Why Are Keywords Important to Your Furniture Business?
- Posted on
- by furniturefuel.com
Table of Contents
Keyword 101 series
This article is the introduction to our keyword series.
Whether you’re a small shop or a large retailer, understanding keyword research and implementation is essential for increasing online visibility and driving more traffic to your website.
In the upcoming articles, we will explain the different types of keywords, how to find the right ones for your business, and the critical components of crafting compelling keyword-driven content that ranks well and engages your audience.
Welcome to the world of keywords!
Let’s Begin.
Why Keywords Matter - Key Takeaways
Keywords are crucial for any business aiming to boost online visibility and attract customers. By incorporating relevant keywords throughout your website, you align your content with users’ search queries, increasing the chances of your site appearing in search results. This not only helps potential customers find your products more easily but also enhances your overall SEO strategy, driving more traffic and improving sales
- Visibility and Traffic: Using relevant keywords throughout your website content increases the chances of your furniture business being discovered in search engine results pages (SERPs) for searches related to your products, driving more traffic to your website.
- Understanding Search Intent: Keywords are just one piece of the SEO puzzle. Understanding the “why” behind a user’s search (search intent) is crucial. This helps you tailor content to address customer needs directly, leading to higher engagement and conversions.
- Strategic Keyword Placement: To improve discoverability, keywords can be strategically placed throughout your website content (on-site), product descriptions, and even technical elements.
- Beyond SEO: Keywords are valuable for crafting impactful marketing messages across all channels, including out-of-home advertising (billboards, signage) to capture attention and boost memorability.
- Emotional Connection: The right keywords can evoke feelings, resonate with personal experiences, and create a stronger bond between your brand and the consumer. Consider using words that tap into positive emotions, comfort, exclusivity, or aspiration depending on the message you want to convey.
Why Does Your Business Needs Keywords
8.5 billion searches a day.
It is estimated that 8.5 billion searches occur on Google every day. This means Google processes approximately 99,000 search queries every second (source).
Think about the hours you have spent creating your business, growing it, and fighting the daily fires. You have painstakingly selected furniture that your audience will love. It is ready to be discovered. Yet, despite all your efforts, you remain invisible on Google. Potential customers searching for your exact products stumble upon your competitors instead.
How do you attract your ideal customers, boost sales, and establish a strong brand presence amid the fierce competition?
Finding the right keywords can be a game changer for your furniture business. Especially when integrated with other components like helpful content, high-quality backlinks, mobile-friendliness, and technical SEO, they become an integral part of a winning SEO strategy.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are the language of search. In SEO, keywords are the words people use when searching for information, products, or services. They also define what topics your content covers. They are search engine magnets, attracting relevant content that matches the search query.
Understanding SEO and the Role of Keywords
Keywords are a fundamental part of search engine optimisation (SEO), which is essential for boosting your website’s visibility and ranking in search results. SEO has three key areas: technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Each plays a critical role in helping search engines understand, index (store), and rank your content effectively.
- Technical SEO: While keywords in elements like URLs and structured data won’t directly affect crawling and indexing, they assist search engines in understanding the main topic of your content. This improves the match between your pages and relevant search queries.
- On-page SEO: On-page keywords are strategically incorporated throughout your content, such as the main body text, headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and image alt text descriptions, to ensure your pages are highly relevant to user search queries.
- Off-page SEO: Keywords also play a role in off-page SEO strategies, like building backlinks with anchor text that naturally incorporates relevant keywords can help establish your site’s authority and relevance for those keywords
Keywords act as a bridge connecting what your potential customers are searching for online and the furniture you offer.
Integrating relevant keywords throughout your website content, product descriptions, advertisements, and social media posts increases the likelihood of your furniture business being discovered.
While they are an essential starting point, remember that keywords are just one piece of the SEO puzzle. A well-rounded SEO strategy also considers factors like website usability, mobile-friendliness, and creating unique, helpful content.
In future articles, we will examine each area of SEO and explore how a balanced approach can attract more traffic to your website and connect you with your target audience.
Social Media and SEO: Working Together
SEO traditionally refers to optimising content for search engines like Google, Bing, etc. However, you may have heard people say using terms like Instagram SEO. This refers to making your profile more viable for the social network’s search engine, not the search engines discussed in this article.
