I was talking to a prospect not too long ago who was interested in hiring me to do a content audit of her website. The website had been around for a long time, and she had been blogging regularly, but she had shifted the focus of her business, so a lot of the content on her website was no longer relevant to what she was doing.
I was curious, so I did a quick domain analysis of her website to see what some of her top-performing keywords were.
They were way off the mark. When I read them out to her, she laughed at how old some of them were, and others just confused her. She wasn’t even sure how she had managed to rank for certain keywords.
That’s pretty standard for someone who’s pumping out content without a strategy. You end up not ranking for the keywords you want to rank for, and ranking for keywords you don’t want to rank for. It’s like working towards a goal without knowing what the goal is. How are you supposed to know what will take you closer to the goal, and what will take you further from it?
This story is also a perfect example of why it’s so important to conduct regular SEO audits of your website. Ranking for the wrong keywords could be hurting your SEO strategy, so let’s talk about how to identify and target relevant keywords.
First, let’s talk about why relevant keywords are so important.
Table of Contents
- Targeting Relevant Keywords Gets You in Front of the Right People at the Right Time
- How to Make Sure You’re Using Relevant Keywords
- Check Your Keywords
Targeting Relevant Keywords Gets You in Front of the Right People at the Right Time
I wanted the above statement to be the title of this article, but it was too long, so I’m putting it here instead. Getting in front of the right people is why we do all our marketing and SEO work. But getting in front of those people at the right time is at least as important as making sure they’re the right people.
As another example, I was recently talking to someone who said their website used to rank well for “chicago divorce financial planner” until they had someone who didn’t know anything about SEO redo their website. That keyword is a great keyword to rank for because people only use that keyword when they’re in a specific situation and they’re looking for someone who can help them with that situation.
By contrast, the term “financial planner” is very broad and searched by all kinds of people in various stages of they buyer journey looking for all kinds of information. Someone might just be wondering what a financial planner does, which does not necessarily mean that they’re considering hiring one.
Think about when you search for something on Google. You get tons of results, each with a heading and a little bit of body text underneath the heading. If you’re anything like me, you’ll scan the body text to see if it looks like it has the answer you’re looking for. Personally, I tend to make sure I can see all the keywords from my search term in the body text, and Google helps me in this by highlighting them for me. I can quickly scan to see if it has the information I need, and if it doesn’t, I move onto the next one.
This is why it’s so important to include your target keyword throughout your content, not just in the title and subheadings. That’s not to say you should stuff your content by repeating the same relevant keywords over and over again. But it does need to be included in the content enough times that, if Google decides to pull some of your content and display it under your headline, it should make sense for the user to see your article in their search results. Of course, that’s assuming Google’s system of pulling and highlighting content works flawlessly, which it doesn’t. But they’re working on it, and the only think we can do for now is to try to create and promote the best and most relevant content we can … and make sure we’re using relevant keywords.
How to Make Sure You’re Using Relevant Keywords
Now that we know why targeting relevant keywords is so important, it’s time to dive into how you can make sure the keywords you’re target are relevant.
First, you need to know how to research keywords to find a content gap. I already covered that in this article, so you can go check that out and come back when you’re done.
All set? Great! Now that you know how to research keywords, let’s talk about making sure your keywords are relevant. Here’s a checklist you can use:
✔ It relates to a product/service you provide
✔ It relates to a pain point you solve for your clients
✔ People tend to use this keyword at a specific point in the buyer journey
✔ It asks a question you can answer
✔ Websites in your industry or related industries are using this keyword
Ideally, your keyword will check all these boxes, in which case you’ll know you can go ahead and use it. The last one on the list is a bit tricky because you want to make sure you’re not competing for a keyword that has been used on so many other websites that you have no chance of ranking.
On the other hand, an indication a keyword is not relevant is if the websites ranking for that keyword have nothing to do with your industry. Another bad sign is if all the search terms that pop up under “related keywords” have nothing to do with the topic you’re trying to cover.
Check Your Keywords
By now you should have a good idea of how to identify and use relevant keywords in your content, but remember you’re not done yet. Implementing your content marketing strategy is a great start, but you still need to measure the results.
This is where an SEO audit comes in handy, but that takes a while. If you just want a quick look at the keywords you’re ranking for and the ranking you’ve achieved for each keyword, you can just do a quick domain analysis. My favorite SEO tool is Serpstat, which lets you do keyword research, an SEO audit, and a domain analysis, but there are plenty of other tools out there to choose from. Feel free to do your research and see which one you like best.
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