Keywords & Content

Strong, strategic keyword research is foundational to any SEO-focused content strategy. Professional keyword research is more than just finding a list of likely words to build your site content around. It involves nuanced study of your site’s area of expertise, the topics that matter most to your audience, your business goals, and the intent of the searchers you hope to attract and convert.

You’ve studied the basics of performing keyword research, and you’re likely already familiar with more advanced resources such as The Keyword Research Master Guide. For an end-to-end keyword strategy walkthrough, we recommend reading said guide in full, to ensure deeper familiarity with a breadth of topics such as keyword prioritization, on-page optimization, and keyword tracking/reporting.

The traditional tools and tactics to find target keywords are great starting points for your brand, but you might also consider these other sources before moving on to content creation:

Keyword research via your audience

As SEOs, we become pretty well-versed in the goods and services offered by the businesses we work with. But it's easy to take this insider knowledge for granted and forget that we're not always the target market for those businesses — and what seems right for SEO on the surface may not actually be the words people are searching, or even how they're thinking about the topic, product, or business.

Whether you use a survey, conduct one-on-one user interviews, do online research, or get this data any other way, we recommend learning and recording as much as you can directly from your consumers. It can be a major eye-opener, and you might discover customers are using a completely different phrase or search methodology to uncover your solutions.

Keyword research via site search

If you have access to a site search box and its data, monitor and analyze that information. People will type in exactly what they're looking for in the exact way they're writing it. This can tip you off to important topics, and if you don't already have content built out that uses similar phrasing or thought processes, this can be a fantastic place to mine for content ideas as well — building out the keyword/content flywheel that powers much of successful SEO strategies.

Keyword research via reviews

Next, don't forget to comb through customer reviews. The language used here also provides ample insight into your customers' vocabulary, as well as tipping you off to what they really value about the products / business / solutions.

Pay attention to the negative reviews, as well. You could potentially create a content strategy to respond to the themes you see there proactively. After all, you want to be able to control the messaging (and fallout) of even negative-seeming search results. Positioning your brand as a helper rather than allowing third-party sites to win traffic around a product issue can be powerful, and a competitive difference-maker.

Keyword research via internal teams

Finally, don't forget about the value of your internal teams and the insights they might hold. Your customer support team might have tickets you can review or common canned responses that speak to the questions people are asking. Mine these for keywords, topics, and potential content ideas. You could even save the support team precious time and effort by creating content that proactively speaks to those customer questions.

Similarly, the sales team will have fantastic information regarding customers at multiple points along the funnel or customer journey, from prospects through to managed accounts and long-time clients. They should also have great insight into the topics that matter to the people already paying you money, the talking points that help convince and convert people, and may even have handy software like Gong that records and transcribes searchable sales calls.

Objective setting

Every good plan should start with the end in mind. Ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish with that SEO strategy we discussed a few chapters back. Are you looking to increase brand awareness? Increase particular metrics like email sign-ups? Increase sales? Increase revenue? Shorten time to purchase? Understanding exactly what you want to accomplish will help you determine which keywords to focus on first.

Keyword topics & grouping

Once you have your goal in mind, start working through your keyword list. The first thing you'll want to do is group similar keywords. You’ll likely run into keywords, phrases, and topics that fall within a certain theme — you'll want to separate these into different lists or groups. This makes analysis and keyword mapping considerably easier down the line, as you’ll see below.

Filtering keyword suggestions in Moz Pro

Let’s take this list of “soccer jersey” keywords, for example:

1. puma soccer jerseys wholesale

2. elmont soccer shop

3. soccer long sleeve training top

4. best soccer jerseys

5. puma team soccer jerseys

6. custom puma soccer jerseys

Keywords 1, 5, and 6 all specify a brand of jersey: Puma. Take those keywords, separate them from the general “soccer jersey” keywords, and create a new “Puma”-focused list. Feel free to stay as broad or get as specific as you want when it comes to these groupings, depending how you intend to use them — are these to analyze specific product lines, site sections, competitive niches, or something else? Remember that you can have multiple, overlapping grouping systems if that makes things easier.

Search intent

After you’ve created your different keyword groups by topic or theme, you’re perfectly positioned to start prioritizing your efforts. Remember that goal we set earlier? Now it’s time to put it to work.

As you sift through your keywords, take note of the intent of the keyword. Google has sometimes talked about “know, go, do/buy” or “information, navigation, transaction.” When you look at that list, you may notice that those words can generally be mapped to the traditional marketing funnel: awareness > interest > conversion. Feel free to use any intent-naming you're comfortable with — as long as you know your searchers' intent, you'll be able to discern which words and topics align with your overall SEO objectives.

That said, this marketing funnel-based grouping of intents likely lacks some key nuances, and you’ll need to use your knowledge of your specific sector to unpick them.

For example, for a business with multiple brick-and-mortar locations and a website, you might find you need to break down intents by another axis besides just purchase funnel — specifically, location. They might be something like:

• Location neutral (looking for online information or services)

• Location implicit (looking for a brick and mortar business)

• Location explicit (including a location name or “near me” in the search)

What other axis or axes make sense for your company is for you to judge, but that still leaves a significant question — how do you determine searcher intent? We suggest looking at the SERPs. Especially if the keyword gets a decent number of searches, examining the SERP can give you a good indication of what Google determines the searchers want.

Look at the top three or four organic listings. What questions are answered? What's the next step for the searcher here? Depending on this answer, you'll get an idea of the intent behind it.

