Adding quality content to your website on a regular basis is a very good
SEO tactic. Google sees that your website is active because new pieces
of information are added. On top of that, you increase the volume of
your content. If your keyword strategy has been crafted properly and
your content is nicely optimized for the right keywords, adding content
will increase your findability. But how to choose the perfect focus
keyword? Especially when you’re blogging and focussing on long tail
keywords, it can be quite hard to decide which keywords to optimize for.
In our view, there are at least three things you should do before
writing an amazing (high quality) text.
Choose a Focus Keyword That is Used to Search
Your keyword strategy should have given you some idea what you want to write about. For blog posts, you will usually aim for a long tail keyword (containing multiple words). In our WP SEO plugin
you will find a drop down menu which supplements your entry with
suggestions. These suggestions are actually based on Google Suggest.
This is exactly the same as what you’d see when you type the search term
into a Google search box.
The terms you will find in the suggest
drop down menu are thus terms and combinations of words that are logical
and used by actual people to search on the web. This tool can be very
helpful in giving you some first ideas about the search behavior of
people in the area you want to write about. Our Yoast Suggest tool uses the same data to find the first 10 keywords and then expands on that. Also, Marieke has recently written about more keyword research tools.
Suggest changes based on the problems people have, so monitoring it for
important keywords makes sense. This particular new result gave us some
extra input for this post.
Discover Some Information About Search Volume
Once you have found a long tail search term you would like to start
ranking for, you should put some effort into discovering whether or not
the search volume of your chosen focus keyword is high. We will be the
first to admit, Google has made this really hard. The only way to know
‘for sure’ how often a search term is used, is by having an active and
alive AdWords account and by bidding on the search term of your choice.
We understand this is a bit too difficult and expensive for most of you
(we honestly hardly ever do this).
Not to worry, using Google
Trends should give at least some idea, in a creative way, about search
volume. Google Trends allows you to compare the search volume between
two search terms over time. This will give some insights in the volume
of the search terms people use (always relative to another term).
If
you already have some (blog)posts that rank well for good terms, you
will know how many visitors these posts attract. Using Google Trends to
compare the focus keywords of older posts (of which at least the number
of visitors to your website is known) with the focus keyword you have in
mind for your new post, could give you some idea about the potential of
traffic this new focus keyword could have. Make sure to choose older
posts that are as much similar to the post you are planning to write: if
you are planning to choose a long tail keyword, compare posts with long
tail focus keywords as well.
As you can see the traffic is comparable, we know the search traffic
to our snippet preview post is reasonably good, so we know it’s worth
optimizing for.
Using Google Trends to compare between your old
focus keywords and the one you would like to choose will give you some
insights about the prospects for your focus keyword.
Another way
to use Google Trends is when you are doubting between a number of (long
tail) focus keywords. Google Trends will easily show you what search
term will have the highest search volume (compared to another). Google
Trends will help you decide which long tail keyword is most common in
the search engines.
Google Your Proposed Focus Keyword
Apart from knowing which
search terms are actually used by people, you need to know whether or
not your idea for your post or page fits the desires and expectations of
the people who use the search terms. The best way to find out whether
or not your content fits these desires is to Google your proposed (sets
of) keywords yourself.
Take the time to look at the first two
result pages. Are the articles Google shows of the same character that
your article will be like? Does your website fit between the results
shown in these result pages? If you decide to write your blogpost or
page, while optimizing for this exact focus keyword, you are aiming for a
display of your page amongst these.
We also saw lots of questions on the WordPress forums, giving us all the more reason to write this post.
Note
that we looked at the old post and decided it wasn’t good and complete
enough, so we decided we would delete it and replace it with this one.
Make
sure to use the content of the result pages as an inspiration for your
blog post. Are there any useful ideas (we are NOT encouraging to copy
content, merely to see whether you perhaps missed some information or
arguments for your own blog post)? But more importantly: how can you
make sure your post will stand out? In what way could your post be
better, funnier, more original than the post presently displayed in the
result pages. Try to think of content that will make the audience click and share!
Should Every Page Have a Focus Keyword?
We often get this question: should our about page or our contact page have a focus keyword? What should it be?
The
answer is easy: not every page needs a focus keyword. Your contact page
should be easily reachable, it might for instance need to rank for
“<company name> address”. That probably doesn’t make sense as a
focus keyword though and it’s perfectly fine to leave it empty.
Conclusion: Picking a Focus Keyword is Not Easy
Choosing
a perfect focus keyword is not an exact science. You should aim for a
combination of words that are actually used by a search audience. Aim
for a focus keyword that is relatively high on volume and aim for
one that will fit your audience.
In the past weeks, we have written quite a few posts about keyword research
and content writing. We have decided to combine all this writing and
add some more and deeper info and are currently working on a new ebook.
In this ebook we will focus purely on content SEO. We will discuss
keyword strategy, site structure and content writing and give in depth
information about what you can do with your content in order to improve
your ranking in search engines. If you want to make sure not to miss it,
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