How do you optimize your content and website for keywords?

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.

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.

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.

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 LSI is a flag for outdated SEO practices.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.

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.

It looks like the traditional keywords metrics such as difficulty and volume are being replaced by new metrics: audience match and intent. That’s because what matters in SEO is answering users questions as best as you can. Intent becomes more relevant and keywords volumes less relevant. Google doesn’t care if your keywords have 1M search volumes if you can’t answer a query.

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!

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 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.