But putting together a keyword strategy for your website can be difficult.

How do you determine which keywords to target? How do you optimize your content and improve your search engine rankings?

Keep reading to learn more. In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at how you can put together a solid keyword strategy and drive more organic traffic to your website.

1. Look beyond search volume

92.42% of keywords get ten searches or less per month.

Source

Looking at the search volume makes sense. If you don’t target the right keywords, you risk investing a lot of time and effort into ranking for terms that barely drive any traffic.

However, search volume shouldn’t be the only metric that you look at when conducting keyword research. You also need to consider other factors like purchasing intent or how likely visitors are to make a purchase.

As an example, the keyword “restaurant pos software” gets an estimated 100 to 1,000 searches per month, according to Google’s Keyword Planner tool. 

You might think that targeting this keyword wouldn’t be worth it, but Google’s data shows that companies are bidding between $16.70 and $59.64 for this particular search query.

Why is this important?

Because keywords with a high cost per click (CPC) often indicate high buyer intent. It’s why companies are willing to spend up to $60 for just one click.

Ranking for these types of keywords can be extremely profitable for your business. But you might miss out on them if you only look at search volume.

2. Target long-tail keywords

If you’re just getting started with SEO or your website is still relatively new, it can be difficult to rank for your keywords.

One way to drive more immediate traffic is to focus on long-tail keywords — search queries that consist of three to five keyword terms.

The following chart shows examples of short and long-tail keywords:

Source

The phrase “SEO consultant” is an example of a short tail keyword and “Saint Louis SEO consultant” is an example of a long-tail keyword.

Here’s why you should consider long-tail keywords in your keyword strategy:

• Easier to rank: Long-tail keywords are generally easier to rank. For example, trying to rank for the term “shoes” would require a sizable investment. In contrast, it’s much easier to rank for a long-tail keyword, like “which type of shoes are best for running?”
• Higher buyer intent: Long-tail keywords are examples of high intent keywords. For example, the term “best business laptop under $1,000” is far more likely to result in a sale than “laptop.”

One way to find long-tail keywords is to simply type your seed keywords into Google. Then the results will automatically display a list of suggestions.

These are all potential keywords that you can create content around. You could even include long-tail keywords into existing pieces of content to improve their relevance.

As an example, this post on promo codes uses a relevant long-tail keyword as a header:

Source

Whether you’re creating a new piece of content or optimizing an existing article, be sure to use your long-tail keywords naturally and only when it makes sense to do so.

3. Answer the user’s search intent

Google aims to provide the most relevant results for each query. If you want to give your keywords the best chance of ranking, you must consider search intent.

For example, someone searching for “pizza near me” is looking for a restaurant that can deliver pizza. Likewise, someone searching for “best hiking shoes” is looking for information to help with a purchasing decision.

There are four types of search intent:

• Navigational: The user is looking for a specific page or website. Examples include “Facebook” and “Expedia.”
• Informational: The user is looking for information. They’re searching for queries like “how to,” “what is,” and “where is.”
• Transactional: The user is looking to make a purchase. Examples include keywords like “where to buy” and “cheap [product].”
• Commercial: The user is researching a purchase. Examples include keywords like “review” and “best + [product].”

This article, “What is a data pipeline?” does a good job at answering search intent:

Source

Users want to learn more about data pipelines, which the post covers in detail. It also includes relevant internal links for visitors who want additional information.

Search for your target keyword and look at the search results on the first page to better understand the search intent. Then make sure to answer the user’s intent with your content.

4. Create topic clusters to establish authority

Instead of focusing extensively on keywords, another strategy you can use to boost your rankings is to create topic clusters.

Topic clusters are a group of content that provides a comprehensive overview of a topic. They’re more difficult to create, but they’re one of the best ways to build your authority online.

Here’s an example of how topic clusters look:

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 Topic clusters are made up of the following:

• Pillar page: A pillar page acts as a central “hub” and provides a broad overview of a topic. It answers questions about a topic but links internally to articles about specific subtopics for visitors to learn more.
• Cluster page: A cluster page provides a more in-depth overview of a topic that relates to the pillar page. It answers a specific question about a topic and links back to the pillar page.
• Internal links: Internal links from the pillar pages to the cluster pages and vice versa are important. They send a signal to Google that each page in the cluster is related. Each internal link should also include appropriate anchor text.

A pillar page might target a broad keyword like “workout routines.” Then you might have cluster pages for the following:

• “Workout routine to build muscle”
• “Workout routine to lose weight”
• “How to create your own workout routine”

This article on “student bank accounts” is an example of a cluster page. It’s linked from a pillar page which provides a broader overview of the subject.

Source

A visitor on the main pillar page can click through to learn more about the best bank accounts for students and what to look for.

