How to do Keyword Research for Best Ranking Results

If you are trying to get your site ranking highly in the search results on Google, Bing or other search engines, you have come to the right place. Despite the fact that there has been a shift in modern SEO with more emphasis being placed on creating killer content and acting on social signals, it is foolish to take for granted an important foundation to any good SEO – keyword research.

Keywords are a great guide for where you need to go with your SEO strategy and whether or not your campaign is successful. Keywords can also be used to determine the desires, fears and thoughts of the audience you are targeting.

Think about keyword research as a modern version of market research.

What Exactly Are Keywords?

Perhaps you are completely new to SEO and are already confused as to why we keep on referring to ‘keywords’. If that is the case, let us take a moment to explain.

Keywords are the topics and ideas that clearly define what the information or content you are promoting is all about. When it comes to SEO they are basically the phrases and words users type into Google, Bing or whatever search engine they prefer to use. Another term used to describe keywords is ‘search queries’.

With that in mind, if you take everything on your page or site (including all the copy, videos and images) and simplify it down into basic words and phrases, these are known as your primary keywords.

Are Keywords Really That Important?

The short answer is, yes, keywords are paramount to a successful SEO campaign because they are the connective between what your target audience is searching for online and the content you are providing with them in mind. Your main goal in terms of SEO optimization is to drive as much organic traffic to your website or page from SERPs or search engine result pages and the choices you make in targeting particular keywords (by including them in content, for example) determines the kind and amount of traffic you actually get.

For example, if you run an online plants and flowers store, you might be looking to target for the keyword ‘new bulbs’. However, if you don’t exercise some caution and care you may attract a whole lot of traffic that consists of users who are looking for lighting fixtures and have no interest whatsoever in gardens or plants.

Keywords relate as much to your target market as they do your actual content, because the way you describe something that you are offering may be different, even in just the smallest and seemingly insignificant way, to the way people in your audience ask for it. It makes sense then if you are interested in the content you create, not only organically ranking well but driving traffic to your site, you need to start gaining appreciation and understanding for the needs of your potential visitors, the vocabulary and language they are using and the kind of content they look for and want to find.

This can be achieved by using keyword research tools, using community groups and forums related to your niche or target market or simply by talking to customers and those people that you’d like to convert into customers.

How To Judge The Value of a Keyword

Now that we have established some of the basics of what keywords are and why they are so important, it is worth considering how you judge the value of keywords. How much value does a specific keyword bring to your website? For instance, if you run an online store selling shoes, do you find that you achieve a greater number of sales from people searching for ‘black boots’ or ‘brown shoes’?

Keywords that your visitors use in search engines such as Google and Bing are usually available to most savvy webmasters and the easiest way to find out information about them is by using software known as keyword research tools.

That being said though, keyword research tools do not actually show the direct value of the traffic you receive from searches for those particular keywords. In order to understand how valuable a keyword is or isn’t then, you need to understand your own website better, make hypotheses, test out the theories and then repeat the formula until you get a clearer idea.

Simple Guide to Determining the Value of a Keyword

Step 1 -Ask Yourself Questions

Start by asking yourself if the keyword you are researching is actually relevant to your website or page. Will searchers be able to find exactly what they want when they use these particular keywords in search engines? Will they be satisfied with what they find? Will the traffic achieved from this keyword convert into financial or organizational rewards for your business, website or page? If you answered honestly with yes to all the above questions and queries, you can then continue.

Step 2 – Search for the Keyword on The Popular Search Engines

Start searching for the keyword in question on all the major and commonly used search engines. When you understand the websites and pages already ranking for your keyword, you better understand the type of competition you are up against and therefore, how difficult or easy it will be to rank for the keyword. Look out for any search ads to the right-hand side or top of the search results page.

If there are many of these ads, it means that the keyword is more than likely very high value and as such a very profitable keyword that directly converts into sales and monetary gains.

