How do you decide which keywords to optimize first?
-
Let me be very clear, I am not looking for info on how to rank keywords so please do not post about that.
I have a list of keywords I chose and want to rank for, and every group of keywords are related. I was wondering, what is a good strategy for determining which keywords to start with? Should I take one keyword from each group so it looks more natural? Should I do a group of 10 related keywords at a time?
Any ideas? Links? Tips? Resources? What have you done in the past?
-
That's an SEO companies IP I think if you're looking at level of competition, ppc $ and monthly traffic estimates that can be a good start but you are also part SEO part business consultant so you need to factor in the clients margins and other factors as well if you want to do your job properly in my opinion.
With existing websites there is always this sunk costs bias which I tend to see creeping in as well which affects people's decision making process.
-
Stephanie i will suggest you to make a use of Hittail Keyword tool as it helps you to get a list of keywords that are good and have potential to get you good traffic + are closer to the first page and are easy to rank i use HitTail: The Best Long Tail Keyword Tool beside that if you already have a list of keywords what you can do is worki8ng first on the long tails building links for them to build authority as well once authority is build you are surely going to get a push on your short keywords + till then getting complete advantage of your long tail keywords
-
Go to your google analytics and see if any of the organic search keywords align with keywords on your list.
Run ranking reports on the ones that do. Note pages that are getting search traffic for terms on your list but that are not at the top of the search results.
Review the pages that are receiving the search traffic for those terms to see how well they're optimized.
Start first with the pages that are least optimized, getting traffic, and are on page three, two or bottom of page one of the results. Optimize those pages for most closely aligned keywords
It's called low-hanging fruit.
-
lol thanks
-
I know how that goes :(. Good luck!
-
yes of course. i am just in the process of creating a new strategy though and fixing some of the stuff the person before me messed up.
-
How do you focus on keywords without being spammy? Backlink anchor text? Guest post title tags? keyword proximity to your backlink?
-
Hi Dave,
Yes I am doing something similar, most of these keywords are for different pages. Obviously all the pages will be optimized to the keywords specific to that page, but i am wanting to pick 10 keywords to focus on and rank for with their respective pages. Rather than focusing on everything and building links all at once, I want to focus on 10 at a time, set goals and measure the results, then maintain those results and work on the next 10.
-
Hmm, I seem to take a different approach than most here. I look at each page and see which of my keywords will match up to that specific content. I don't use a top keyword list unless I'm optimizing the homepage. I hardly ever look at competition when placing keywords on the content pages of the site. I ALWAYS look at competition when looking for long-tail blog post type keywords. I used to use 5 different tools to look at competition, but then I realized that you really only need one metric - the allintitle: "keyword." If the allintitle is below 2000 you can rank 1st page with the keyword being furthest to the left in the title tag pretty easily. If it's higher than 2000 the keyword you choose dosn't really matter. It's going to come down to off-site SEO.
-
One strategy is feeding KW terms into Google Trends and figuring out interest levels. Next, figure out the total amount of sites ranking for that string (via quotes in a Google search). Once you have these two data points you can prioritize the string as you have a good indication of interest/competition.
-
Thank you
-
Great answer thank you
-
I would look at what you already have ranking and quality phrases which are coming up in the search and need that extra attention to get them onto the first page and also factor in:
Level of Competition
Potential Traffic / current traffic
The quality of content on site you have to work off of
That would tell you which short tails you have a shot at and if they are out of reach or already ranking, start taking a look at the next most valuable long tail terms
-
Hi Stephanie,
I'd say pulling your analytics data for keywords you're getting long tail traffic for that you're ranking for on the first page (not in top 2 spots) and prioritizing that against your rankings data (whether its from SEOMoz, Advanced Web Ranking etc) using Vlookups in Excel
If you're estimating potential traffic, you can export Adwords keyword data for potential traffic (very rough estimate) to get an idea of what kind of traffic you could potentially be getting
An excellent resource would be http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/#vlookup to start off with.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Keyword difficulty and time to rank
Hello, Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ? In other words let's say I try to rank for the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Keyword ranking verse all other data
Hi there I have just joined Moz so I am not sure if i am doing a good job of analysing all the data, but from what i can see i have a few questions: 1. I seem to have a fairly high visibility compared to a few other competitors 2. All the other competitors i am looking at have a much lower domain authority 3. I win the link metrics in all categories compared to my competitors 4. I have a page optimisation score of 94 5. I dont have any crawl issues (except that i just changed to https and i believe there is a synching issue with Moz and cloud flare..) YET I barely rank for any of the main keyword in my industry.... Kitchen, New Kitchen, Kitchen Renovation etc. I also have a page optimisation score of 94 for related keywords. I feel like i am really missing a big point and was hoping I could get your expert thoughts on this 🙂 Thanks so much! PS my domain is www.bluetea.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bluetea0 -
Homepage not ranking for main keyword, all other pages ranking slightly for their own keyword phrases.
