How do you optimize your content and website for keywords?

One thing I found crucial is to understand your Customer Journey Map, and build your marketing strategy around it. If you determine SEO as a part of your marketing strategy, then you should think about how to provide value for your customers in their customer journey with the help of SEO. If you have a customer-centric approach, a value-first approach - determining the right SEO strategy and goals will be easier. Think about how to provide the best value for your customer - and they will thank you during the checkout process with their bank cards.

When defining your goals, don’t forget to also define how you plan to measure that goal. Goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) and they need to be mapped to KPIs. Having KPIs will help you better understand which content pieces are moving the needle for your goals.

Get a list of keywords your competitors are ranking. Prioritize the keywords which are ranking high with high possiblity of search intent satisfaction. Now create the contextual vector based on those keywords. The context should not be broken throughout the contextual vector, and every contextual layer must be structured in a way that fulfill the keywords intent best way possible.

Here are some tips for defining your SEO goals: Understand your target audience - Identify who you are trying to reach with your website and tailor your content accordingly. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) - Track the right data points to gauge success, such as organic traffic, rankings, and time on page. Analyze competitors - Learn from the competition by researching their strategies and identifying areas where they can be improved upon. Monitor trends - Stay up-to-date with the latest trends in SEO, such as voice search, local SEO, and AI technology. Set realistic goals - Don’t be overly optimistic when setting goals; instead, focus on achievable ones that will boost visibility over time.

First you need to have clarity on your organizational goals. Set aside the clients for a moment. Are you trying to build an email list, increase sales, conversion rate, become a thought leader, client retention, increase value for clients, decrease client drop off, etc. Where you are as an organization dictates the areas you will focus on primarily. Attempting to do too much at once is likely to become far less effective. When you make too many changes at once, it becomes more difficult to determine what exactly is contributing to the success, even with solid KPIs. It could be that one change in another section has impact on other areas you are not able to register easily. Goals define strategy always.

The best place to find new topic ideas for content is by speaking to your audience. Tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, and keyword tools (like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.) are great. But they will never compare to actually speaking with your target audience. Speak to your customers to find out about their goals, challenges, and needs. Use this information to create new content that specifically relates to audience’s interests. Don’t forget to speak with customer-facing teams like Sales or Customer Support to find other customer-focused angles for content.

When exploring topics for a business website, it is also important to tune into what is going on internally. For example, an open discussion with sales, operations and support teams can quickly uncover where certain content is required for sales conversations or to answer frequently asked customer queries, and these can be integrated into the ideation process.

You can also use platforms like Answer The Public, Google Search, YouTube search for finding topic ideas. Just put in your seed keyword and follow the suggestions you are getting. Also, try using the FAQ questions and People also ask card. Voice command search is extremely important and businesses should leverage this. Keep an eye on what your audience is searching and include that in your website.

When choosing topics, make sure your brand has the expertise to speak to them. It's important to stay in your lane to build the credibility and audience trust needed to become an authority. Also, cluster topics together based on main topics and subtopics. This will help you keep your site's content organized and ensure you cover each topic in depth.

When I am writing articles for various blogs, I definitely start with brainstorming broad topics. This can lead to many articles on the same topic - however with more in-depth on a subcategory. Broad topics can come from Google Trends, Google Search, Ask the Public, and other great sources mentioned by others. However, when it comes to writing, whether articles or social posts, you should be trying to rank more for E-E-A-T, and write naturally without keyword stuffing (do people still do this?). Writing an article for your niche should lead to natural voice and keywords. Answering questions or pain points should lead to better quality rankings.

It's important to understand, categorize, and prioritize your keyword targets by search intent. Someone searching for "what are the best running shoes?" has a different intent than someone searching for "nike react shoes best price" and certainly far different than just "running shoes". Once you understand the intent behind the keywords and queries that your prospects are using, then you can tailor the content and user experience of the page(s) on your website that they will get to from your optimization efforts.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an old information retrieval technique by Susan Dumais. The original paper from 1990 can be found here: http://susandumais.com/LSIPapers/JASIS90.pdf Generally speaking, "LSI keywords" is not how modern search engines rank search results, and encourages the poor SEO practice of keyword stuffing. LSI is a flag for outdated SEO practices. Alternatively, start with your core topic, look at the search results, and empathize with the problem various searchers could be looking to solve behind the search. As of June 2023, the "related searches," "people also asked," and word filters are great for identify different problems related to a topic. Answer the problems that align to your business goal(s).

Here are several other ways to find keyword suggestions: 1- Analyze the search terms visitors are using on your website's internal search engine to gain insight into what language/words they are using. 2- Google Search Console can help gain insights into the search terms people are using to find your website. 3- Regularly check industry publications and listen to customer feedback to identify the latest trends/topics and potential keyword ideas. 4- Use Google's suggestions and PAA (People Also Ask) section to find search terms that can provide valuable keyword ideas.

No. Stop now. This is out-of-date behaviour. The days of stuffing content with keywords are long gone. Focus rather on creating high quality content that meets the searcher's intent. Keyword research is a waste of time that could be spent making better content.

Let your customers do your keyword research for you. If you have a search box on your website, collect and analyse that data, and use it to discover any trends and/or products that you can add to your website.

While keyword metrics are helpful, don't let them discourage you from opportunities that make sense for your business goals. For example, many so-called "0 volume keywords" may be relevant to your audience and can result in pages that drive traffic from a variety of keywords or highly qualified leads. (The search term's volume may simply not have registered in SEO tools yet.) Also, if your website already has authority, it's possible you can target higher competition keywords.