Step 3 – Invest in a Sample Campaign Using Either Bing Ad Center or Google AdWords or Both

If your site or page is not currently ranking for your chosen keyword, you can test traffic and see how well it will convert. Using Google AdWords, pick the ‘exact match’ option and direct traffic to the page on your website that is most relevant. Track at least 200 to 300 clicks looking at the impressions and conversion rate.

Step 4 – Determine The Keyword’s Value Based on Your Findings

For instance, let’s assume 5,000 impressions were generated each day by your search ad and of that 5,000 you actually had 100 that came to your page or site, with 3 converting into sales, for a total profit of $300. Based on those numbers then, one individual visitor to your site through that keyword is worth $3 for your site and business.

This means that the 5,000 impressions you were getting every day, could give you a click-through rate of around 18 to 36%, ranking you at number 1. Which in turn would mean around 900 to 1800 visits to your site every day, with the value of $3 each, or to put it in wilder terms – somewhere between $1 and $2 million in a year.

What Are Long Tailed Keywords?

Returning to the subject of keywords from earlier, we discussed keywords in their most basic form. Now we are going to dive a bit deeper and discuss long-tail keywords. Keywords are often far-reaching and broad – often referred to by the term head keywords; however, they can also consist of a very specific combination of important terms – referred to by the name ‘long-tail keywords’, that we are sure you will have heard of before.

Although you may see it as your main goal in keyword optimization to rank for single word keywords, thanks to the high volume of searches they generally get; it is worth noting that the competition for them is usually tougher. For example, you may be aiming to have your independent book store rank for ‘books’, it will be difficult, even impossible to outrank Amazon.

Additionally, as well as involving stronger competition, single word keywords are often incredibly vague. Someone searching using the word ‘dog’ could be looking for a number of different things – such as a place to purchase a new dog collar from, information about the ingredients of dog food, a directory of different dog breeds or just some funny dog videos and images.

Therefore, the intent behind using long-tail keywords is generally a lot easier to define. Taking the dog search above as an example again, keywords such as ‘cheap dog sitters Washington’ or ‘best training collar for a puppy’ are more likely to have less competition, giving a small site a better chance to achieve high listings in the SERPs.

What Is a Niche?

So far we have looked at how crucial keyword optimization is and how long-tailed keywords play their part in helping you with keyword ranking and SEO. It’s worth discussing the fact though that before you even conduct the above keyword research, you need to spend some time identifying the niche topics related to your market or industry.

Once these niche topics have been identified, you will be able to make use of buyer keywords that your competitors may not even know about.

This is because, without looking at niche subjects and topics, many of the keywords you find using Google Keyword Planner or similar will not be of any use. Even some of the ones you do find that are relevant will be less lucrative and have more competition.

Before we go any further though, you may be asking ‘what actually is a niche?’. The word niche refers to interests, services, products and in relation to what we are discussing, topics that appeal to only a small and very specialised percentage of people.

Niche topics, with regards to your business or site, are the topics and subjects that your target audience have an interest in. Therefore, it is not just a keyword or long-tail keyword – it’s a broad and expansive subject.

They are normally subjects related to your niche, and therefore things your target audience are interested in.

For instance, a user who is looking to buy a basketball hoop could also be searching for the following:

• How to improve a vertical jump
• Nutrition for athletes
• How to be successfully recruited by college scouts
• Slam dunk clips
• Hot to shoot great free throws

As you can see these searches are part of unique parts of your niche but are their very own niche topic.

The thing about niches, in general, is that they generally aren’t big enough to support a product or website on their own. While some niche markets will give you maybe 10 or more keywords to work with, there may only be around 2 to 5 that have enough commercial intent and a large enough search volume to actually allow you to create an optimised web pages about.

However, when you take a number of niche markets and put them together, you will find you have a greater number of lower competition keywords than you could ever imagine.

A great and effective thing to do is make a niche topic list  – a map of the different topics your target audience are looking at through Google.

