How many keywords should I target?
-
Hi there
I'm looking for advice from the community on how many keywords to target. What are the pros and cons of:
-
focussing on the 40 keywords that we rank for already, with specific attention paid to those where we are on pages 2-5.
-
Spread our link building / onsite optimisation work a little further - and continue to target all 280 keywords on our list as and when they are appropriate to target.
I'd love to hear what strategies people recommend.
Thanks
-
-
Every day I work to produce new content that will expand my keyword reach. Every day.
-
Thanks everyone for your comments - I will report back in a couple of months!
-
Thanks Chris - I think you're right. I was spreading myself too thin before!
-
Thanks Philipp - makes perfect sense and was the direction I was leaning anyway!
-
The hardest part about what you're proposing is effort dilution. Say you have 10 people working your 40 keywords. That's 4 keywords per person (this is oversimplified for the sake of argument). Now you're proposing by increasing their load 7 times to 28 keywords per person. Do you think that you will get the same quality of work? The answer is a likely "No" and you might not realize that until your rankings tank (which is part of what happened where I work).
The first thing I would do is categorize your 280 words. I use three categories
- Primary - This is an important word to our site. It needs to be prominent in the site (titles, H1, etc). If it's a phrase it should appear together in nearly all circumstances.
- Secondary - This word is less important but still important. If it's a phrase it needs to appear together whenever possible but it does not have to unless there is a page focused on it. In some cases this might be a shorter version of a primary phrase (i.e. "spinning widgets" is encompassed by a page on "spinning blue widgets")
- Tertiary - These are typically long tail words. They have no focus page and are not a primary focus but we want the traffic. The phrase mostly does not appear together but the words should be sprinkled where appropriate. Here we expect the search engine to do the work of pulling the words together
Once you've categorized your keywords you can then look at your site with "SEO glasses" and begin to structure your site and content to use the keywords in a meaningful manner.
-
Hi Heather,
There is no correct answer to this, but personally I would work on a manageable set at a time. Try grouping them and create content and optimise accordingly. The unfortunate thing about working on many keywords at a time is that your effort becomes diluted.
Hope this helps.
Dan
-
Your decision on how many keywords to focus on at one time could depend one how much content your site already has, what time frames your business objectives call for, and how many woman-hours per week you have to put towards it.
Often, it is better to be spending money that you do have than money that you don't, which would lead you towards going after low-hanging fruit first (option 1) so that you're seeing the faster ROI that that can bring. Then prioritize the creation/optimization of content for the rest of the project in segments according to remaining business objectives or product/service profitability,
-
Hi Heather
I think those 2 options are not exclusive. First focus on your top 40 keywords as you suggested. In a next step, by all means target further keywords. The point is that you'll probably have to create extra content so you won't be able to expand to 280 keywords in one go. But try to integrate those in your content planning to prioritize content that promises lots of search traffic.
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
-
I have recently re-done my website. My buyers guide and my category page are ranking for keywords I'm after.
I have recently re-done my entire site (only a few days). I believe Google is still re-crawling and updating (however, the amount of movement on other searches has been significant). My buyers guide is ranking very high for its intended keywords, as well as high for the keywords of the category page. Both are at the beginning of the second page and I wonder if its dragging me down. What do you think I should do? Is it to early to take action as everything has been completed redone.
Technical SEO | | Code2Chil0 -
Geographical targeting with Magento
We have a Magento store, with multiple stores/domains setup. There is only really one reason that we have the multiple domains; we use an automatic GEOIP store switcher to send a customer to the right store, so that they pay the proper shipping, see the proper pricing etc, and a couple small differences in the design templates. But all the content is identical. So we have: domain.com (main website)
Technical SEO | | maartenvr
domain.ca (where most other countries are directed to based on GEOIP)
domain.eu Since the content is the same, what is the best strategy here? I looked at several options: 1. Custom canonical urls, making each page on the .ca and .eu use canonical url of the .com