Although social media does not directly contribute to your rankings, it can be helpful to your business, nevertheless. Social media plays a vital role in your overall digital marketing strategy. Here’s how keywords can be influential on social media:
- Increased Discoverability: Using relevant keywords in your social media posts can help potential customers find your furniture business when searching within the social media platform.
- Targeted Audience: They can help you reach people actively looking for furniture on social media, increasing the chances they’ll engage with your brand.
- Building Brand Awareness: Compelling social media content with relevant keywords can introduce your brand to a broader audience, potentially leading them to search for you later in search engines.
Remember: Social media might not directly affect your Google search ranking, but it works with SEO. A strong social media presence, combined with an optimised website, is a winning combination for attracting new customers to your furniture business!
Where are Keywords Used?
They exist all around us, not just digital descriptions. We use them every day when describing products, problems, and concepts. Think about the last time you were searching for a replacement part for a piece of furniture. You might call the supplier and say you need a part for a particular chair or table. You would use certain “key” words to describe the part needed if you didn’t know the correct name for it.
Similarly, a customer searching for furniture online will use keywords or phrases to find what they want. To use an earlier example, a customer might search for “mid-century modern coffee table” or “outdoor wicker chairs.”
As shown below, Google may determine the user’s intent to buy furniture and display relevant product listings. These listings often included the words in the searcher’s query in their titles and descriptions to signal their relevance to the search query.
Above:
A Google search for a mid-century modern coffee table shows results that are transactional intent, meaning the searcher knows what they want and is looking for a product or service to buy.
Above:
A Google search for outdoor wicker chairs shows results that are transactional intent, meaning the searcher knows what they want and is looking for a product or service to buy.
Strategic Keyword Placement
Placing relevant keywords throughout your website content (on-site) is crucial for search engines to understand your offerings and for users to find what they’re looking for. But SEO doesn’t stop at your website.
- On-Site Content: This is where you have the most control over placement. Here are some key areas:
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Headers and sub-headers
- Body content
- Product descriptions
- Anchor text
- Off-Page SEO: While the focus here is on on-site content placement, earning backlinks from high-quality, relevant websites is another crucial aspect of SEO. These backlinks can significantly improve your website’s authority and trust in the eyes of search engines, even if they don’t directly contain your exact keywords. Search engines consider the overall context and quality of the linking website.
Above:
An image displaying the location of Title Tags and Meta Descriptions in the search engine results page or SERPs
Meta descriptions, those little bits of text displayed under website titles in search results, are often dismissed as a waste of time. However, information about clicks that came to light during the DOJ anti-trust hearing against Google may suggest otherwise. Well-crafted meta descriptions that are informative, relevant, and include keywords can entice users to click on your website, even if it’s not ranked number one. More clicks may signal to search engines that your content is valuable and user-friendly, potentially leading to a gradual improvement in rankings over time.
It’s important to incorporate keywords naturally.
Keyword stuffing (inserting irrelevant keywords or too many to gain ranking) and using misleading titles or descriptions can harm your reputation and SEO performance.
The content still needs to be readable and informative for users. In a future article on monitoring and mistakes, we’ll explore keyword stuffing and how to avoid it.
Why are Keywords Important?
When looking for a customer’s house to deliver furniture to, you rely on street signs and house numbers to find the right place. Similarly, keywords act as signposts for both searchers and search engines.
- For Searchers: In your content, they act like clear signs, helping users identify if your content addresses their search query. Imagine all the content on the internet as a complex road network. Without proper signage (keywords), users might get lost and unable to find the information they seek.
- For Search Engines: They help search engines understand your content and determine its relevance to a user’s search query. This is crucial for your content to be shown in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Using the Right Keywords
Keywords are not used solely to drive traffic to your website. It has to be the right traffic. It’s about connecting your target audience to the product or content they are looking for. Ensuring you reach the right audience increases the chances that they’ll engage with what you have to offer. By targeting the wrong keywords, you might attract a lot of attention, but it won’t be from the people who actually care about what you have.
Imagine someone searching for a particular item, like a “green velvet armchair with chrome feet” They’re likely not just browsing for furniture – they’re on a mission.
Here’s where many furniture store websites miss the mark.
The Homepage Trap
Many searchers land on a generic homepage titled “Modern Home Furniture.” While the homepage might capture some general furniture searches, it doesn’t target the specific user looking for a “green velvet armchair with chrome feet.”