To do this, open up a text file or Google doc and come up with at the very minimum 5 niche markets and you will have more than enough to find some great and effective keywords.

Take, for example, basketball hoops – niche topics for this type of site and keyword could be:

• Basketball trainers
• Improve vertical jumps
• Nutrition for athletes
• Dribbling drills
• How to shoot a 3 pointer

If you are having trouble making a list or want to be able to find more topics related to a niche, take a look at some of the following strategies:

Personas of Buyers

Niche topics can be easily identified when you use buyer personas. This involves thinking about who your target audience is, in terms of:

• Age
• Gender
• Estimated income/salary
• Interests and hobbies
• Problems and issues they may have
• Their goals and aspirations, both on a personal level and professionally

Depending on the industry you are working within, you may have more than one specific buyer persona.

Using the basketball hoop as an example, you may have two different buyer personas – one for basketball players and another for parents (or often the people who will buy the product)

The quickest and easiest way to make a clear buyer persona is using PowerPoint to make a slide.

This will help you to see the world from your target audience’s viewpoint and find topics you may not have considered initially.

Using Forums

Look at forums as being your access to a live focus group 24/7. If you are unsure where to find forums that your target market frequents and uses – don’t worry, it is relatively simple. Just use one of the following search strings in the search engine –

• ‘your keyword’ + board
• ‘your keyword’ + forum
• ‘your keyword’ + forums
• ‘your keyword’ forum

When you have found a forum related to your niche and target market, take a look at the sections it is divided up into. These normally refer to niche topics.

You can dig a little deeper by browsing some of the threads to find other important niche markets that relate to your target market.

Using Wikipedia – The Contents Page

Many people wrongly overlook Wikipedia when conducting research into niches. It is a virtual goldmine – because you can find overviews on topics that have been curated by hundreds and hundreds of industry specialists and is organised neatly into categories and sub-categories.

Type a broad keyword into the search button of Wikipedia and when you are directed to an entry related to the keyword, take a look at the contents and then the sections of each page – these could be amazing niche topics you never even knew existed or considered. You can dig deeper still by clicking through to some internal links on that page to check the contents pages of other entries closely related to your niche.

Using Reddit

Okay, so not everyone likes Reddit but that still doesn’t stop it being an excellent resource for researching possible niche topics to target. Imagine you have a site that sells organic cat food. Go to Reddit and then run a search for a wide scope topic that your audience is interested in – something related to what you say – for instance, cats.

Now, pick an appropriate subreddit and find threads with lots of comments. You may well find several more niche topics to add to your list.

What Is Page Rank and Why Is It Important?

Page Rank was something that was introduced by Google and set the standard for all other search engines, but it also created difficult scenarios that eventually got more than a little out of hand.

Page Rank is basically, how important a website is. By definition, it is an algorithm that assesses the quantity and quality of links a web page has. This assessment helps to establish the page’s authority and importance in relative terms.

Therefore, each link counts as a point for that page and just how valuable the point depends on the page rank scoring of any pages it links to. While their scores are determined by the scores of the pages they are linked to, and so on and on and on.

Originally, page ranks were public in their toolbar, which displayed them in the browser for anyone to see along with an estimate of its value.

However, because it caused a lot of controversies, Google shut down the Page Rank Data displayed in the toolbar, so it became more of a secret to the ranking mechanisms the search engine used.

While Page Rank may not be public anymore, it is still there and still important.

Calculating Page Rank – Understanding How It Really Works

If you want to have successful websites, there is no way around it, you need to understand how Page Rank really actually works. It will not only help you to know what you have to do to get great results but will also help you understand exactly what went wrong if your website or page’s ranking have dropped.

Why It is Controversial

As amazing an invention as it was, as it made Google authoritative and efficient; it could and was manipulated, perverted and very easily used for different intentions than it was invented for.