2. Completely block the .ca and .eu from robots.
3. Leave it the way it is0 -
New keyword simply not Ranking
Evening all, first post. I'm currently ranking OK for a broad range of keywords - nothing at number 1 but some are on the first page. However, there is one particular keyword which simply refuses to get indexed. I've witnessed this behaviour before with another site where it appears at SERP 300 or so, then vanishes, comes back at 200 odd and then vanishes. Right now, it's not even ranking in any position. I'm using SERPFox for SERP position on Google. I've had Moz analyse the content on page and it's getting an A. The article is about 2000 words, with good Title and page description and the keyword is appearing under 1%. My question is, have you witnessed odd behaviour like this before where other keywords are ranking OK but an odd few don't even get indexed? I have a few links built to the URL and asked Google Webmaster tools to index the URL but still nothing. I have no penalties or anything to worry about. The only other info I have is that this URL is on a brand-new domain but the previous domain has a 301 redirect with a page authority of 42 and a domain authority of 38 (not too high). And, everything else appears to be running along OK. The point is, I have no expectations about the keyword ranking in a certain position but find it odd how the keyword keeps popping in and out of Google SERP. The keyword has a difficulty of: 58% Any thoughts appreciated. Robert. uH7vtbh
Technical SEO | | hooneyrobert0 -
To many links on page. Big or small issue for eCommerce
On my site I have around 3k pages and about 90 categories. Most of which have a sensible number of products but some have only a few products and some have loads. if I have say 40 links on the page ignoring the producand is it a big problem if I have more than 60 products on the page? Assuming a link limit per page of 100 user wise we have filters and sorts for thme to find what they breed without issue. But simply from an seo point of view how damaging would I be to have the 23 "to many links on page issues? Worth fixing by making two categories and splitting out products even tho it would hinder the user.
Technical SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Is it possible to be penalized as duplicate content for one keyword but not another?
I help develop an online shopping cart and after a request from management about some products not showing up in the SERP's I was able to pinpoint it down to mostly a duplicate content issue. It's a no brainer as some times new products are inserted in with copied text from the manufacturers website. I recently though stumbled across a odd problem. When we partially re-wrote the content to seem unique enough it seemed to remedy the issue for some keywords and not others. A) If you search the company name our category listing shows as #1 ahead of the manufacturers website. We always did rank for this term. B) If you search the product name our product page is listed #3 behind two other listings which belong to the manufacturer. C) If you search the keywords together as "company product" we are still being filtered out as duplicate content. When I allow the filtered results to show we are ranking #4 It's been a full month since the changes were indexed. Before I rewrite the content even further I thought I would ask to see if any one has any insight as to what could be happening.
Technical SEO | | moondog6040 -
Different pages first results on same keyword search
Hi, Sometimes Google does not show the page you intended for a certain keyword. Logically you would say that the intended page is not relevant/strong enough. But in my case several pages ranked fine for a long period of time and all of a sudden another less important page gets the highest result on a keyword search. (We are in the camping business) For instance: One of our campsites called Tenuta primero used to rank position 9 in google with page below for a long time (search: 'camping tenuta primero') This was the page we intended to rank with. http://www.suncamp.nl/nl/nl/campings/italie/friuli-venezia-giulia/camping-tenuta-primero/uc19-l1-n797-c13-r115-cp104959/ Now all of a sudden the position for search 'camping tenuta primero' is position 33 with review page below. http://www.suncamp.nl/nl/nl/campings/italie/friuli-venezia-giulia/camping-tenuta-primero/beoordelingen/uc19-l1-n797-c13-r115-cp104959-t22598/ What could have caused this? Pages are in Dutch but main keywords are camping are tenuta primero. Thank you very much in advance! Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek Dennis@acsi.eu | www.suncamp.nl |
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Targeting City via Web Server
Here's a question I can't seem to find an answer to. Does web hosting within a targeting city make a different in the engines? For example, a site targeting the Denver area, with web hosting in Denver. Will this boast the ranking or is targeting limited to countries? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mkoster0 -
Local results without geotargeted keywords
i'm trying to rank the site appliance-repair-ny.com for the New York City area. I managed to have the site rank pretty good (the site is less than 6 months old) for keyphrases with NYC, New York and Manhattan but i don't understand how to get the site rank higher for the ones without those keywords. For example: Appliance repair NYC - rank 1 Appliance Repair New york - rank 4 Appliance repair (without location) not in results Anyone can help me please? 🙂 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | atohad0