How to Choose Keywords and Optimize SEO for Websites

"Know yourself and your enemy, and you will never be defeated." This ancient wisdom is highly applicable when organizing information for foreign trade websites. Keywords play a crucial role. Understanding the needs of our target users allows us to create more valuable website content. Therefore, keyword research and analysis is also a process of understanding user needs.

We can use a variety of keyword tools to analyze the keywords that "potential target customers" might search for, not just product names. This is because competitive product keywords are mostly dominated by major foreign brands or platforms on the first page.

We should categorize these keywords as comprehensively as possible, organizing them into a table that includes not only well-known terms but also those that target customers are likely to search for.

Step One: How to Uncover Long-Tail Keywords

I have summarized several characteristics of long-tail keywords:

• Traffic: Long-tail keywords have a certain amount of user searches, though the search volume is smaller.
• Specificity: They are more detailed and specific, building upon core keywords.
• High Conversion: Visitors searching for long-tail keywords are more likely to convert because their product needs are more relevant.
• Abundance: There are many long-tail keywords, and we can uncover numerous high-quality long-tail terms.
• Ease of Optimization: Long-tail keywords face much less competition compared to core keywords, making it easier to rank for them.

It's important to note that we should not only focus on long-tail keywords and ignore core keywords.

The recommendation is to initially use long-tail keywords to gradually build the website's optimization structure and weight. Then, begin optimizing core keywords. For a new site, Google’s "understanding" starts from zero, and optimizing for popular keywords right away is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

As our website gradually gains rankings and traffic through long-tail keywords, it will accumulate some weight and ranking. The next step is to tackle more competitive core keywords.

Step Two: Types of Long-Tail Keywords

a. Question-Based Long-Tail Keyword Strategy

Many long-tail keywords are in the form of questions, often containing words like "how," "what," "when," "where," "which."

This form of keywords is very common in search engines and has the following advantages:

1. Less Competitive: These keywords are often overlooked by competitors since they are not direct product terms, resulting in lower competition.

2. Relevant to Potential Target Customers: These search terms have a certain conversion rate. Users searching these questions on Google have specific needs, and providing detailed answers directly addresses their pain points.

3. Comprehensive and In-Depth Content: Optimizing pages for these keywords allows for detailed and targeted responses, making content creation straightforward and thematic.

4. Abundant and Easy to Uncover: A single core keyword can generate many related questions, leading to numerous long-tail keywords.

By designing high-quality long-tail keyword pages with rich content, clear layout, and good internal optimization, we can create a significant source of Google search engine traffic. The more such pages we have, the higher the traffic proportion they will occupy on our website.

It's important to ensure that each page has unique content. Different angles can be used to expand thematic keywords, creating differentiation between pages.

For example, if you have a product that can be expanded into 50 related directions, it means that one keyword can lead to 50 corresponding pages. By creating a content-rich, high-quality page daily or weekly, many keyword expansion pages will emerge over a month or quarter.

How to Effectively Identify Long-Tail Keywords for Foreign Trade Websites

Method 1: Expand Keywords Using Search Engine Autocomplete

Search engine autocomplete is currently the most direct and effective channel for keyword research. Utilizing it well can help our foreign trade websites uncover the long-tail keywords, question-based keywords, and thematic keywords mentioned in the previous article.

Here are some characteristics of search engine autocomplete suggestions:

• The suggestions displayed are highly relevant to the keywords you are searching for.
• These suggestions have a certain search volume since they are based on actual user searches.

Usually, Google only shows 10 related search suggestions. Here is a "trick" shared by an experienced foreign trade marketer to uncover more keywords:

"When searching for a keyword, input a space and add an English letter from a to z, or a number. Each time you add a different suffix, the dropdown results from the search engine will display expanded keyword suggestions."

Using this method, we can uncover a vast number of long-tail keywords.

Method 2: Use Search Engine Autocomplete to Identify Question-Based Keywords

We can use wildcard characters "*" on Google to uncover question-based long-tail keywords related to core keywords.

Most question-based keywords typically start with words like "how," "what," "when," "where," and "which." We can take advantage of this.

Enter in the Google search bar: How * keyword

Google’s autocomplete suggestions will show questions starting with "How" that are related to the current keyword. You can also use the trick from Method 1, adding letters from a to z or numbers 0 to 9 to expand the keyword suggestions further.

For example: If you search "How * bike" on Google, you will see suggestions in the dropdown list, some of which are question-based keywords.

Additionally, you can add letters to the end of "How * bike," such as "How * bike a," to get more keyword suggestions.

Note: Google might not always display autocomplete suggestions strictly according to your wildcard input. It tries to understand your search intent and provide relevant suggestions, so you might encounter results that do not exactly match your input criteria.