Depending on your target market and niche, you want to aim for keywords that have a high search volume (100+ searches/month), and if your website is new, a low keyword difficulty (“Low” competition on Google Keyword Planner). If your target market is extremely small and you are selling a high-value product or service, a search volume of 10+/month may also be worthwhile. Once you build up the reputability of your site, you can begin to target “medium” difficulty keywords.

If you're using regex filters to identify keyword queries Google associates with your content, focus on clicks/impressions (e.g. 10/100). Identifying queries responsible for low clickthrough rates can be a good place to start when updating existing content.

It is paramount that you know how to use analytics to inform, measure and evaluate your content performance. Being data-driven makes you become more valuable as a digital content professional these days.

While analyzing keyword metrics we should focus on high search volume keywords with low competition. These sort of keywords help in driving more traffic and ranking the web pages. It helps in ranking the web pages organically and easily. However, this method won't work well with ads.

Search engines are on an ongoing mission to improve the quality and relevance of the search experience for users through algorithmic refinements and updates. When these happen, a keyword’s intent and associated SERP features can change. Many keyword monitoring tools provide SERP feature insights. These can help to detect changes to the SERP landscape. This is particularly useful where revenue-driving queries are concerned.

To confirm the intent of a keyword, search it yourself on the search engine you're targeting and analyze which types of results appear. If you see blog articles or guides, it's likely an informational intent keyword. If you see product pages (and product ads), it's likely a transactional intent keyword.

One thing I've learned is to spend at least 50% of your keyword research in the "long tail keyword" world. Often times, there is much more "intent" behind the long tail keywords than the shorter, "punchier" keywords. For example, if you have a website about tropical birds (I don't know why that came to mind!), you could target "best pet birds" and "talking birds". Or, you could go after longer term keyword phrases that almost give you the topic of your content, right in the term. What if you found that "best low maintenance pet bird for seniors" is getting hundreds of searches a month? Or maybe "best pet bird for dry climate" - these are gold in terms of uniqueness and opportunity. Plus, there's no guesswork on the content creation!

Intent is more crucial than ever to consider in keyword prioritization. 🔮 AI’s integration into organic search will most likely shift much of our b2b prospect’s first line discovery to AI. Said in another way, AI will become a prospect’s first touch advisor with the ability to answer complex questions about perceived problems and ways to solve. It isn’t clear how or if AI will cite sources yet. This means old tactics of relatively easy organic wins through informational intent keywords may disappear. The average b2b website can attribute more than 70% of their keywords to “informational” intent. So it’s more crucial than ever to prioritize navigational/branded, commercial and transactional intent keywords in SEO strategies.

Step 5 is irrelevant as it should have been covered in Step 1. It is the organizational goals that ultimately determine keyword intent. If you are only addressing this by this time, you are off on the wrong foot. You also cost your client in the process, at least their time, but perhaps also money and even your professionalism.

In my experience, a powerful exercise is determining a primary keyword based on your list and determining what other keywords you can use in the same article or landing page, called "semantic" keywords. Not every keyword will need its own dedicated article or page. Prioritize your primary keywords based on what your website will be able to rank for quickly. If you have a brand-new site, you'll want to prioritize keywords with "Low" competition, giving your new site a fighting chance of showing up on the 1st page of Google.

Never underestimate the power of the pivot table. When it comes to keyword grouping, pivot tables - in Google Sheets or Excel - allow you to cross-reference topical trends against their total number of average monthly searches. Based on these figures, you can quickly establish which content opportunities are worth pursuing first based on search popularity. You can also use pivot tables to produce visualisations to better analyse your findings or communicate them to others.

Taking note of which keywords are clustered under the same topic can help you cover your priority topics in-depth, identify any gaps, and also add internal links between these pages when they're created.

I want to mention that you can't predict precisely what keywords will convert well for your business. I suggest testing the niche and keywords with Google Adwords, and also with experience in the niche you'll get more confidence in prioritization

You can also prioritise according to the topic and cluster a group of keywords. Some keywords belong to the same topic while others belong to other topics and sometimes it’s necessary to understand this difference. If you analyse from a topic perspective you’ll have a better view on how to cover an entire topic rather than a single keyword. Which means you’ll have coverage and can increase your topical authority much more effectively.

I always like to start by thinking about what questions people might have about the product or service I'm promoting. I write down all the questions I can think of, even the silly ones, and then pick out the top 10 that come up the most or that I'm most excited to talk about. It's a great way to make sure I'm addressing what people actually want to know (vs just doing it for the keywords).

Always start with the Search Engine Result Page - do a simple search using the query you want to optimize for and see what the results tell you. If you see, for example, lots of videos (think of "how to" content) as results, then creating a blog post for that query might not be the best route; doing a video will. The SERP tells you in which direction you're going.

Use AI to rewrite your content to make it easier to read. Think 'spellchecker' but better. (again I have to pad out this sentence to meet LinkedIn's 125 character minimum for some weird reason!)

AI tools have transformed Google, making it crucial to establish expertise in your field rather than just focusing on SEO. Google uses automated ranking systems to show the most relevant results. These systems analyze hundreds of billions of web pages and content, and they are regularly updated and improved. Here is what you should focus on: 1 - Build website authority by creating cross-content with non-competitors and prioritizing research through customer surveys and market research. 2 - Produce concise, valuable content with links to sources. 3 - Get reviews from reputable sources in your industry. AI technology now automatically collects credible industry reviews for rankings as it gets smarter. 4 - Invest in influencer marketing