Effective search engine optimisation tips

Keywords are often the first thing people associate with SEO. However, we think there’s a lot more to SEO than simple keywords.

The dying myth of keyword density

Stuffing a blog post with trending keywords for the sake of ranking isn’t viable anymore. What may seem like the easy way out, is not always considered best practice. As we know, word trends have a tendency to change quickly, and technology is forced to keep up. When you’re writing a blog post for example, take a moment to choose your keywords wisely and ensure that they’re relevant to your website, as oppose to the latest Google trends.

Know your audience. People are interested in purposeful and thought-provoking content. A blog post with an uninteresting or incoherent narrative faces the risk of losing readers. Writing for humans, not search engines, is a good rule of thumb.

To be clear, we are not suggesting you steer clear of trending keywords, nor that you underestimate the importance of keyword analysis when planning content. Putting thought into carefully selecting certain keywords can often save you time and money. Unless you are a company that is already at the top of search rankings for business related keywords and phrases, trial and error testing for highly competitive keywords may prove to be a challenging task.

At Matter Of Form our approach to keywords is a subset of a broader brand strategy. As a Brand Interactions Agency we firmly believe that a brand needs to have a unique perspective on the world, and live and breathe it through all internal and external touch points.

By delivering a unique point-of-view across all channels, SEO strategy is liberated from a category of many, to competing in a category of one. Using various channels also allows us to fine-tune the keywords in a more time and cost-effective way.

Of course this does not mean the brand can wander into territory that it has no right to enter or own; the business must be able to stimulate value from the move through consumer demand, but also transition into its positioning and hold its purpose with credibility.

To help do this for businesses we use the Matter Of Form ‘opportunity for interaction’ model: A simple device that helps identify the unique intersection in between audience and brand. We use this model to build out a new purpose and positioning for each particular brand and use it to define our keyword strategy.