When creating your own topic clusters, include internal links and relevant anchor text. Of course, always answer the search intent and provide value with your content.

5. Include LSI keywords and synonyms

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords are terms that are closely related to your main keywords. They help search engines understand what your page is about.

When Google’s crawlers “see” terms like apple, cake, vitamin, and green, it knows the page is about fruit. But when it sees keywords like apple, computer, iPhone, and product, it knows the page is about the technology company.

Adding semantically related keywords provides Google with more context on the topic you’re covering. It can also drive more organic search traffic to your site.

Enter your seed keyword into Google’s Keyword Planner tool to identify related terms.

Here’s an example of keywords that the tool generates for the term “outdoor furniture.”

Another way to find semantically related terms is to search for your keywords in Google and look at the sites in the top results. Look through the content and note any keywords that appear frequently.

Don’t forget about synonyms, which are terms that have similar meanings (e.g., “small” and “little” mean the same thing).

Google even has a synonym system (which it states took over five years to develop) that allows its ranking algorithm to match queries with pages that contain words with similar meanings.

Source

If you search for “how to replace a light bulb,” Google will deliver results on “how to change a light bulb” because its system understands the terms “change” and “replace” are similar.

Aim to include both semantically related terms and synonyms throughout your content. But make sure that you’re still fulfilling the original intent of the keyword.

6. Establish your content structure

Establishing a content structure before you start writing improves readability and helps search engines understand what your content is about.

Start by identifying the main keywords you’re targeting. Then break that topic into subtopics, which you’ll use as headers.

One way to identify subtopics is to search for your keywords and look at the “People also ask” section on Google.

Here are questions that people are asking for the search query “central air conditioning.”

These would all make great headers that you can use to create a basic structure. Targeting these phrases will help drive more organic traffic to your site.

This Marriage 365 review offers a good example of an optimized structure. It uses headers to break up the content and includes relevant keywords to help search engines understand what the page is about. 

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What’s more, visitors to this page can click any of the links in the table of contents to jump straight to the section they want to learn more about.

7. Add visuals like images and videos

Nobody likes to read large blocks of text. Adding visuals to your content is a must, as it’s a proven way to increase user engagement and keep visitors on your page for longer. 

In fact, a study from SEMrush found that blog posts with at least one image get two times more traffic than posts that contain text only. They also get 30% more shares on social media and 25% more backlinks.

As an example, Ultimate Meal Plans makes good use of images on its homepage for its most popular meal planning recipes:

Source

Make sure to add multimedia like images, infographics, charts, and even videos to make your content more engaging.

Don’t forget about alt text — short descriptions that describe your images. 

Adding alt text is beneficial from both a usability and search engine standpoint. If your images fail to load, visitors will see the alt text as a caption. It can also help you drive traffic from Google Images.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says about adding alt text to your images:

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-conversation=”none”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Alt text is extremely helpful for Google Images — if you want your images to rank there. Even if you use lazy-loading, you know which image will be loaded, so get that information in there as early as possible &amp; test what it renders as.</p>&mdash; ? John ? (@JohnMu) <a href=”https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1036901608880254976?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 4, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Every bit helps, so make sure to add descriptive alt text to all of your images.

8. Optimize for mobile devices

More people are browsing the web using mobile devices than ever before.

Your website’s design and functionality must be mobile-friendly. If users have to pinch and zoom to read through your content, most will simply tap the back button. These signals can negatively impact your rankings for mobile searches.

Google offers a helpful mobile-friendly test tool. Simply enter your URL and click the “Test URL” button to see if your site is optimized for mobile devices.

Here are the results that we get for Real Thread:

The site has passed the test, and we can even see how it looks on mobile devices.

If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then consider implementing a responsive design — a grid-like structure that dynamically adjusts to fit all screen sizes. This will ensure that users can access your site whether they’re on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

9. Create an action plan and track your results

With the information above, you can start putting together and implementing a keyword strategy that drives measurable results. Consider using a knowledge base and a task management tool to track your progress and keep your team on the same page. 

Of course, make sure to also track your results against your marketing goals. Then continue to refine your keyword strategy as you get more information.

Don’t be afraid to pivot your keyword strategy. As your business grows, you may add new products or remove entire product lines. Make sure to revisit and adjust your keyword research document accordingly.

Conclusion

Ranking in the search results is harder than ever.

You can’t simply create a piece of content, sprinkle some keywords, and expect it to drive traffic the next day. You need to take a more robust keyword strategy to increase rankings and drive organic search traffic to your pages.

Start by implementing some of the tips covered here to help you develop a keyword strategy that works for your business. This includes targeting long-tail keywords, creating topic clusters, including semantically related keywords, and adding quality visuals to your content.

