How do you decide which keywords to optimize first?
-
Let me be very clear, I am not looking for info on how to rank keywords so please do not post about that.
I have a list of keywords I chose and want to rank for, and every group of keywords are related. I was wondering, what is a good strategy for determining which keywords to start with? Should I take one keyword from each group so it looks more natural? Should I do a group of 10 related keywords at a time?
Any ideas? Links? Tips? Resources? What have you done in the past?
-
That's an SEO companies IP
I think if you're looking at level of competition, ppc $ and monthly traffic estimates that can be a good start but you are also part SEO part business consultant so you need to factor in the clients margins and other factors as well if you want to do your job properly in my opinion.
With existing websites there is always this sunk costs bias which I tend to see creeping in as well which affects people's decision making process.
-
Stephanie i will suggest you to make a use of Hittail Keyword tool as it helps you to get a list of keywords that are good and have potential to get you good traffic + are closer to the first page and are easy to rank i use HitTail: The Best Long Tail Keyword Tool beside that if you already have a list of keywords what you can do is worki8ng first on the long tails building links for them to build authority as well once authority is build you are surely going to get a push on your short keywords + till then getting complete advantage of your long tail keywords
-
Go to your google analytics and see if any of the organic search keywords align with keywords on your list.
Run ranking reports on the ones that do. Note pages that are getting search traffic for terms on your list but that are not at the top of the search results.
Review the pages that are receiving the search traffic for those terms to see how well they're optimized.
Start first with the pages that are least optimized, getting traffic, and are on page three, two or bottom of page one of the results. Optimize those pages for most closely aligned keywords
It's called low-hanging fruit.
-
lol thanks
-
I know how that goes :(. Good luck!
-
yes of course. i am just in the process of creating a new strategy though and fixing some of the stuff the person before me messed up.
-
How do you focus on keywords without being spammy? Backlink anchor text? Guest post title tags? keyword proximity to your backlink?
-
Hi Dave,
Yes I am doing something similar, most of these keywords are for different pages. Obviously all the pages will be optimized to the keywords specific to that page, but i am wanting to pick 10 keywords to focus on and rank for with their respective pages. Rather than focusing on everything and building links all at once, I want to focus on 10 at a time, set goals and measure the results, then maintain those results and work on the next 10.
-
Hmm, I seem to take a different approach than most here. I look at each page and see which of my keywords will match up to that specific content. I don't use a top keyword list unless I'm optimizing the homepage. I hardly ever look at competition when placing keywords on the content pages of the site. I ALWAYS look at competition when looking for long-tail blog post type keywords. I used to use 5 different tools to look at competition, but then I realized that you really only need one metric - the allintitle: "keyword." If the allintitle is below 2000 you can rank 1st page with the keyword being furthest to the left in the title tag pretty easily. If it's higher than 2000 the keyword you choose dosn't really matter. It's going to come down to off-site SEO.
-
One strategy is feeding KW terms into Google Trends and figuring out interest levels. Next, figure out the total amount of sites ranking for that string (via quotes in a Google search). Once you have these two data points you can prioritize the string as you have a good indication of interest/competition.
-
Thank you
-
Great answer thank you
-
I would look at what you already have ranking and quality phrases which are coming up in the search and need that extra attention to get them onto the first page and also factor in:
Level of Competition
Potential Traffic / current traffic
The quality of content on site you have to work off of
That would tell you which short tails you have a shot at and if they are out of reach or already ranking, start taking a look at the next most valuable long tail terms
-
Hi Stephanie,
I'd say pulling your analytics data for keywords you're getting long tail traffic for that you're ranking for on the first page (not in top 2 spots) and prioritizing that against your rankings data (whether its from SEOMoz, Advanced Web Ranking etc) using Vlookups in Excel
If you're estimating potential traffic, you can export Adwords keyword data for potential traffic (very rough estimate) to get an idea of what kind of traffic you could potentially be getting
An excellent resource would be http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/#vlookup to start off with.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Having a Keyword in # is not that important in 2018, Do you agree?
Earlier having a Keyword in was one of the important ranking factor or at least every SEO guru use to suggest this. But, of late, we are noticing that Google is not giving much weightage to it. What are your thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SameerBhatia3 -
Keyword stuffing on category pages - eCommerce site
Hi there fellow Mozzers. I work for a wine company, and I have a theory that some of our category pages are not ranking as well as they could, due to keyword stuffing. The best example is our Champagne category page, which we are trying to rank for the keyword Champagne, currently rank 6ish. However, when I load the page into Moz, it tells me that I might be stuffing, which I am not, BUT my products might be giving both Moz and Google this impression as well. Our product names for any given Champagne is "Champagne - {name}" and the producer is "Champagne {producer name}. Now, on the category pages we have a list of Champagnes, actually 44 Which means that with the way we display them, with both name of the wine, the name of the producer AND the district. That means we have 132 mentions of the word "Champagne" + the content text that I have written. I am wondering, how good is Google at identifying that this is in fact not stuffing, but rather functionality that makes for this high density of the keyword? Is there anything I can do? I mean, we can change it so it's not listed with Champagne on all the products, but I believe it would make the usability suffer a bit, not a lot - but it's a question of balance and I would like to hear if anyone has encountered a similar problem, if it is in fact a problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nikolaj-Landrock2 -
Potential keyword cannibalization?
