A keyword isn’t really a word. It’s a question someone is asking, squeezed into as few words as they can manage.
If you want to know how to use keywords for SEO articles, that’s the place to start. The job is to find the question your customer is typing, answer it better than the pages already there, and say so in the places a search engine looks. This walks through the whole thing, from finding phrases to placing them to knowing what they can’t do.
Keywords are what customers type
“House painter Newtown” is a keyword. So is “how much does it cost to paint a house exterior”. Behind each one is a person with a need, and some of those people are worth more to you than others.
Using keywords means making it clear, to that person and to the search engine, that your page answers their search. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the work of getting the right searches to lead to your pages.
Why bother before you write? Because a good article can still answer a question nobody asks. In 2023, Ahrefs analyzed its index of around 14 billion pages and found that 96.55% got no traffic from Google. Two of its reasons were that nobody searches for the topic, or that the page doesn’t match what the searcher wanted. That index covers every kind of page from everywhere, so it isn’t a measure of small business blogs. The lesson still travels: check the phrase before you spend the evening.
Find the phrases your customers really use
You can learn most of what you need before paying for any tool. We’d go in this order.
Start with who you want more of. Say a painting contractor wants whole-house exterior jobs and fewer one-room touch-ups. An article on “interior painter prices” will get read, mostly by people shopping for the smaller work. One on what an exterior repaint involves speaks to the customer he wants. If you haven’t settled which services to push, our piece on growing a local service business helps with that first.
Then listen for their words, not yours. You may say “mini-split”. Your customer may type “ductless air conditioner” or “air conditioner for a room with no vents”. Your inbox and phone log are the best source, because customers describe the problem in their own words every day.
Write a short list of seed phrases: the services you want to grow, the problems customers describe, the towns you serve. Then type each into Google and see how it offers to finish the search. Those suggestions are a free look at how people phrase the question. Lean toward the longer, more specific ones. “Plumber” is searched by everyone for every reason. “Tankless water heater installation Allentown” is searched by fewer people, and you know what they want.
Next, search your phrase and read the pages that already show up. What questions do they answer that yours doesn’t? The point is to learn what searchers expect, not to copy. Paid tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs can estimate which phrases other sites appear for. They’re good tools, and a small business doesn’t need to start there.
Finally, read the town Facebook groups. Neighbors rarely use trade terms. Someone asks who can fix “the wet corner of the basement”, not who offers “foundation drainage solutions”. Phrases like that may never show up in a keyword tool, and they’re often the ones worth writing for.
Using Google’s Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is Google’s own research tool, and it lives inside Google Ads. According to Google’s help page for it, the steps are short:
- Go to Keyword Planner within the Tools menu.
- Select “Discover new keywords”.
- Start with keywords related to your products or services, or start with a website and let Google look for related keywords.
- Select “Get results”.
The same page says the tool shows estimates of how many searches a keyword gets each month, and the average cost for an ad to show on those searches. It also says you must complete your account setup by entering billing information first, which is worth knowing before you start.
It was built for planning ads. The cost figures describe advertising and say nothing about how hard it would be for an article to show in the regular results. Use the search estimates to compare one phrase against another, not as a precise count.
Very local phrases may show little or no data even though people search for them. If customers ask you that question every week, that’s evidence too.
When you pick from the list, look for a phrase that relates to a service you want more of, is specific enough to show what the searcher wants, and is something you can answer well from your own experience.
How to use keywords for SEO articles: where the phrase goes
Pick one main phrase per article. Then put it where readers and search engines look to understand the page. Each point below comes from Google’s SEO Starter Guide, its documentation for site owners.
Title. Use the phrase in a form a person would want to click. Google describes a good title as unique to the page, clear and concise.
Meta description. This is the short summary that can appear under your title in search results. Google says a good one is short and unique to that page. It may show a snippet from the page instead, but write one anyway. Google Search doesn’t use the old “keywords” meta tag, so skip it.
Headings. Use the phrase in one or two headings where it reads naturally. Headings also help a reader skimming for one answer.
Body text. Put the phrase in your opening paragraph, then use plain variations wherever they fit. Google says keyword stuffing is against its spam policies, and that repeating the same words is tiring for readers.
Image alt text. Alt text is a short description of an image, read aloud to people using screen readers. Describe the picture accurately. Use the phrase only if it truly describes what’s shown.
URL. A short, readable address helps people see what the page is about. Expect little more. Google says keywords in a domain or URL path have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs.
Links. Use words that describe the page you’re linking to, not “click here”. Link each article to the service page it relates to and to your other articles. If you doubt the effort is worth it, we’ve covered whether a company blog helps your SEO.
That’s the mechanical part. The bigger part is the answer. Take a homeowner reading two articles on exterior repainting. One repeats “exterior painting Newtown” in every other sentence. The other explains what prep involves, how to tell paint failure from a surface stain, and what to ask before accepting a price. Which painter does she call?
What keywords can’t do
A good phrase, used properly, gives an article a fair chance. It doesn’t decide the result. Google’s guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months. How it goes depends on where your site starts, how many others are writing on the same topic, and how good your answer is. Nobody can promise a position on a date.
Keywords also can’t fix what happens after the click. If the article lands a reader on a site with no easy way to get in touch, the visit ends there. And if traffic rises but the inquiries are for work you don’t do, you haven’t reached the goal. When we do SEO work for a small business, the number we care about is worthwhile inquiries, with rankings and traffic as signals along the way.
Your part is the knowledge nobody else has: which questions customers really ask, which jobs you want more of, and which inquiries turned out to be good.
Test one phrase on a real article
This week, pick the article you wrote that nobody seems to have read. Type its main topic into Google and write down the suggestions it offers. It takes about ten minutes and costs nothing. If a phrase there matches what customers ask you on the phone, that’s your new title.
Send us the article and tell us what kind of work you want it to bring in. We can begin with a free SEO audit to see which searches your pages appear for now and where the gaps are, then explain what we’d do and why. Your first consultation is free.