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
-
Old homepage in google on branded keyword
Hello there, I have a strange problem: if you search "probike" (romanian google.ro), i get an OLD homepage with https://www.probike.ro , and my new homepage is https://probike.ro, the real problem is that title/meta description are not available (see attachment). Redirect 301: Ok
Technical SEO | | Shanaki
Robots.txt: Ok
Sitemap: Ok Help, is annoying 🙂 With respect, Andrei I33gThc0 -
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
See Different Landing page for my main keyword in google search result
I have a website like http://www.bannerbuzz.com, i am promoting home page with vinyl banners keyword, but currently i can see my website's review page for vinyl banners result in google, i want to display my home page instead of review page for my keyword result in google, its frequently change, some time i can see home page for it and some time it shows review page as i attached image. i want to show my home page, so can you please help me to solve it, how can i stable my home page with main keywords. OtOXxiE.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Keyword Targeting with Dynamic Pages
We have a large e-commerce website made with .net. so all of our category and item pages are made dynamic. Most things like title, some of the words and a few other things are done with scripts. I want to be able to target certain words and have more customized words on certain pages. Has anyone dealt with this? I know .net is pretty common so I can't be a unique case.
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Too many external links?
Ok, so I am finally focusing more on SEO of my hobby website as I am notice the relavent keywords are not really onsite what I want, for example, according to analytics "post" is my most popular keyword which I assume is from the vbulletin forum. My question today is that according to the moz scan, my forum has too many external links, my question is what are some measures I can do whether within the vbulletin forum or custom coding to reduce the amount of links/increase power? www.rcnightmare.com
Technical SEO | | TheTippingPoint0 -
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris
Technical SEO | | BaseKit0 -
We have a decent keyword rich URL domain that's not being used - what to do with it?
We're an ecommerce site and we have a second, older domain with a better keyword match URL than our main domain (I know, you may be wondering why we didn't use it, but that's beside the point now). It currently ranks fairly poorly as there's very few links pointing to it. However, the exact match URL means it has some value, if we were to build a few links to it. What would you do with it: 301 product/category pages to current site's equivalent page Link product/category pages to current site's equivalent page Not bother using it at all Something else
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0