Google established PR and made it public to show people that as a search engine the company could:

• find the pages that users are really looking for
• display the safest and best pages to users

The toolbar was developed to work with IE and then Firefox and showed a score for PR from 0 to 10. Although the majority of casual net users were not interested in page and site scores, a large percentage of SEO people thought it was a great way to make a difference to their businesses and customers. The obsession SEO Even though this theory did not account for the fact that pages with low PRs can beat in the ranks those with higher PRs.

What happened next?

Link Farms and Link Spam

As a result, there was the emergence of a new market designed to meet the demand of SEO agents – link farms and the manipulation of PR scores.

Google took exception to these farms and shut them down. However, with every link network or farm that cropped up and Google removed from the search results, more continued to pop up. The fact is, while there are people out there who will pay good money for PR boosts, there will always be people who offer such help.

Spam link was also born out of the publicised PR scores – spammy comments anywhere and everywhere that featured links to a specific site. Google also tried to stop this by adding the no-follow attribute.

However, it did not really stop or end link spam.

Regardless of whether it is public or not, while we all know that PR and links are one of the main determining factors in how Google ranks pages, there will always be a market for farming and selling links.

Is Page Rank Still Important?

The short answer, if you aren’t already screaming it on the screen is, yes of course it is. Google believes it still matters and it helps it to identify the most trustworthy content on a particular search query. It’s just not public like it used to be.

The key to a higher PR value for your site is quite simple really = quality and relevancy of backlinks + efficient internal linking

Keyword Research Tools and Resources

We’ve firmly established the importance of keywords and keyword optimisation. However, how do you actually get the ball rolling with getting those all important keywords? You need to make use of tools to conduct research into keywords, to find the ones that are going to help you to reach the upper echelons of the rankings.

Wait though, there are quite a few keyword research tools out there, aren’t there? Scratch that, when we say ‘quite a few’, what we actually mean is more than you could ever want or need.

If we had to go through all the available keyword research tools and highlight the benefits and downsides to them all, we’d be here all day. So, instead, we are going to highlight a few of the most popular and commonly used.

Google Ads (previously Google AdWords)

Although Google Ads is more readily associated with advertising, there are a number of hidden gems in this tool that can help you to find keywords that will help you to generate some revenue, in just a few seconds.

Google Keyword Planner is something that most marketing people will be familiar with to some extent. While it is true that this tool can help to give you competition feedback and volume for various keywords, it is not very reliable at doing so.

However, there are other things you can use it for, such as analysing the competition. For instance, take a landing page or website URL and put it into the tool and you can find out instantly the keywords they are targeting. So, by using your closest rival’s website and putting it through the tool, you will find that the tool recommends you a number of related terms you can use.

One particularly good thing about this tool is that you can take the words you find and organise them easily into Ad Groups. All you need to do is browse through them, click the ones you like and then click that little blue arrow at the right side of the screen.

They are then automatically transferred over to your AdWords account so you can use them for ads.

Additionally, you can also use AdWords to identify the keywords most likely to get you traffic AND convert to sales and may even identify some that you didn’t even think about or give any consideration to.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another tool that most are familiar with, but whereas the majority probably head straight for conversions or traffic data, you should try starting from the Google Search Console integration.

Although you need to sign up to both tools and integrate them; it is worth the small amount of legwork as you are given data related to queries directly into Google Analytics.

Simply select Acquisition and look for the Search Console and Queries options. This will show you some search terms and words people are using to reach your site or another site.

It doesn’t end there though, as you can look at the site searches that have already happened. Most blogs now have a search bar that people use to find content on, particularly subjects they are interested in. These are often the things your audience are most interested in learning about or finding out about, but often they have trouble finding them. Google Analytics tells you exactly what these things are, so you are better able to help them.

You need to enable site search and then choose Behaviour and from Site Search select Search Terms. This will provide you with a list of the words people are most commonly searching for on your site and how many times someone has searched for them.

Another Google Analytics tool worth using is found in Audience and Interests. Select Affinity Categories and you will be given a full report of your website users’ related interest categories.

