Introduction to Discovering the Best Keywords to Target

Finding the Right Keywords to Target

Identifying the best keywords to go after is crucial for any SEO or content marketing strategy.

It’s all about striking that perfect balance between keywords that are popular enough to drive traffic, but not so competitive that you’ll never rank for them.

If you don’t take the time to do this homework up-front there’s a good chance your time, energy and money will be wasted.

Here’s a quick rundown of a process for finding the right keywords.

1. Make a Seed List

First, brainstorm a list of broad topics and “seed keywords” related to your business. These are just the obvious keywords your target audience would be expected to search for. There’s no need to overthink it at this initial stage – the goal is simply to get things started.

TIP: an easy way to start this process is to make a quick list of the questions people ask most often.

2. Use Keyword Research Tools 

From there, the seed keywords can be entered into a keyword research tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. These tools allow the you to uncover all the related long-tail keyword variations that people are actually searching for.

What’s a “long-tail keyword”? Let’s say your seed keyword is “dog food.” A related long-tail (no pun intended) keyword would be “Grain-free organic dog food for puppies,” or “Best affordable high-protein dog food brands.”

When analyzing the results, look at:

• Search volumes (higher is generally better, but not at the expense of being too competitive)
• Keyword difficulty scores (lower scores indicate easier rankings)
• Commercial/transactional intent (if searchers are actively looking to buy something)

3. Analyze the Competition – On-Page SEO

For your target keywords, study the current top-ranking pages to gauge how stiff the competition is. There are 2 basic things you’re looking for:

1. Are they huge brands you can’t realistically outrank?
2. Or smaller sites where you may be able to leapfrog them with better content?

Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you’ll want to thoroughly analyze their on-page optimization tactics.

This means looking at the actual content and HTML elements on their top-ranking pages to understand what they are doing well.

Content Analysis

• Study the content depth, structure, and formatting on their top pages. Look at heading tags, use of multimedia, internal linking, etc.
• Evaluate their content quality, uniqueness, and how well it satisfies search intent for target keywords.
• Note content gaps or areas you could improve upon with more thorough, better written content.

Keyword Targeting

• Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to see which specific keywords their pages are ranking for.
• Identify primary keywords they are targeting in titles, H1 tags, body copy, etc.
• Look for opportunities to target keywords they may be missing or under-optimized for.

On-Page Optimization

• Check their title tags and meta descriptions for keyword targeting and persuasiveness.
• Analyze how they structure URLs, use alt text for images, optimize page speed, etc.
• See if they follow on-page best practices you may be missing like schema markup.

Content Types

• What types of content rank well for them – blog posts, guides, videos, tools?
• Do they produce lots of long-form content or keep things more concise?
• Identify content formats that seem to resonate well with your shared audience.

The goal is to reverse engineer what’s working for your competitors from an on-page perspective.

Look for gaps in their strategy as well as elements you can improve on with better optimization and higher quality content.

4. Prioritize the Opportunities 

Finally, the keywords should be prioritized based on the best balance of search volume, difficulty, relevance to the client’s business, and where their content can realistically outperform what’s currently ranking. These become the primary targets to build content clusters around.

What’s a “content cluster”? Content clusters, also known as topic clusters, are a way to organize and structure content on a website around specific topics or themes.

Basically, you have a central “pillar page” that provides a comprehensive overview of a broad topic. Then you write multiple pages that cover subtopics in more depth, creating a “cluster.” The pillar article has links to the subtopic pages, and they link back to the pillar page.

It’s an iterative process of constantly refining the keyword targets as more research is conducted. But that is more or less how you can systematically identify the best keyword opportunities in any niche.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, while you could certainly spend time learning and conducting keyword research yourself, it’s often more efficient and effective to bring in an experienced SEO pro to handle it.

Keyword research is both an art and a science. Knowing how to identify opportunities, interpret data, analyze competition, and formulate a comprehensive keyword strategy isn’t something most people can do in their spare time.

Unless you have the time and willingness to really dive deep into mastering keyword research, you may find yourself spinning your wheels or missing out on opportunities an expert could uncover. For many businesses, professional-level keyword intelligence is well worth the investment.