The Winning Strategy
Successful furniture stores create dedicated product pages optimised with relevant keywords instead of relying solely on the homepage. Imagine a page titled “Velvet Sofas and Armchairs.” This page would include detailed information about the specific product and use relevant keywords throughout the description, image alt text, and even the URL itself.
By creating targeted product and information pages, you turn your website into a go-to destination for furniture hunters:
- Customers: They land directly on a page with the exact in-depth information they seek, saving them time and frustration.
- Your Business: You attract highly qualified leads actively searching for a specific product, increasing the chances of a conversion.
By strategically incorporating keywords throughout dedicated product and information pages, you can guide potential customers straight to the furniture they desire.
This improves user experience and boosts your chances of turning website visitors into happy, furniture-owning customers.
The more relevant elements, like in this example, your website title, are to a user’s search query, the more likely they are to click on your website compared to the competition. You’re providing clear and informative signage, helping potential customers find exactly what they’re looking for.
Decoding Intent
The meaning behind a search query is called search intent. For example, “rustic wooden chairs” could indicate someone looking to buy or find an image for inspiration. Based on the search query, Google retrieves results that it believes will best serve the user’s intent.
Targeting the right intent with your keywords is crucial. Don’t worry. We will discuss intent in depth in the following article.
Google uses various factors to determine search intent, including the keywords, the query’s surrounding words, and the user’s search history and location. By analysing these elements, Google aims to understand what the user is trying to achieve with their search. Are they looking to buy something, find information, or complete a specific task?
Decoding intent through keywords is the key to helpful content.
They offer valuable insights into customer motivations and needs. Analysing them can help you understand the “why” behind a user’s search.
For example, someone searching for “Can’t get my dining table to open fully” might feel frustrated or inconvenienced. This tells us they need a solution, not just another product listing.
By decoding user intent, you can tailor your content to address customer needs directly. Imagine informative blog posts or detailed video tutorials targeting “Can’t get my dining table to open fully” to those specific searches:
- “How to Easily Extend Your Dining Table”
- “Troubleshooting Common Extending Dinning Table Issues (with Video Guide)”
This targeted approach increases user engagement, builds trust, and positions your website as a valuable resource, ultimately leading to higher conversion opportunities.
Copywriting and Keywords: The Emotional Connection
Using specific words can evoke feelings, resonate with personal experiences, and create a stronger bond between your brand and the consumer.
Someone searching for a sofa might be looking for more than a place to sit. They may want a “cosy haven” for family movie nights or a “sophisticated centrepiece” for their living room.
Keywords that tap into these emotions, such as “plush comfort” and “sleek modern design,” can attract users with specific desires and guide them to your furniture store.
Here are some examples of how keywords can contribute to emotional connection:
- Positive Emotions: “joyful,” “inspiring,” “uplifting,” or “heartwarming” can evoke positive emotions, creating a connection based on happiness or inspiration.
- Comfort and Security: “safe,” “secure,” “trusted,” or “reliable” instil a sense of comfort and trust, fostering an emotional connection built on reliability.
- Exclusivity: “exclusive,” “limited edition,” or “unique” can create a sense of exclusivity, appealing to the audience’s desire for something unique or rare.
- Empathy and Understanding: Empathetic words and phrases that demonstrate an understanding of the audience’s challenges or aspirations can forge a deeper emotional connection, “we understand,” “you’re not alone,” or “we care.”
- Nostalgia: “nostalgic,” “vintage,” or “timeless” can trigger sentimental feelings, fostering a connection based on shared memories or a longing for the past.
- Aspirational Keywords: “achieve,” “dream,” or “transform” appeal to the audience’s desires and ambitions, creating a connection based on shared goals.
What emotional connectors you use depends on the message you are trying to convey and how you want your tone to be perceived by your target audience. Do you want it to be fun and friendly or formal and corporate
Using the correct emotional words helps to create a more profound and lasting connection with the audience. It goes beyond functional features and taps into the emotional, often subconscious buyer considerations.
Value outside of SEO
Keywords aren’t just necessary for SEO. They’re crucial for crafting impactful marketing messages across all channels, including out-of-home advertising like billboards and signage.
Keywords in Out-of-Home Advertising
We love Oatly’s out-of-home (OOH) advertising. Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash
Out-of-home advertising, whether billboards or signage, can benefit significantly from strategic keyword integration.
Imagine a customer driving down a busy street. In those fleeting seconds, you must capture attention. Using concise and relevant words on your billboard can make all the difference, instantly conveying your message and sparking interest.
