Choosing Focus Keywords
-
Hello everyone!
I am new to the community and I have a question about determining keywords. I have created a blog {LulusLikes.com} to practice my SEO.
I have installed the Yoast SEO plugin and I have noticed the plugin always encourages you to choose a different focus keyword. So if my focus keyword is "Dog of the Week" and it's a weekly contest, wouldn't that be my focus keyword each time I had that type of post?
How should I choose my focus keyword for that type of post?
I hope that makes sense. Thanks!
-
Thank you so much! This is the best explanation I've gotten so far!
-
No problem
What you would want to do is learn a little about site architecture, and how different pages will target different thing. Think of a sire like Zappos:
- homepage - targets something broad like "shoes" and "shoes for sales" etc
- shoes categories - target things like "men's shoes, men's dress shoes" etc
- subcategories - "men's dress shoes black"
- finally products - "size 9 men's dress shoes black"
- even resources - "how to choose the most comfortable men's shoes"
So your homepage should target the broadest concept / keywords. Then you might have category pages targeting things slightly more specific. Then your posts would target informational searches of very specific things people are looking for.
-
Hi There
We were just saying the type of content being created seemed like a very good fit for sharing on social media.
I'd say if it's your goal to be practicing SEO - that process and SEO work should start way before writing a new blog post and entering a focus keyword. You would want to begin everything with keyword research. This helps you determine what to create content about to rank for things.
You may also want to learn a little about how different pages should rank for different things - and your homepage should target your main over arching topic. This will be usually the broadest, most highly searched term.
There's some great resources on keyword research:
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
-
Yes, I think it is safe to say that ALL of my traffic is from social media since I just started and have a tiny little following. But, I would like to learn how to get traffic based on my SEO. I really appreciate you breaking it down for me. That makes sense to find a "gap" and fill it with content.
So if I'm not so much focusing on one single keyword per post, should I focus on adding overall keywords through out my whole website? Like incorporating "dog clothes" or "dog fashion" into all my posts? I know not to stuff keywords, but if I can organically incorporate them?
Sorry for all my newbie questions, but I really appreciate your help!
-
Like I said earlier, this is a brand NEW blog to try to help me learn SEO (which I am clearly terrible at) so does that mean I need more text so it's not appearing only as social media? I did use some Instagram posts to get started. So that is probably why it looks like that.
I guess what I am wanting to do is make it like a fashion blog so I can promote products. Those have SEO, right? I find them when I search for them. So would that mean I should focus on overall keywords to use throughout my website? Like maybe "dog clothes" or "pet clothes"?
My "dog contest" it's a contest I hold on Instagram and then post the winner's images on my website. So wouldn't I want to optimize it for that?
Sorry for all my newbie questions but I REALLY appreciate your help!
-
I cant say any other thing than @evolvingSEO he is right, your content clearly looks like social media.
There is an opportunity for image search of course, thatswhy you could name the puppy/dog you write about like I said above - but your traffic screams out social mediaIf you optimize for dog contest, just because it is searched a lot, you will frustrate any person wich want to participate on a dog contest (as long as you dont do dog contests).
-
Hi There
To step back a second, not all blog posts or pieces of content need a focus keyword. It depends on the goals of your content, and how you are trying to get it traffic. It looks like a lot of your content may be best suited to get traffic from social media etc. That's great, and in that case just write your article and don't worry about the focus keyword too much because it may rank for stuff by happenstance, but your main traffic sources won't be SEO.
That said, sometimes you may create content because you specifically see an opportunity to maybe rank for something where there is a "gap" in existing content in Google's search results. For example, you may notice a lack of great results for something like "pembroke welsh vs cardigan corgi" - and as a goal, you may set out to create the best piece of content on that topic to rank for it, and SEO is your primary goal. In that case, you'd enter "pembroke welsh vs cardigan corgi" into Yoast, and it will tell you how well your article is optimized for that based upon simple best practices.
So in other words - focus keyword is great when you know your target keyword ahead of time and are writing an article based off of that. If you're just writing an article for non-SEO purposes, maybe you'd refine a target keyword after the fact, but it's not a huge concern.
Choosing your focus keyword also has to do with just knowing good keyword research in general. There's two main factors to think about. Search volume and competition.
- Search volume - how many people look for the keyword per month. For blog posts it's best to stick in the 10-1,000 searches per month range.
- Competition - there's no single competition metric (Google does not provide one) but you can judge competition by experience of looking at search results or using a tool like Moz's keyword difficulty - which will give you a number from 1-100.
The trick of course is to try to find the highest volume but lowest difficulty, and that's a great beginning point for choosing focus keywords.
-
Thanks for your response! Okay that makes sense. So if I make my focus keyword for example - "brown retriever puppy" then I would be better off making one of my main keywords "dog contest" ? Because that is something people search for.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Thanks again for the help!
-
Yoast tells you what people search for, i guess noone searches for "Dog of the week".