Google Trends

Yet another free Google tool worth utilising is Google Trends. Generally speaking, the vast majority of keyword research tools out there rely on historical data – that is, information that is out of date. Sometimes, it is only a few months out of date, whereas other times it can be as much as a few years old.

They make use of this past data to try and predict the keywords that are always popular. There are downsides though, past behaviours are not always a good indicator of what people will do in the future. Take for example, ‘DVD movies’ or ‘CD albums’.

Another downside is the fact that most established terms and keywords are very competitive, meaning it will be hard to rank for them. This could mean you have to wait weeks or even months to see any concrete results. Which is where Google Trends comes into its own.

With Google Trends you can find topics that have recently been trending and take advantage of them immediately.

Moz Keyword Explorer

The first paid-for keyword research tool we are going to look at is one of the fastest rising and most popular. As we’ve covered, keyword volume is not the sole criteria you need to pay attention to, because you need to look at the competition. When you have tough competition it is not unrealistic to think that you might not see your site gaining a first-page ranking for months or even more likely, years.

Gauging the level of competition is not an easy thing to do. Normally it involves diving head first into link profiles to work out what will be required to beat them. However, Moz Keyword Explorer can assist you in speeding up the process considerably.

When you type specific keywords into the tool, you are given the standard information such as competition and volume. However, you are also given things like opportunity and difficulty scores which can help you use to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Moz can also recommend terms based on related searches and they can be transferred into a list so they are ready for a specific strategy or campaign.

You will then have to hand metrics such as difficulty, opportunity, average volume and priority scores for all your keywords in one place.

SEMrush

While SEMrush is more famous for obtaining data regarding advertising, it can be used for keyword research also. SEMrush can help you to find the profitable keywords in highly competitive niches and you will also get data that overlap relating to competition or volume.

In addition, SEMrush can also show you a complete list of keywords a competitor is paying money on ads for and actually show you the ads too.

ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most practical Search Engine Optimisation tools out there. It is very easy to use and also they have a YouTube Channel which provides very valuable information on how to do SEO and use their tool better. Here are some of the things that you can use ahrefs for:

• Competitive Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Backlink Research
• Content Research
• Rank Tracking
• Web Monitoring

KWFinder

KWFinder is a great keyword research tool that specialises specifically in helping you to identify the most profitable and best long-tail keywords to use and target.

It can help you identify those with the lowest competition and highest search volume and is a good all-round alternative to GKP as it gives you the exact amount of search volumes in a month, as well as many other useful pieces of data, including:

• Google SERP results
• PPC
• CPC
• Search volumes (monthly)
• Trends
• Keyword difficulty

Bing Keyword Research

Although many people seem to prefer Google products in general, the Bing tool is still a great place to achieve a deeper level of keyword research. Starting with the basic settings, it is a little different to GKP, in that if you have it set to report you for 30 days, it will give you a precise number of searches during those 30 days. You are also able to export the data and use precise search numbers to better judge long-tail keywords.

 

How to Use Google As A Keyword Research Tool – 80/20 Guide

You’ve probably gotten the idea that it can be quite a laborious and time-consuming task conducting keyword research that can take hours and hours out of your work time that you could be spending on content.

Google ranking is all down to content after all. Therefore, the greater the amount of content you create and put out there, the more organic chances you have to rank. So how can you research keywords without using the obligatory spreadsheets? In this section, we will look at the 80/20 method and why it is crucial.

 

What is The 80/20 Principle?

Perhaps you are not familiar with what the 80/20 principle actually is – here is a basic low down.

Also known as the Pare to principle or the law of the vital few and suggests 80% of all impact is generated by 20% causes.

This means basically that a small amount of the efforts you make will produce the largest amount of results. Look it as being similar to going to the gym and trying to add muscle onto your body.

There are major exercises you can do that will challenge your whole body, but also requires the maximum amount of effort will take less time training wise, but will garner the biggest results and therefore impact on muscle growth.

