Keyword Targeting and Content Creation - A Blossoming Relationship
Keyword Targeting and Content Creation - A Blossoming Relationship
It is quite often that keyword research and content creation are approached separately. There are countless websites out there where a person implementing SEO has not been involved in the content strategy and has no say as to what goes on the website.
This is because business owners are sometimes hesitant to allow changes to what already exists on their website as they are happy with the way it looks and what the site has to offer. Their sole request is to rank for a phrase with making as little changes as possible. Let’s take for example the phrase ‘kitchen knives’; the easiest solution is to simply choose a suitable page that the phrase should be placed on and make that rank better.
Further along the in the SEO journey the business owner may decide that they now want to rank for ‘professional kitchen knives’ so the same pattern occurs where the SEO person modifies the page again to target that particular phrase.
It’s easy to get trapped into this viscous circle of spiralling keywords make no mistake. Keep going and the business owner will end up getting caught in this broken process of modifying pages targeting absurd phrases such as ‘professional chef kitchen knives sets for commercial kitchens’.
Clever Content Creation – 3 Easy Steps
Don’t fear about getting caught up in a keyword and content fluster because another Whiteboard Friday by SEO MOZ has taught us a few tips how to obtain maximum impact in just a few easy steps! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mapping-keywords-to-content-for-maximum-impact-whiteboard-friday
The idyllic process of mapping keywords to content for maximum impact is as follows:
Step 1 –
Establish a full list of keywords to target realising how valuable and important each one is rather selecting them one by one over time. Separate them into groups by which ones convert the most, which generate the most traffic and which have the lowest difficulty etc.
Step 2 (Part 1) –
Now is the time to map your keywords to your content. This should be based upon three factors. It is firstly important to map your keywords by relevance, in other words does the content reflect the keyword phrase you are targeting? The second factor is based on user intent; are these the sorts of keywords a user wants to read when they get to this sub-page? The content must offer the correct information about the product/service, the brands available and how to purchase it etc. Lastly it is important to map keywords your keywords in accordance with your conversion goals, which are the keywords that will push potential clients to add goods to their basket or sign up for e-mails etc?
Step 2 (Part 2) –
Carefully selecting single or multiple keywords for what each page focuses upon.
Page 1 Example
It is wise that when placing the broad phrase ‘kitchen knives’ onto a page to use it as a singular keyword page focus because you don’t know what the user intent is at this point, so keep keywords broad and to a minimum.
Page 2 Example
This page should target multiple keywords for example ‘chef's knives’, ‘professional kitchen knives’ ‘knives for chefs’ etc. The most important keywords can be placed in the Meta title and secondary just in the body content
Page 3 Example
This page should also target multiple keywords as we know the user intent and the relevance of placing them on this specific page. Variations will include phrases such as ‘knife sets’, ‘knife block sets’, ‘knife blocks’ and ‘carving knife sets’ etc.
Step 3 –
After completing this process for the pages you want to optimise you can now take the map you have produced to actually go develop the content to make searchers happy.
The process of mapping keywords to content in this way is applicable when creating SEO content right from the beginning and also adapting what content already exists on the site. It is the most beneficial and targeted approach to not only rank for those all important keywords but to also better convert your visitors because of assessing the relevance and user intent of which pages you are placing your keywords on.