If you write for a targeted Keyword, you should do that only one time - otherwise, what should google show in SERPs??But in your case, Dog of the week is not the targeted keyword. Don't know how people searching for dogs you write about, but that should be the target keyword - maybe for the category - and with the post about the dog of the week should target other things. Maybe "brown labrador retriever puppy"
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
-
How to rank 1 page for multiple keywords in the new way
Hi There It has been a little while since I was involved with KW's in earnest. 1.5 years ago and beyond I did really well with SEO. I'm not in a hugely competitive market but we found our keywords, we wrote great web pages for 1,2,3 keywords and when we found more great keywords that we built a new page to rank for. For example: One big hitting keyword was "Rugged PDA", we created a category page for Rugged PDA's. Another was "Rugged Handheld" so we had a new page for that. We then long tailed "semi rugged PDA", "waterproof rugged PDA" etc etc and built sub category pages. We were legit, did lots of content marketing, ran a blog tweeted etc and we did really well to be honest. However these days it's not working, One of Rand's whiteboard sessions stated that you need to build bigger topic based pages that delivered on more keywords (The one about shoes!). This is great as we love that idea as we can have 1 big category page that offers great value to the visitor, however I am struggling to work out how we target a bigger list of keywords to the one page or to fewer pages. To underline this the MOZ page rankers also still seem to work in the same way where they expect 1 or 2 KW's per page to get A ranks to them, so I'm confused!! For example Rugged PDA is an old term, Google trends is showing that it's glory days are over and we know that the term "Rugged Smartphone" is the one to use as we all use smartphones not PDAs these days. However we also see a lot about Rugged + Phone, Mobile, Cell, Handheld, tablet, device, phablet... all relevant to one big category page. So I run these KW's through google search to see if the same pages come up as a test to see if Google thinks they all mean the same, I get a few, but not much overlap. How do we therefore have 1 page that talks about all kinds of great stuff about the "Rugged smartphone" but one that also targets rugged handheld, rugged android device etc etc? I've spent 2 days catching up, i'm none the wiser on this specific element but i'm sure I am just missing one key element of common sense here and any help is very much appreciated. Regards Dave
Technical SEO | | Raptor-crew0 -
Google displaying different meta descriptions for the same URL but different keyword
Hi All, A quick question that may even have a quick answer: Why would Google display a different meta description for the same URL for a different keyword? For example I enter 2 of our similar keywords into Google: KEYWORD A | META DESCRIPTION A DISPLAYED | URL A KEYWORD B | META DESCRIPTION B DISPLAYED | URL A Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Keyword targeting by page, site, or both?
Hi, We recently discovered that a product we sell has a misnomer, and that a ton of people take to Google and use variations of that misnomer while trying to find us. Unfortunately we don't rank in Google for this keyword, and its costing us thousands in lost sales. I've been slowly building the misnomer into the content of our site in hopes that the spiders will pick up on it. It has started to work in the last couple weeks, but we're nowhere near the top (and we are #1 and #2 for most of our other prime keywords.) The site which sells the product is specialized, and only sells this specific product (in different models, but they're all the same product essentially.) With that in mind, I'm trying to figure out the best way to attack a new keyword. I know that normally you would dedicate a specific page (in an eCommerce store probably that product's own page) to employ your SEO tactics. However, because this site specializes in this product and offers different models and information about it I'm confused about the best approach. Does Google take into consideration the entire site a s whole, or are the pages within my site competing against each other for rank?
Technical SEO | | ninjaprecision0 -
Description and Title keyword Not showing in Google SERP?
It appears our description and title have disappeared in Goggle and Bing search results. We currently did a update to Magento 1.7 and the robots.txt included this: User-agent: * Disallow: / But that is fixed in Google Webmaster tools and everything else looks good. Here is the site: http://www.oxygenconcentratorstore.com/ Any help would be awesome. Thanks. google_serp.jpg
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton0 -
If I get a natural link for a great site and I have my keyword with anchor text in this link, how should I proceed?
If I get a natural link for a great site and I have my keyword with anchor text in this link, how should I proceed? I need to contact the site and ask to remove the link or request the removal of the anchor text and leave only the site URL? Or yet do not I need to worry about this issue?
Technical SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Google WMT shows sitemap.xml highest ranked for one main keyword
Hello, I am seeing my sitemap.xml show up in Google webmaster tools at the top for one of the main keywords for my site. This is in the Your Site on the Web - Keywords section. The URLs of my site contain this keyword, which is why I figure it showed up. I'm curious if this should be a concern to me? I find it odd that the sitemap would show up in this way. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nux0 -
Keyword stuffing
I'm working on this page at the moment - http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/berghaus-bid6.html. The keyword we're going for is, unsurprisingly, 'Berghaus'. The SEOmoz on page report has flagged up a possible issue with keyword stuffing as the term is mention around 25 times. Is it worth altering this, which could be quite tricky as a lot of the page is dynamically generated? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | neooptic0