So if your workout is made up of 20% consisting of huge compound exercises, it will drive up to 80% of the results you will achieve. The other work you put in is just supplementary.

The principle was first established in 1896 by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist – who showed that 20% of the Italian population owned 80% of the country’s land. Then also successfully showed that 80% of the peas in his garden were produced by just 20% of his pea pods.

It is crucial that you use this rule in your marketing campaign. For instance, if you are spending upwards of 100 hours to do your monthly keyword research and only producing around 5 pieces of content each month, you are definitely not following the 80/20 rule.

However, if you are spending around 10 hours every month on keyword research and producing upwards of 25 unique posts every month, that drives more traffic with even more indexed content, you are more than likely following the principle.

The aim is to focus on the bigger impact stuff that will produce 80% of your results.

More often than not, the old and traditional way of analysing data and using spreadsheets of information won’t produce the big results you desire. The way to produce big results is by creating good quality content.

While it is true that you still need keywords, you can’t sacrifice content frequency or quality to get it. How can you use the 80/20 principle into your strategy for researching keywords and content.

 

Search For Category Keywords Using Industry Blogs

A whole lot of keyword research and the lack of impact it usually makes probably means you want to turn the other way, but one of the quickest and most effective ways to get keywords is by looking at the top blogs related to your particular industry for keywords related to categories.

When you navigate some of the best blogs, there will be neatly laid out categories and will find there are a number of primary categories. When you dig a little deeper and look under the top categories you will find even more specialist content.

These titles and category names are keywords that have already been crafted and curated and are ready to use. In addition, most blogs and sites have a section that highlights their most popular posts.

There is not much work involved realising that those topics are high quality keywords that have a huge enough volume to make them worth devoting some time on.

 

Look for Top Quality Content Through Buzz Sumo

Once you have looked through a number of the top performing blogs in your particular industry, it is a good idea to look on Buzz Sumo to look at the content that is ranked as popular there.

This allows you to see what your target audience cares most about. It enables you to see the topics they are most interested in by checking a wide variety of social share and engagement types. One of the reasons Buzz Sumo is so great is that it pulls up the content that is most popular for a particular site at no cost whatsoever.

 

Look For Your Own Ideas For Content Using Google

While keyword research and keyword optimisation is effective, it can pigeon hole you dangerously meaning you could lose out on business. When you conduct research, you have to create content that fits with the keyword. The problem is that most of the big and successful sites are dominating that particular keyword already.

Therefore, rather than finding keywords and then creating content to fit around it, you need to first find topics you have expertise in and then, use Google to find topics to write about.

You get deeper into the nitty-gritty of a topic and what people are looking for using the ‘People also ask’ section of the search results. Click a question and you are given even more questions.

Instead of, frankly, wasting your precious time messing around with keyword research tools you could be spending your time more effectively mining lots of content ideas from these common questions people are actually asking.

Furthermore, if you scroll to the bottom of a search results page you will see the ‘Searches related to’ section and there you have further keyword information.

 

Utilise An LSI Keyword Generator to Create the Outline for your post

Once you have made a productive start using keywords from Google, you can get even more data on some of the most popular phrases and terms. First, you need to understand that researching long-tail keywords is not very effective, because they are incredibly specific. Meaning you can only write between hundred or thousand on those subjects.

Which means it is not nearly long enough to solve a problem or paint point, and definitely not in-depth enough.

Use an LSI Keyword generator like LSIGraph, which is free and gives you the chance to generate keywords that are semantic to your own keywords that are focused generally.

When you pull up the results you may be interested as to how quickly you can form the outline for a post. This tool can also enable you to get good ideas of the things people are looking for throughout their whole journey so you can write about their entire interests.

Guides are more productive for creating converting users into leads, not those 1,000 word posts that have no information to act on.

By using some of the semantic keywords in your subheadings, you can help to improve the SEO of your page too, while producing content that is worth reading, acting on and sharing.

