How many keywords should I target?

[HeatherBakerTopLine]

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

[EGOL]

Every day I work to produce new content that will expand my keyword reach.  Every day.

[HeatherBakerTopLine]

Thanks everyone for your comments - I will report back in a couple of months!

[HeatherBakerTopLine]

Thanks Chris - I think you're right. I was spreading myself too thin before!

[HeatherBakerTopLine]

Thanks Philipp - makes perfect sense and was the direction I was leaning anyway!

[Highland]

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.

[djlaidler]

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

[Chris.Menke]

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,

[zeepartner]

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.