Dear Mozzers, We have an ecommerce website (www.pashmina-boutique.com), we want to rank the homepage for the keyword "pashmina". Problem is, we are nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100 search results of Google. It is indexed, we have no crawl errors, except that we had some problems with our hosting (503's), the crawler of Google bumped in a few of those. And we are fixing it. Our other pages, e.g. (http://www.pashmina-boutique.com/15-white-pashminas) ranks for "white pashminas" 24th and "white cashmere pashminas" 23rd. We have done no linkbuilding, in Majestic, you can check that. We have been offline for a long time (over 6 months) and about 3 weeks ago, we did a redesign (SEO). We relaunched, everything is looking fine except the homepage isn't ranking for the main keyword. Could you guys check it out? Is it over-optimization? It can't be Penguin, Panda would be a surprise too. Or do we still have to wait for the monthly Panda data-refresh? We are currently busy with this issue, once this is solved - that the homepage is ranking - we will start linkbuilding. Mr.1000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.10000 -
Newbie question about long tail keywords
I am a little confused as to how search engines see and rank keywords. Let me explain. If I have a fairly long tail keyword such as "buy natural progesterone cream uk" will the search engine also break this up into smaller parts such as "buy natural progesterone uk"," buy progesterone cream uk", "natural progesterone uk" and so on or will it only see the words that are next to each other like "progesterone cream uk". Also where does cannibalization come into this? I really appreciate any help I can get with this that furthers my understanding. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mogsta220 -
Keyword Targeting Best Practices??
What is the best way to target a specific keyword? I rank well for several of my keywords but want to do better on others. How do I go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Adding another keyword phrase to home page.
I finally reached the #1 ranking for my websites main keyword phrase. There are two more equally good keyword phrases that have my main two keywords plus one additional page. Can I shoot for both of those or should I limit it to just adding one more keyword phrase for a max of two? For Example. I rank #1 for Horse Buggies (our domain is the main two keywords) (Example) The other two equally good phrases with a little more traffic are Horse Large Buggies (I rank #29)and Horse Giant Buggies. (#46) What is the best way to start ranking for those terms....without saturating or cannabolizing my current terms? We are about to change the URL's on some of our pages...so maybe I could add Large and Giant to the URL. Any suggestions? I sure would like to capture the other two keyword phrases. #1 URL additions? ( I think this would just rank me higher for the new pages) #2 Would getting new links with those two new keyword phrases in the alt text help or is that black hat? #3 Adding more of those keyword phrases to my home page? Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
How important is sticking to an exact keyword?
The latest article I'm writing for my site is "Friends With Benefits Rules"... So the first part of my question is, what does SEOMoz advocate as being the ideal # of times to include the entire key phrase in the article? I know nobody but Google knows for certain, but is 4 (including in H1's etc.) generally considered enough, other than in the page title? Second part is, what is the consensus about how important is it to stick to the exact keyword? For the example I gave, is it just as good to include a comma, E.g. "...friends with benefits, rules..." or a hyphen "Friends with Benefits - Rules for..."? One thing I'm unclear about on this topic is stop words and plurals. I've been told before that Google ignores stop words, but results for searches with or without the word "how," for example produce very different results... Same thing with plurals. In any case, all of the above is assuming that the quality of the content would not be affected in either case...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0