Hi, I'm doing an audit of a site for a very competitive term (project management software). The site ranks for its root domain on the second page. They have a lot of other non-blog pages that are geared towards longer tail versions that include that term (project management software pricing, project management tool comparison, etc). My question is: are those pages cannibalizing potential search traffic? Should they just stick to the one page (root domain) and include those longtail keywords on the page instead of creating various pages that seem to possibly be cannibalizing traffic? Is this a fair conclusion that these other pages is causing them to rank lower for the main head term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Confused with rankings for keywords that are not on the actual page?
Hey Guys, So I went to search a keyword, my competitor came up, when I looked for that keyword on their page i didn't see it at all, and the page is content thin, how is it they are ranking for the keyword at all? Bit confused at how this works. So having the keyword in your content is not necessary a ranking factor? Please advise and sorry if this question is really amateur, I'm sure based on this search there is more to it then that.... could you other ranking factors as to why they rank for a keyword that is not in their content? Does the whole exact keyword have to be in the content to rank? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
Optimising a page for multiple keywords
I remember reading a question a while back about seo for a page targetting multiple keywords but I'm blowed if I can find it now.... I have a page which is optimised for one phrase and want to add 5-6 phrases/keywords... obviously I can't stuff the all the keywords in the page title or the header 1 tag. So I have written the content to mention the other keywords trouble is not wanting to compromise the quality of the page so of the keywords/phrases I have only been able to use once in the content. I assumed as the phrases are all on the same topic/area that this should not really matter. Apart from link building with the correct anchor text is there anything else I should be doing? The other option is to create custom pages for the keyword but again I am not keen on this idea.... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Why google does not show my site on my branding keyword?
Hi, I am the site owner of http://www.lankahq.net. It is a youtube video hosted website. 95% of the video contents are daily telecasting TV shows and categorized to make easy to find the specific video of the day of preferred program of the viewer. About 1 year ago suddenly disappeared my site from the google. Before happened that it was performing very well in search. Google showed my site contents within few minutes after I update in their search results when someone search for that. At the moment it does not show even some one search for "lankahq". It showing only if search for "lankahq.net", "lankahq.com" or "www.lankahq.net" something like a search keyword related to my domain name. Some other websites have added my branding keyword LankaHQ as a user of their site and they showing on top of Google. But not mine. It is much appreciated if someone can have a look on this matter. I can not find where is the problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad0 -
Multiple Keyword Research Questions, Help
Hello , I've been trying for several days to understand how keyword research works for a multi purpose website,I've read guides, articles even some chapters from the book" The Art of Seo" by O'Reilly and still no luck. It seems i can't wrap my head around keyword research,lets say I have a social gaming community website and I'm trying to rank it first on some low competition keywords + some long tail keywords.The website has functions like leaderboards, profiles,events, competitions,etc so it's not actually a news related website but it will have a blog. My website being on the games niche It would imply that I should target words that contain the word "Games" but this word generates millions of searches globally so ranking first its nearly impossible if the website is brand new. This made me pursue generic keywords formed with 2 / 3 words like fresh games, new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc which still generate lets say 30.000 searches globally each. Due to the different areas of the website like latest game events,latest games competitions,etc I'm confused If i should pursue website specific keywords like latest games events, fresh games events, latest games competitions, upcoming games competitions but these too generate 30.000 global searches each,so... 0.should i use generic keywords or keywords that include site features? So let's say I decide to pursue generic "games" keywords,due to a high competition based on the keyword I decide to go a layer deeper and for the keyword "fresh games" I obtain keywords like** "fresh games 2011,top fresh games 2011, upcoming fresh games** " and thus building a list of 30 keywords that contain " fresh games".If i do this for the rest of the keywords: ** new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc** I end up with a list of 10.000 keywords or more since each keyword generates other keywords. Is this the correct approach ? since generating 10.000 keywords sounds a lot and I'm getting the feeling that It's not how it supposed to be done,like were would I insert 10.000 keywords? So how do I know which keywords to pick and aim in order to try to get no.1 ranking? and why those? How many keywords should I use? and where should i put them? since it's not a news website so writing a lot of articles isn't an option. Should I focus on 2 words keywords with around 10.000-30.000 seaches or 2 words keywords + long tail keywords with less traffic like 100 - 5000? Is there a guide for the Keyword Analysis Tool since if i enter "fresh new games" i get a 39% keyword difficulty,is that hard to rank? and I don't know what all those color mean since some of them have higher numbers then others that are found at the top and how can i get beat a website that has has rank 10. So hopefully with your help & by some miracle I will finally be able to build a keyword list. Thank you !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arching0