- Instant Recognition
Imagine that same customer driving down a busy street on their way to work; they may be running late or had a rushed morning getting the family ready. Whilst driving, they see a billboard featuring a plush armchair paired with the text ” Traffic Stress? Find Comfort at Home ” or “Destress – It’s Only a Cushion Away: Luxury Sofas” cutting through the visual noise. It instantly communicates function and emotion, making viewers think, “That’s exactly what I need after a long day!”
The timing of the ad is vital. For instance, an ad like the one pictured above (with the message “Traffic Stress? Find Comfort at Home”) might resonate more with viewers in the evening when they’re returning home from work and seeking relaxation. While the message of comfort might still be appealing in the morning, it could have a different effect on viewers stressed about starting their day. Dynamic digital billboards that allow you to schedule ad displays for specific times would be ideal for this type of targeted messaging
- Memorability
Well-chosen words can make your out-of-home advertisement more memorable. People are more likely to retain information when it’s presented concisely and effectively, creating a lasting impression and increasing the chances of potential customers recalling your brand later.
Consider a billboard showcasing a beautifully arranged outdoor patio set with the text ” Get Comfortable with Nature: Outdoor Furniture Sale.” This uses relevant keywords (“outdoor furniture”) and connects to the desire for a comfortable and stylish outdoor space.
Information to display. You need to consider where the ad will be displayed. The examples we have created are more suited for motorway/roadside advertising. Our mock ad features a clear image of outdoor furniture, the main message, the company logo for brand recognition, and, most importantly, the website address. Since drivers have limited time to absorb information, including a full physical address might be counterproductive. By focusing on the website address, viewers can easily find the company online for more details, including the physical location (if applicable).
Simplicity. The billboard ad above has been simplified to its bare essentials. It’s not trying to be clever. It just displays a strong message, “outdoor furniture sale,” and the web address to find out more information. If in doubt, K.I.S.S – Keep it super simple.
- Targeting Specific Audiences
Out-of-home advertising often targets a diverse audience. Incorporating words that resonate with your target demographic helps tailor the message to specific interests or needs. This targeted approach significantly increases the effectiveness of your campaign by directly appealing to potential customers.
For example, a billboard near a college campus with the text “Cramped College Crib? – Shop Smart” uses keywords relevant to student life and living situations. This speaks directly to their needs and budget concerns.
Recognition. In the example above, we have tailored the message to address college students. Making the title “cramped college crib” rhyme can be easier to remember and repeat, especially for short phrases like slogans. However, Cramped College Crib” might not be a natural way for college students to describe their living spaces, which makes your ad inauthentic to the target audience. Make sure any words used to foster a connection align with the audience. The mock college colours (blue and yellow) may add a connection if targeting a specific college. The imagery should show your furniture and how it can create a beautiful space in small college rooms.
IKEA
If you want a masterclass on minimal, captivating advertising in the furniture industry, then IKEA has to be one of the best examples.
Their ads can provide you with a great source of inspiration, but remember, imitation isn’t the goal. IKEA has achieved phenomenal global brand recognition, allowing them to display their logo without needing a web address in most cases. Your ads will require a bit more information to capture attention and connect with viewers.
Take a look at IKEA’s award-winning ‘moving day’ ads in Quebec. Their ‘Swearnitures’ campaign cleverly played on the similarity between IKEA product names and swear words, showcasing their unique and witty approach to advertising.
The Importance of Keywords
In today’s digital-first world, where billions of searches unfold daily, the role of keywords in shaping the success of your furniture business cannot be overstated. Keywords are not just strings of words or meaningless descriptors. They are the keys to unlocking visibility, engagement, and success for your business.
Remember, the power of keywords extends beyond the digital world. Out-of-home advertising can attract attention, ensure instant recognition, and drive engagement with potential customers. Copywriters skilfully use keywords to tap into the audience’s emotions, instilling trust and creating a bond beyond a simple transaction.
Become a Keyword Detective
Before you move on to the following article, I want you to look around where you are. Are there any brochures, pamphlets, or posters around you? Please pick them up. Analyse how keywords are being used.
Consider the emotional connections they might be trying to create, the specific words chosen to describe products, and what action the writer wants you to take next.
These are all critical areas, and as you delve deeper into the keyword articles, you’ll see their role in crafting a successful marketing strategy.
