As professional SEO and digital marketing consultants, we have seen many cases where a website or blog has a lot of content but no organic visitors. There are many issues that may be causing this, but our first guess would be the lack of a proper SEO Keyword Strategy!
In this post, we will guide you through diverse elements such as keyword relevance, density and content quality.
Define your keywords
As a first step, we will do a brainstorm of the best keywords for our SEO. To do this we will first identify 3 elements:
- What is my core business?
- Who is my target market?
- What are my differentiators?
The best way to define your keywords is to start from what is mostly related to your core business or value. You will then progressively shift into keywords that are related to your differentiators. All this from the communication perspective of your target market! So it is important to write the keywords in a way that your target market would use to look for you.
Here is an example, lets say I am a fitness studio. My first keywords would naturally be very closely related to my core value. Probably “fitness studio”, “training”, “get fit”… would be first on the list as they are the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about a fitness studio.
Depending on each industry, there will be different levels of competition for keywords. For example it is safe to assume that “fitness studio” will be used by every fitness studio, generating high competition and so including it on your content will probably not be enough to get you to the top page. It is important to include it but you also need to have more “specific” keywords for better SEO results.
Next step would be to include on your keyword brainstorm list some words related to your differentiators. In our fitness studio example, location is very important because most people will like to train near their home or their work. We can write “fitness studio near…” or “fitness studio in …”. This will start to set you apart from your competition. In fact, if you are the only studio fitness in the area, you might get to the top page with this!
Probably you are not the only fitness studio in the area so you need to develop more specific keywords. You might have Yoga lessons, or a swimming pool… so specifying keywords such as “swimming pool in (city or zone)” would probably set you up apart from the rest of the competition for people looking for swimming pools.
Keyword Density
Now that you have your keyword brainstorm, and you have selected the best keywords to use, its time for content generating! You should be aware that including a keyword excessively in your content would be considered spam by the crawling bots and penalize your score.
For every post or page, we recommend to select a main keyword or key phrase and a few other keywords that will be scattered around in the content.
The main keyword must be at least once included in the content. We would also advise including the main keyword on the title of the website (H1).
You can include this main keyword once every couple of paragraphs and be fine. The ratio of main keyword/content would be appropriate. Including it every paragraph would be too much in out opinion and the content will feel forced to the reader.
The secondary-priority keywords can be used as section topics. They can be included in the sub headings (h2, h3…) but its not completely necessary. They should be included at least once in the section content.