Once you have a solid keyword strategy established, you’ll be able to create a repeatable process that drives measurable results for your business.

The post How To Master Your Keyword Strategy To Increase Your Rankings appeared first on Botsify.

This is what often inspires businesses to build their own chatbot. But hold your horses there. Chatbots aren’t a miracle solution either. Best case, they’ll free up employee resources and help convert visitors into customers. Worst case, visitors won’t want to engage with it and bounce off your website. 

The wide disparity between good and bad chatbots comes down to one thing: UX design. While graphical user interface design is well-established, these best practices don’t always translate to chatbots. Remember, chatbots are dynamic systems that need to imitate humans somewhat to get the job done.

In this article, we’ll uncover the best UX practices for building user-friendly chatbots that engage your website visitors. 

The Value of Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the most cutting-edge applications of Artificial Intelligence today, helping both users and businesses achieve their desired tasks in less time. 

Chatbots help users by:

Improving response times 

Helping users achieve their goals faster by making customer service more personalized, and available 24/7. 

Decreasing mental load

Rather than directing users to a Help Center filled with countless articles to complete a simple task, chatbots can direct more impatient or less tech-savvy users through these steps in a fraction of the time.

Chatbots help businesses, on the other hand, by:

Increasing productivity 

Freeing up employees from mundane tasks, so they can focus their energies elsewhere.

Lowering overhead

Decreasing business expenses due to not needing as large a support team to service customers. 

Reducing bounce rates

If your business struggles with high website bounce rates, implementing a chatbot could help to engage new visitors with questions before they leave. Do keep in mind that this won’t solve the issue directly, as you’ll also need to implement user monitoring tools and perform A/B tests on your website design. But asking questions and getting direct answers from users will help to improve your understanding of their motivations, including why they clicked through to your site and whether they are actually interested in your offer. 

Humanizing their brand 

Many businesses come across as faceless corporations to their users. As a result of this, users might grow disengaged or even suspicious of the company in question. Chatbots can remedy this issue by providing a business with a unique voice and tone that users can engage with like they would a real person. 

But before you dive head-first into building your chatbot, you need to make sure that it’s the right tool for the job. 

Building Engaging Chatbots

Yes, chatbots are one of the many tools you can use to automate business processes. But does it make sense for your customers? 

Here are two major cases in which users happily engage with chatbots:  

1. Executing a simple task quickly. For example, booking an appointment. 
2. Getting a piece of information that would’ve otherwise taken a while to find. For example, an answer that’s deeply hidden in the self-help portal. 

The commonality among these two use cases is: saving time. So, a chatbot should save time for both your employees and your users. It’s this win-win scenario that will increase the chances of your chatbot being adopted. 

Here’s another pro-tip for your business needs. Chatbots are used at the beginning of the sales funnel to answer any kind of questions from potential clients, right? Well, make sure that any requests are also integrated into your sales tracking software so that you can follow up with leads. 

As an example of this, take a look at the marketing automation software ActiveCampaign’s live chatbox. 

(Image Source)

It doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles you’d typically associate with a chatbot, but you could nonetheless argue that it’s a chatbot. Why? Because it’s prompting you to enter an input in a natural language, which it then uses to perform a function (redirecting you to the right person). 

As you can see, the lines are a bit blurry when it comes to distinguishing between what is or isn’t a chatbot. But forget the semantics and get creative with the use cases instead. You could, for example, use the conversation analytics from chatbots in your content planning process. In doing so, you’ll be able to create more personalized content that will address your audience’s most frequently asked questions.

When it’s all said and done though, all that matters is that you’re providing a better experience for the user. So with that out of the way, let’s dive into the top UX practices. 

1. Manage the User’s Expectations

Chatbots create the illusion that they fully understand humans. These expectations can make or break the experience. For example, if the chatbot prompts the user to input a weekday, the user might do so in their natural language. 

For example, the user might input “Monday” instead of 06/07/2021. Now, imagine the user’s frustration if they get an error message right after this input. 

Let’s look at another example. If a user is trying to execute payment and the chatbot requires the currency formatting to be “$19.00” instead of “$19,” they should make that clear from the get-go. 

A back-and-forth between a human and a chatbot can never be engaging if it’s riddled with errors. 

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2. Looks Matter for Chatbots

Humans rely on faces to understand and anticipate each other’s actions. This is so crucial to our ability to empathize that we even anthropomorphize inanimate objects. 

Chatbots are no exception. 

Many companies have chatbots that are face-less or represented by their logos. But this only alienates the user. Your best bet is to put a face to your chatbot. It could be a human, animal, or robot. 

But you can never go wrong with adding a human face, like this route planning software is doing. Your visitors will then have the feeling of talking to a real person instead of a bot.