 

What is a Content Silo?

Content silo is a term you may or may not have heard of and is a technique of grouping content together that is connected to provide a foundation of a website’s topical themes or areas based on keywords.

Content silos can be beneficial to both usability and SEO.

Can you remember when you last visited a library? How were you able to, or with the help of the staff, find books you were interested in or could be interested in? They were all grouped together into sections like fiction and non-fiction. That is essentially what a content silo is.

Barnes and Noble’s site and navigating through it is a perfect example of a real world content silo in action. Products on there are grouped together like for like.

Their books and other products are collected and kept together in sections related to their subject matter, to make it easier when you have to visit a physical store or shop online.

Now, most people assume this is purely done to make the user experience better for visitors to the site. However, that is only half of the story, it is also done with SEO in mind.

 

Why are Content Silos Crucial For SEO?

As well as helping human visitors to sites, content silos also help search engines. Just like an actual human visitor, search engines need to understand fully your website’s content. They are interested in understanding what it is all about, in what way it is structured and where it is all placed. Content silos help by providing search engines with a structure of content that is similar to the old index cards used in a library.

Another reason why content silos are so useful in terms of SEO is because search engines like Google award a website and page, keyword relevancy not just on the content of an individual page, but the relevance of the website as a whole. To put it another way, if you want to rank for the term SEO, for example, it would be simpler and easier if there was a section of your website regarding SEO-related subjects instead of just one single page. Topical content helps to lend gravity to the authority of the whole website and in turn can increase its page rank.

 

How To Use Keywords In Your Content For SEO

Before we finish up, it’s important to cover one last thing on keyword research, or at least the next step after that – creating content using your keywords. It is not enough to just throw those keywords onto your page. Sending those little hints to the robot crawlers of Google will not cut it anymore if it ever really did.

Content has to be of a high quality and compelling – giving your target audience of visitors real value. There are a number of simple rules regarding the use of keywords that you need to keep in mind.

You need to use unique keywords on every page of your website, particularly in the sections that humans and bots generally look to make sure they believe you have what they are looking for.

This includes not just the content body but the title tag too. This, in turn, brings us onto a crucial point – click bait and its pitfalls. Even if you believe and know for a fact you can entice a greater number of clicks by offering tempting, but vague titles for your site’s content, when you disguise the real purpose of the page, you are missing out on some of the power available to you from keywords.

Another wise move would be trying to include your primary keyword in your URL, alt attributes for images, the meta description or even the H1 tag. These places are all ideal for helping you to give the right hints to search engines about what your content is focusing on.

When you use keywords in the areas highlighted above, you are using the simplest of ways for targeting search engines with your content. It is unlikely to make your site or pages jump to the top of the rankings, but it is a crucial part of SEO, When you fail to put these fundamental steps into practice, you could be keeping your site and pages and all that valuable content you worked hard to develop from the rankings in other ways.

 

Formulating a Content Strategy Using Your Keywords

Although you will often be able to create content with one keyword and build it around it, there may be content that already exists that you need to find some way of connecting it to your keywords. You can do this by creating what is often referred to as a ‘content to keyword’ map. When you take the time to create this kind of map, you can improve your understanding of the impact the existing content has and figure out any gaps or weak links that could need improving or filling in.

Remember, keywords help to define each individual page of your website, so they can be used to organise your content effectively and establish a successful strategy. The easiest and simplest way to do this is by starting a spreadsheet or content to keyword map and identifying what the primary keywords are of every article on your site. Now you can build your sheet to the requirements of your site, adding the volume of searches for that keyword, organic traffic, and any other relevant metrics including page authority that you consider as vital to the success of your business.

As a general rule of thumb, every page on your site should target its own specific primary keyword. Home pages usually target a more wide and all-encompassing industry-related term and as you work at your site, making category pages, articles and product pages, these will dig deeper into the niche you have chosen and target more precise and specific user needs.

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