What Is A Keyword And Understanding The Intent Behind it

What Is A Keyword?

A keyword is simply a search phrase.

So, anything you search for in Google is its own keyword.

Let’s imagine that I go to Google and I search for “best chocolate ice cream”. The keyword in this example would be “best chocolate ice cream”.

A lot of people often get confused and associate keywords with the individual words e.g “best” “chocolate” and “ice cream”, however that is incorrect.

The keyword is the entire search phrase and not the individual words.

To be successful when doing local SEO, you simply need to figure out what your potential customers would search for in Google to find the services that you offer.

So let’s just imagine you’re a business based in Richmond VA and the main service you offer is “carpet installation”. People who are looking to get a new carpet installed that live in Richmond VA would typically go onto Google and search for “Carpet installation Richmond VA”. As a result, that would be one of the keywords that you would want to target on your website.

Instead of just giving you the theory of how to do SEO, I’m actually going to implement SEO on one of my live websites and show you exactly how it should be done step by step. And even better, at the end of the course, this exact same website is going to be on page 1 for all the local keywords we’re targeting! My example website that we’re going to be using throughout the course is called LevelFinish:

Level Finish is a flooring contracting website and targets the city of Richmond which is in Virginia in the USA.

Understanding Search Intent

Search intent, which is sometimes referred to as “keyword intent” is essentially the ultimate goal of the person using a search engine. So, let’s imagine I go over to Google and type in “carpet fitter Richmond”. The search intent for this keyword tells Google that I’m looking to get my carpet fitted in Richmond.

So what does Google do? Google returns listings of carpet fitting companies in Richmond.

However, if I searched for ”how to fit carpet” then this has a completely different search intent behind it. The intent behind this keyword is not me looking for someone to fit my carpet, but it’s me trying to learn how to fit a carpet so I can do it myself.

As a result, the results Google shows you are totally different.

The first search for “carpet fitter Richmond” returns local carpet fitting businesses and the second search returns “how do” videos and blogs talking about how to fit carpets.

Understanding the difference in search intent and creating the correct pages to suit the intent will help you tremendously when it comes to converting your traffic into enquiries and sales.