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On the flip side, you could do away with the idea of giving your chatbot any character, and let it guide your website visitors to other humans instead. For example, in this in-depth Nextiva review, FastCall gives you the opportunity to talk to an expert through their chatbot. 

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When you click through to Salesforce AppExchange and click on “Chat with us”, the chatbot will prompt you to enter your email before being connected with a member of the FastCall team. 

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The key takeaway here is that if you can’t add personality to your chatbot, then there’s no need to fake it. Instead, use your chatbot as a straightforward middle man between the website visitor and your sales or support team.

3. Make the Chatbot Intuitive 

When a customer starts speaking with your chatbot, no time should be wasted on learning how to use the chatbot itself. This ties into the first principle of managing expectations: don’t make the user guess.

Even something as simple as resetting the chatbot should be obvious. In traditional user interfaces, we have a home button. With chatbots, there’s no standard solution to this issue. But as an example, you could configure a keyword like “help” to present a list of general options like starting over. Or you could also have the chatbot ask whether to reset the conversation after a task was successfully completed.

A great idea to start the conversation with your customers is to ask directly for the email address in case anything goes wrong with the connection. This way, you’ll be able to reach out to them in a different way. An inspiration from this fireplace store: 

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Whichever approach you choose, it shouldn’t be something the user has to think hard about. As an alternative to implementing all these complicated conversation flows, you can simply have your chatbot send the user’s information to your busy agents. 

Richter Studios, a video production agency in Chicago, does this through a form on their website, which captures contact details from potential customers while the main staff are away. 

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4. Give the User Time to Read

One of the often-mentioned benefits of building chatbots is that you don’t have to spend time designing a graphical user interface. So what ends up being one of the most overlooked aspects of chatbot UX is the reading experience itself. 

Chatbot UX may require fewer resources, but as you’ve no doubt seen throughout this article, there are still subtle ways to mess up the user experience. Just think about it: reading takes place on a screen, which means that it’s constrained by screen dimensions, which in turn, can become a problem depending on the:

• Font sizes
• Line spacing
• Message length

Since correcting the first two issues is simple enough, let’s focus on message length.

Every user reads at a different pace, some slower and some faster. But to err on the side of caution, your chatbot should give the user enough time to process each message before sending the next. It’s pretty distracting for the text to keep moving while you’re reading, all because the chatbot doesn’t pause between messages. 

While there’s no set wait time, two or three seconds is a good baseline. 

You should also keep in mind that the exact wait time should depend more on the length of the message. Hence, the shorter the message, the shorter the wait time. 

Another good rule of thumb is to have no more than three lines per message. Aside from this, you can also program the chatbot to increase its wait time with each additional message. 

One of the most insightful ways to test whether your chatbot is sending excessively long messages to users is to try your chatbot on different devices. If you find yourself having to scroll up just to read the entire message, then the message is in fact too long. A final point to keep in mind is that users often have their keyboards popped up on their mobile devices. This again hammers home the principle of making your chatbot’s messages as short as possible. 

5. Choose Words Wisely

Traditional user interfaces are primarily visual. But the chatbot experience, on the other hand, is completely dictated by words. Here are a few wording principles every chatbot should follow.

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Be clear, not clever 

This comprises two practices. First, don’t reinvent the linguistic wheel. Use the same words that your audience uses to describe things. Anything else will surely confuse. 

For example, in a flight booking scenario, use the terms “departure” and “return” rather than “inbound” and “outbound.” Second, keep your sentences at a sixth-grade reading level. 

Confirm by asking 

A good chatbot will be able to take into account the various nuances of English grammar and still serve customers who don’t speak English as their first language. But no matter how well-designed, errors are an unavoidable part of the chatbot experience. How errors are corrected makes all the difference. 

For example, if Alice states that she wants to send a payment to Bob, the chatbot should confirm this by asking something like, “Send this payment to Bob?” That way, in the event of an error, the user can easily deny this action. 

The question determines the response 

Two otherwise identical questions, worded in slightly different ways, could result in different answers. To optimize for error avoidance, pay careful attention to words such as: “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where.” 

Continuing from the last example, if the chatbot prompted Alice with “Who do you want to send your payment to?” she will probably answer with a person. But if the chatbot were to ask, “Where do you want to send this payment?” she might think to answer with a location instead.  

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Getting Your Chatbot Adopted

As we approach 2022, Artificial Intelligence will continue to pervade every aspect of our personal and professional lives. 

The key, however, to getting your chatbot adopted by users is to make them as easy to talk to as a support agent. So mind these tips as you build your bot. If you’re still struggling to implement UX best practices into your chatbot, taking a course might help. Masterclass has several interesting courses on UX design and how to optimize your site for a better user experience.

The post Top 5 UX Practices for Building Engaging Chatbots appeared first on Botsify.