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Choosing the Right Focus Keywords
Choosing the right focus keywords for blog content is important for improving visibility and relevance in SERPs.
Search Volume, Search Intent and Competition
The boring part of SEO is following what makes the most sense logically. It isn’t exciting stuff typically. Monthly search volume matters because if too low, it isn’t worth the time effort to produce content and if too high, it might not have commercial intent to drive conversions.
If it’s too competitive, you won’t be able to rank without expending serious resources on backlink building efforts. You’ll want to find a nice balance between search volume, search intent, and competition.
Aligning Keywords with Content Goals
SEOs should align their keyword research with overall content marketing efforts so that organic search traffic helps achieve business goals. By ensuring that focus keywords resonate with a business’ more general targets, you’ll be able to guide traffic towards money pages and drive conversions that move the needle.
Balancing Difficulty with Opportunity
Site Authority (SA) was revealed in the Google leak, an internal measurement Google uses to determine a website’s power in search engine results. It’s their version of DA or DR that has been theorised for years upon years, only to be confirmed recently.
What SA means for SEO is that websites with stronger backlink profiles will have an easier time ranking and maintaining rankings. Lower SA websites will have a more difficult time competing for rankings on keywords, which is why it’s important when selecting focus keywords to strike the right balance between keyword difficulty and SEO opportunity.
If the top positions for a focus keyword are being held by websites with high SA, it’s unlikely you can compete with them unless you yourself have a high SA or you put significant effort and resources into backlink building.
Topical Borders
Concept: If a site writes about a topic outside of its normal scope, Google doesn't trust it (as much).
Implications: Expanding the scope of your website categories requires writing about tangentially related topics with internal links in a logical pattern.
For example, if your website is about email marketing but you want to also publish about sales content, you should first write about sales emails so that Google understands you have sales expertise.
Read the full article on our blog:
tl;dr Edition
By honing on-page SEO elements in on a focus keyword, you improve your odds at ranking for it.
Search for a general term in SEO software and review their related suggestions to find focus keywords.
Analyze competitors’ top traffic / top ranking pages and create content that competes for their focus keywords.
Build backlinks to your content to rank higher, quicker.