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
-
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Why does Google's search results display my home page instead of my target page?
Technical SEO | | h.hedayati6712365410 -
Question about breaking out content from one site onto many
We have a website and domain -- which is well-established (since 1998) -- that we are considering breaking apart for business reasons. This is a content site that hosts articles from a few of our brands in portal fashion. These brands are represented in print with their own magazines so it's important to keep their presence separate. All of the content on the site is related to a general industry, with each brand covering a unique segment in the industry. For example, think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games. The current thinking is to break out the content from a couple brands to their own sites and domains. The business case for this branding purposes. I'm of the opinion that this is a bad idea as we would likely see a noticeable decline in search traffic across the board, which we rely on for impressions for our advertisers. If we take the appropriate steps to carefully redirect pages to the new domains what kind of hit should we expect to take from this transition? Would it make much difference if we were transition from 1 to 2 sites vs 1 to 4? Should this move be avoided all together? Any advise would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | accessintel0 -
Keyword rankings for new website good in Yahoo and Bing but no movement in Google?
Hello, This past September I launched a new redesigned website for a client. His old website was a static html site that was many years old and the new website was created using WordPress. With the new design we made sure to use all the proper techniques for SEO. (h1 tages, image names, quality links, page titles, etc.) Plus, all the content is new content written for this site. I've actually launched new sites many times and after a few months usually start seeing keyword ranking improvements from the major search engines. With this particular website I'm seeing improvements in Yahoo and Bing but no movement in Google. I've used Google Webmaster Tools and made sure my sitemap is being submitted, etc. It all seems good, but I can't understand why Yahoo and Bing are working but nothing from Google. My page grades are all A's and B's and Moz isn't showing any big issues. Maybe I need to give it more time? This client is a lawyer and has many websites out there so maybe he's being penalized somewhere I don't know? As I mentioned, I've been doing SEO for about 8 years and have never had this much trouble with Google. I was wondering if you can look at the site and see if there are any glaring issues I'm missing. Website: http://www.arizonamedicalmalpractice.info/ The keyword phrases were are looking at are "Phoenix Medical Malpractice Lawyer", "Phoenix Medical Malpractice Attorney:, "Arizona Medical Malpractice Lawyer & Attorney", etc. I appreciate anyone who takes the time and does a quick look over. Thanks very much, Bill
Technical SEO | | Bill_K0 -
My blog post for a specific keyword is in the 'omitted results'. Why might this be, and how to overcome it?
My website Homepage: http://kulraj.org Here is the page I am working to rank for:** http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/** When I search specifically for 'kulraj hedonic treadmill' just to test it, the first result is this: kulraj.org_/tag/_hedonic-treadmill. It shows the shortened version of the article that is within the Tag page. [I'm new to SEO and Moz, please keep in mind] Moz has told me I have duplicate content, which is regarding my main Blog page and Tags page, which is true the content is duplicate. However, the actual blog post itself is not displayed anywhere else on the website, or anywhere else on the web. Moz confirms this, and reports no duplicate content warning. My questions, therefore, are: 1. How do I actually go about installing a rel canonical tag within a standard WordPress dashboard (I'm using Genesis Framework) - I'm finding great difficulty finding instructions on this anywhere on the web. I clearly need to fix the issue with Blog page and Tags Page. 2. Why would my blog post be omitted, and are there any suggestions I could implement to bring it into the main search results. Other things I've noticed: 1. If I type this URL in: kulraj.org/hedonic-treadmill, it automatically redirects to http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/ 2. Inside Google Webmaster Tools it says: No new messages or recent critical issues. 3. Regarding the above, when I click 'Labs > author stats' within Webmaster Tools, it shows nil stats, so something there is not quite right either, even though Google+ Authorship is confirmed.
Technical SEO | | Kulraj0 -
Top 10 keywords is still going strong but the rest just got smashed!
Hi SEOMOZ and it's USERs, Been trying to find my answer online but now after three weeks of reading blogposts I'm going to try this. 🙂 My website was ranking really good on 10 important keywords but not so good on the long tail, between 11 - 50 on maybe 30 different other, not so important keywords.
Technical SEO | | Drillo
So I began doing some work (I'm a newbie) but this is what I did:
1. Changed top navigation structure to get 4 other pages (w/ keywords as links) in it. (used a dropdown)
2. Wrote plenty of text that was a good fit for the page. (The text is OK and not to spammy looking.)
3. Added three links from high quality sites with keywords as links to these pages. I added them from my own site that is on the same server, same IP. 😉 I know, not looking so good.
4. Changed URL structure on a couple of pages to get a keyword in it. (did a correct 301)
5. Changed to better Titles and headings on the page. Keywords in them both but not the same. The result:
1. My 10 most important keywords I began ranking even better. I rank no. 1 on 9 out of 10.
2. Almost all the other pages went from ranking ~ 15 - 50 to not > 50. It has now been 4 weeks since I did most of the changes and 3 weeks since all the pages was hit > 50. So now I'm thinking about what to do?
1. Should I clean up my text, titles so they don't look to over optimized?
2. Should I remove my links from my own pages? (my link profile in general is actually pretty good.)
3. or should I just wait? Because changing more will just indicate to Google that somehing fishy is going on 😉 ? In the beginning I hoped that Google killed my rankings just because of the big changes. But now after 3 weeks I'm more sceptical and thinks I've been hit by a over-optimizing filter. According to webmaster tools I've not been hit by a manually penalty. Please, help me. I would really appreciate all ideas from people here with more experience.0 -
Do keywords in url parameter count?
I have a client who is on an older ecommerce platform that does not allow url rewrites in anyway. It would cost a ton of money to custom dev a solution. Anyways right now they have set up a parameter on their product urls to at least get the keyword in there. My question is, will this keyword actually be counted since it is in a parameter? An example url is http://domain.com/Catalog.aspx?Level1=01&Level2=02&C=Product-name-here Does this 'product-name-here' count as having the keyword in the url according to google?
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
"To keyword or not to keyword" in the URL string?
We are debating on whether to use primary keywords in the URL for every page for a new client for the sake of SEO. What is the feeling in the Community on which version is smarter? Version 1: www.abccompany.com/miami-moving-company/about-us www.abccompany.com/miami-moving-company/contact-us etc. etc. Version 2: www.abccompany.com/about-us Thank you for your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Outranking a competitor when their domain name is the keyword
Hi I'd just like to ask the opinion of my fellow members here : We are currently ranking second for a very important keyword and would obviously like the top spot on the SERP - the site that is ranking first has the domain name as the keyword phrase(along with a good amount of quality links from a variety of domains) - now I know it is possible to outrank them since I do remember reading about this in one of Rands posts(I think it was the whole white hat black hat one he posted recently) - bascially we have more domain authority, slightly less links but from double the amount of root domains and a higher page authority too! Does having the keyword as your domain make THAT much of a difference when we are(imo) quite close in terms of great content and link profiles(and all the onpage factors) ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DanHill0