Using a Keyword Research Tool
Keyword research tools are designed to help you make the most strategic decisions about optimization. By understanding key SEO metrics, you will learn which are the most profitable keywords to target to get you in the relevant searches and in front of your ideal audience.
You can utilize our Keyword Research Tracker for free available in your LinkGraph customer dashboard, or you can find another tool that provides the search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC metrics necessary to make informed decisions about which keywords to target.
In the above images, you will see some keywords alongside their accompanying search metrics. By understanding these terms, you can make some inferences about which keywords provide you the most potential opportunities to rank.
Understanding how all of these terms relate to each other is another important factor in successful optimization. Popular keywords are usually accompanied by higher monthly search volume, but that doesn’t automatically qualify them as the best choice for you. You need to take more than that into consideration when it comes to gaining visibility in the search engine results pages, particularly if you’re a webmaster that’s just starting out.
How to Evaluate Keywords
There isn’t always a direct correlation between the most popular keywords and the keywords that are the right choices for your website or business goals.
For example, the search phrase, “Discount Shoes,” gets 18K searches a month. That’s an attractive number of searches, but the competition level for that target keyword is extremely high. Websites like Zappos, DSW, and Famous Footwear have high domain authorities and already occupy the top spots in the SERPs for that given keyword phrase.
When it comes to smart keyword research, the general rule of thumb is this: The best keywords to target are the ones you stand the best chance of ranking for and the best chance of converting from. Every new piece of content you create–whether a new landing page or a blog post–should target a new keyword so you have more opportunities to rank in more SERPs.
The best keywords should meet the following criteria:
Long-tail keywords can be a great way to make the most out of your optimization efforts. Long-tail keywords are usually search phrases over 4-5 words.
Targeting these long-tail search phrases with blog posts can be very effective because they have a more specific search intent and are far less competitive than other keywords.
Targeting long-tail keywords can also be an effective optimization strategy because it tends to result in higher conversions. Those users who rely on long-tail search queries are usually further down the sales funnel and more ready to make a purchase, fill out a form, or offer an email address.
Once you have identified which keywords you want to target, it’s time to transition to doing the work of including those keywords into your content. You need to incorporate your primary keywords in both the primary text of your landing page and the HTML title tags and meta descriptions.
If you use our copy optimizer tool, the process for doing so will not only be easier, it will help you avoid keyword stuffing. Because our tool provides you with the LSI terms that have topical relevance to your webpage content, the distribution of your keywords will appear more naturally and in a way that appeals to search engine crawlers without disrupting the readability or quality of your content.
For this reason, a content optimizer tool like ours can help you include your primary keyword phrases alongside Focus Terms that Google is expecting to see on your landing pages. These Focus Terms are topics, ideas, and phrases that we’ve determined are related and important to the keyword search you’re trying to rank for. Incorporating Focus Terms will help your landing page demonstrate topical depth and expertise.
Like the Keyword Research Tracker, the copy optimizer tool is available in your LinkGraph customer dashboard. You can also download the LinkGraph Chrome extension to automatically transfer your web page content into our tool with 1 click and start your optimization work right away.
Using the Copy Optimizer Tool
Whether you are creating a brand new piece of content, or revising an existing landing page, our tool makes the process of optimization easy, even for SEO beginners.
As you draft your content, our tool will keep track of the Focus Terms that you have incorporated and will provide you with an overall score. Even small changes to syntax, vocabulary, and phrasing can maintain the readability of the content while also optimizing for search.
Also, the content optimizer’s color-coded highlighting alerts you to which terms you have sufficiently included, which need to be included more, and which are being overused.
And because the content score takes length into consideration, it encourages you to create more in-depth content that allows the space for the keywords to naturally appear. Longer content tends to do much better in search, so our copy optimizer uses 2500 words as an ideal benchmark. The tool will also provide you with an overall Content Score. A score over 80 is considered very good.
In the below video, you will find a tutorial on how to use the copy optimizer tool to optimize your landing pages.
If you are optimizing an existing piece of content like your site’s homepage or current landing pages, adding our copy optimizer chrome extension to your toolbar will allow you to automatically transfer the content of any existing landing page into our tool and start your optimization work from there.
Additional Considerations when Optimizing Content
Starting in 2017, Google’s search quality teams have been specifically focusing their engineering efforts towards content-quality signals and have pushed core algorithm updates every quarter. Their BERT update in October 2019 was one of the most meaningful content related updates they have rolled out in years.
Creating high-quality content is essential to the success of your optimization efforts. Google wants to rank good content, and when search engines crawl your website, they are looking for hints about its quality.
Factors like content uniqueness, content length, external and internal links, anchor text, headings, grammar, syntax, and readability all influence whether or not your content ranks. On their blog, Google advises webmasters to consider multiple questions about the pieces of content they create.
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
- Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
If you have landing pages on your site that have proved to drive traffic and convert, one of the best ways to capitalize on those pages is to include them in your sitemap.
By re-optimizing content to target less competitive keywords, content optimizers have the opportunity to go after new search queries without the work of creating an entirely new long-form landing page or blog post.
