How to use Word Clouds for SEO

What is SEO?

SEO - Search Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your webpage and content so that Google and other search engines can identify what your page is about, easily categorize it and present it to users searching for related content. It’s also one of online marketing’s most powerful tools to help you rank high on the first page (for the maximum amount of traffic).

Since Google is not a person looking at your webpage, it “sees” your page only as text (i.e. the content and the code). This is the reason you should always add alt text to your pictures, so Google can tell what’s on it in order to drive the most relevant traffic to your website. Written content is the number one factor in page ranking and should therefore be a big focal point of your SEO strategy.

How can Word Clouds Help?

While it’s most important to write high quality content, you should also keep in mind to use keywords relevant to your topic. Word clouds can help you keep track of these keywords within your text. Putting your text into a word cloud generator can instantly indicate which keywords are most prominent in your marketing content and will give a visual indication of how Google and other search engines will likely process and assess your content.

Competitor Analysis

The same is obviously true for the websites of competitors, so if you want to find out what your competitors focus on in their SEO and content, you could also create a quick word cloud to see the terms and keywords they put an emphasis on.

Summary

To summarize, word clouds are not only a quick way to visualize the message your content (or that of a competitor) is conveying, but it also gives you a broad idea of how Google will perceive the content on your page and how it will likely drive traffic to your website. Word clouds don’t account for all the technical aspects of SEO but are still a good way to get an idea of your written content and its possible impact.

To show you what we mean, we created a quick word cloud of this blog post, that should ideally feature the keywords relevant to this content. As you can see, the key message of this post (SEO, Google, content, keywords and word clouds) are emphasized: