6 Steps to an Effective Keyword Strategy

| February 25, 2019 | Blog | No Comments

Developing a keyword strategy is an important part of creating not just SEO content but great SEO content. It forms an important part of your content development, especially after you’ve researched your keywords.

In this article, we’ll be looking at what exactly a keyword strategy is. Then we’ll give you our top six steps to creating an effective strategy that will help with getting people to click on your site.

hands at laptop with note book working on keyword strategy

What is a Keyword Strategy?

A keyword strategy is a combination of decisions that you’ll take based on your findings from your keyword research. You can do this by using tools that show you the search engine results, keyword trends based off your region, and analysing your competitors.

So, once you’ve found the top words people are using to find the type of content you want to write, you need to plan how you want to target those keywords. Furthermore, a keyword strategy is about tracking how your SEO is performing.

6 Steps for an Effective Keyword Strategy

Now that we have an understanding of what a keyword strategy is, let’s look at how you come up with one.

Step 1: Look at Yourself

Now, we don’t mean this in an existential way. We mean you first need to look at yourself, your site, and/or your business. You should ask yourself the following question to get a clearer understanding:

  • What are you doing and why?
  • What is your goal?
  • Are you offering your audience anything unique?
  • What message are you communicating?
  • Why would someone visit your site?

These questions should help you get a better understanding of what you are trying to achieve. This then helps you create a starting point for crafting your strategy.

Step 2: Look at Search Intent

Search intent is the why that leads people to your site – why are they looking for the content you are providing. Whether they are looking for an answer to a question, a product, or a specific website, this is search intent. To better integrate search intent into your keyword strategy, ask yourself the following:

  • Do you know your audience? Who are they?
  • What are they doing on your site: are they looking for a product or information?
  • Are there ways in which you can target specific intents with focussed content to influence them? Could you use words like “top tips” or “the best music streaming sites of 2019”? Think about words that will immediately grab their attention.

Step 3: Look at Words

keyword being underlined

Words are at the epicentre of what we do as SEO copywriters. That’s why keyword research is such an integral part of writing content. It helps us find the words people are using to find what they’re looking for. Think about the following when crafting your SEO keyword strategy in depth:

  • Are you using the right words to catch the reader’s attention (think of search intent)?
  • Is your content user-oriented and does it fit their goals perfectly? Are you giving them what your meta-title and H1 promises?
  • One key thing to remember is that search volume on a keyword isn’t everything:
    – Consider landing page relevance: does you chosen focus keyword take them directly to the page with the relevant content?
    – What’s the competition like for the keyword: consider targeting those with lower competition which makes it easier for you to rank for that keyword.
    – Specificity: are users doing what you want them to do on your site or page? For example, are impressions (them seeing your page) turning into clicks?
    – Intent: does the keyword fulfil their objection?

Step 4: Look at the Competition

Another important aspect of an effective keyword strategy is looking at what your top competitors are doing. These are sites or content that’s ranking for the same type of keywords on search engines. Tools like SEMrush feature functions that can help you monitor what other sites in your area of interest are doing. Look for the following:

  • How are they ranking for the terms you want to rank for?
  • What’s their content like? Look at things like their headings, content length, and long tail keywords.
  • Are there ways you can improve your content to match or better theirs?

Step 5: Look at the Search Engines

Using search engines not only adds to crafting your keyword strategy by giving insight into your competitor’s strategy. it also gives you the following:

  • You get to see what happens when you type in your focus keyword. Are you going to have to rethink it so that you get the results you want?
  • What does the on-screen real estate look like? Does the keyword generate featured snippets or other types of rich results?

It’s important to include this in your strategy because you can see if the SERPS match what you were going for.

Step 6: Look at the Data

Finally, look at the data using search engine tools like Google Analytics or Search Console to give you insight into the performance of the site and keywords. Think about this step as the refiner.

  • Look at which keywords are drawing traffic and clicks to your site.
  • Keywords with higher impressions for a specific page are good targets.

How are Things Going?

Once you’ve created and used your keyword strategy to write a page, it’s important to monitor how it’s doing. Using your Analytics and Search Console tools is a helpful way of checking how your SEO is performing. Afterwards, you can access and adapt your strategy.

  1. If your page has a low click-through-rate (CTR), look at optimising its meta-tags.
  2. Alternatively, if the page is ranking poorly, optimise the content like its headings, actual content, and the keywords you’ve used.
  3. In other words, rethink your keyword strategy.

It’s important to go back and rework your keyword strategy every now and then. It’s especially important for pages that are important for your site but aren’t doing well.

TL: DR – download the PDF version of this article on keyword strategy.