important to your business (first keyword blog post HERE), our next steps are to narrow down to the best keyword choices and then start incorporating them into your marketing. 

How many keywords can you optimize for on your website?

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts debate how many keywords you should use, but most agree to not use too many. For each page on your website, choose between 1-3 keywords you want to optimize for on that page, which is specific enough that you can pay attention to them but not too overwhelming of a task. 

For example, your farm might produce meat, but individual website pages might talk about butchering, pork products, beef products, etc. Think of picking keywords for these pages as a way to get people to just the right spot on your website (remember to pull out those tools we discussed in part 1). It will be the same for your social media posts. One post might talk about an easy pork breakfast recipe while another might talk about the two breeds of cattle raised and the differences between their beef. Those will have different keywords as well. So rather than aiming for a specific number of keywords, focus on how you are going to use them. Over time, they are going to show if they are working for your business or not.

Where to put your keywords

  • On your individual website pages. 

So let’s say that after some research, you see that homemade ice cream is most searched online but small-batch ice cream also seems popular. You have plenty of room on the actual web page to talk about your product but to emphasize the importance of certain words on a page you can:

  • Use the keywords a few times (aiming for 1-3 times)
  • Bold them or write them in a larger font on your webpage 
  • Link them to other pages

In this example, I have made the start of an ‘about’ page for my homemade ice cream shop. You’ll see how I’ve used formatting to emphasize the ‘homemade ice cream’ and ‘small batch’ and ‘order ice cream’ ideas for the search engines without driving the people reading the website crazy:

  • In the metadata (fancy for: page title, tags, and description) or your pages

Read more So You Have Keywords, Now What?

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Finding the Best Keywords for Your Business 

Has some slick search engine optimization (SEO) person kept saying how important ‘keywords’ are for your website? Think keywords sound too complicated to figure out or impossible to use without being a tech genius? If you would like more people to find your website without spending money on ads, then read on for helpful tips.

Keywords are words you type into a search engine to find information and sites helpful to you. No doubt you’ve typed in a phrase before and, looking at the results, thought “Oh, that’s not it” and reworded your query for better results. Understanding your customer will help you find the best keywords for your food and farm business. 

What goes into picking good keywords?

There are a few factors that go into picking good keywords. Here are several different ways, try the one that is most interesting to you:

Popularity

Using common words that people are familiar with is a first place to start with keywords. We can use tools to help us find related keywords (we’ll get into that below) by starting with a general search. 

For example, by searching ‘microgreens’, we can see other suggested keywords and their relative volume of search. Tip: To create more traffic, use clear words and phrases that people will naturally look for. Keep it simple. 

With this tool “Keywords everywhere” you can see related keywords and how often they are searched.

In the example above, you will see that there are words (or phrases) as well as the volume of search they experience. For example searching ‘microgreens benefits’ gets 1,900 searches in the US. These numbers give us the relative popularity of the words. 

Relevancy

Using relevant keywords to your business will help you narrow down the list of popular options. For example: ‘grow microgreens’ might be more popular than ‘buy microgreens’ but if you aren’t helping people grow microgreens with your products or services, you won’t end up getting the right people to your website. 

My favorite example of relevancy came up while doing keyword research for an environmental non-profit. I discovered that ‘gulf stream’ was a popular search term. When I saw the other relevant searches, I quickly realized the popularity (looking at ‘related terms’ searched) was about recreational vehicles and not the Atlantic Ocean. While putting the words ‘gulf stream’ all over their website might have gotten traffic, that traffic would have immediately clicked away when they realized that the page was not the topic they were looking for. Read more Finding the Best Keywords for Your Business 

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E-Commerce Best Practices

I’m Jeremy Bloom (a.k.a. the Internet Farmer). Being a software nerd of over 25 years, I’ve helped small-scale farmers and food business owners with their online needs. I have experience working on farms and creating some of the first co-op buying software out there. After teaching a class on E-commerce Best Practices for the recent Ag and Food Producers Academy I thought I would share some of the main takeaways. We’ve come a long way in recent years with E-commerce thanks to the pandemic, and in the local food scene it’s become a game changer. It’s been an interesting twist to the online sales world during this odd time in our history. 

1. Cyber Security

This includes your domain name access, usernames/passwords and webmasters.

Control your domain name. 

  • Which means, have a username and password for access to your domain so you can make changes if need be. If you don’t have access, question who you are working with. 
  • Why do you need access? When your site goes down because your friend didn’t renew it and has left to sail the open sea, you’re not going to be happy when you’re offline until they get back.

Manage your usernames and passwords

  •  E-commerce connects to banks, emails, personal customer information, and is the lifeline to your sales. 
  • In many cases, you can set up a user name and password to give limited access to someone you’re working with. It can be a pain, but remember to change the password when the person is done working with you. 
  • Get a password manager like LastPass. This tool saves tons of time on so many levels of managing usernames and passwords.

Friends and family can be webmasters, but not professionally. 

  • Software is fun to tinker with and anyone can set up a domain and website that looks awesome on the surface. But are they thinking of your best interest for the long haul? 
  • Whether it’s your friend, a family member or a webmaster, do not let them set up a domain if you don’t get a username and password to it. You want to have direct control over the billing. 

2. Analytics 

E-commerce helps you see successes and can correct errors in your thinking.

Google Analytics example

Track past performance  Read more E-Commerce Best Practices