You'll also want to analyze which SERP features appear alongside the organic results. If you see a map, your keyword likely has local or navigational intent. If you see a shopping carousel, clearly Google has learned that folks are looking to buy. If there's a Wikipedia article or Knowledge Graph block, it's probably an informational search.

Choosing the right keywords & topics to focus on

You know your topics and you have a sense for intent across your keyword list. Now, you need to prioritize where to get to work.

Start by obtaining metrics like search volume, organic CTR, and difficulty. A high search volume means more opportunity to be seen by searchers, but it may be more competitive to rank for or more of a generic or high-level term; a keyword with low search volume could indicate a smaller audience pool but perhaps one more focused on buying. CTR helps you estimate whether you'll actually get clicks (though you still need to optimize your page titles and meta descriptions as well!), while the Difficulty score will give you an idea of how competitive that phrase is to rank for.

Keyword Explorer, available with Moz Pro returns vital metrics like monthly search volume, Difficulty, organic CTR and priority metrics in a few clicks.

We don't have a hard and fast rule for prioritizing overall, your strategic approach will depend on your business, budget and authority, among many other things. The process of organizing and visualizing your topics will help you understand how achievable your short term and long term goals are for your industry keyword topics.

You'll also want to align them with your business objectives, content strategy, and marketing funnel.

And this leads nicely into our next topic: content creation.

When you come to the point of integrating keywords into your content strategy, we recommend performing a content audit (or several). Some excellent resources to start with:

• How to Do a Keyword-Driven Content Audit

• How to Carry Out Content Audits

• How to Do a Content Audit

We also recommend you peruse The SEO's Guide to Content Marketing for a strong foundation in content strategy. Here in this chapter, we're going to discuss just a small part of the bigger content picture.

Depending on your site, the amount of content you've created, and a few other factors, you'll likely discover three things to add to your to-do list:

1. Content that needs to be updated or optimized

2. Content that needs to be gracefully retired

3. Content that needs to be created

Content that needs to be updated or optimized

While the details will vary widely from site to site, content that needs to be updated or optimized can look like out-of-date information, incomplete information, thin or duplicate content, or content that's objectively good, but isn't earning enough traffic for some reason.

If you're dealing with out-of-date, incomplete, thin, or duplicate content, one of the best things you can do is update it with the help of an expert. This could be someone internal if you employ subject matter experts or have product-knowledgeable employees with a flair for writing, or it could be a contractor or industry influencer you hire to review and make updates for you. The better your content displays your authority and expertise on a subject, the better you'll adhere to Google's E-A-T guidelines, which are more or less table stakes if you're looking to create content that's ten times better than the competition.

If you're dealing with content that isn't earning enough traffic, it's time to analyze. Did it once earn traffic that dropped off a cliff? Is there a reason you can pinpoint, whether technical, Google algorithmical, or something else? Look at the content and assess it from an objective point of view. How would someone reach it? (Try throwing the URL into Keyword Explorer to see what it's ranking for and reverse-engineer the searcher thought process.) What's the assumed intent of someone visiting this page? Does it answer that intent well? Where do you sense friction or blockers? Sometimes it's the format of the content — something that could make a quick and easy video is instead a long and somewhat confusing blog post. Consider it from all angles. The answer won't be the same every time, but it's worth it to test and analyze.

At the same time, it’s important to make sure you’re not just updating a page to better compete with yourself. Sometimes if a once successful page has stopped getting traffic, it’s because some other part of your site is now ranking for the same keywords. Consider which version you want to keep, or whether the intents need to be better disambiguated (see Whiteboard Friday episode above for more on this).

As always, be sure your updated content is adhering to best practices for on-page SEO. Your title tags and meta descriptions should be optimized for earning searcher clicks (even if they may be rewritten by Google.) Everything should be up to snuff accessibility-wise, and you should be considering technical improvements like structured data where it makes sense.

Content that needs to be gracefully retired

Sometimes you’ll find content that isn’t getting much traffic, and for good reason.

Perhaps it wasn’t that interesting in the first place, or it’s no longer accurate, or your site now has better content on this topic.

Whatever the reason, if you decide that some of your content isn’t worth updating and optimizing, the question is what to do with the URL — you don’t want to just leave it there, or 404 it. Typically the best plan will be to find suitable URLs to 301 redirect to. These need to be similar enough that Google will be willing to consider them a direct replacement, and pass on any equity built up in the old URL.

So, for example, bulk redirecting to your homepage would not be appropriate. If, on the other hand, you think the old content needs to remain live (perhaps for legal or corporate reasons), but you don’t want it interfering with SEO, noindex provides the opposite solution — no recycling of SEO benefits, but avoiding any SEO disbenefit at the same time.

That said, if you’re concerned that the old URL may have some spammy signals around it, 404 is of course still an option.

When undertaking content clean-ups like this, it helps, both for UX and for SEO, to make sure that any old URLs are also removed from internal linking on your site.

Content that needs to be created

You're also going to discover some gaps that need filling. When comparing your content audit to what you've discovered about your keywords, what do you notice? Have you identified keyword groups that aren't represented in your content?

One especially smart way to approach content creation is to build content around pillar pages. These are pieces of "big content" (this guide could be considered a pillar page, for instance) that serve as a core touchstone for searchers. You can create offshoot content linked out from your pillar topics to branch out, dive deeper into a subtopic, and create breadth and depth of knowledge for your business (and your authority on the subject.) The resulting link structure also has considerable SEO benefits, by creating clusters of focused, topical authority.

Any keyword groups that stand out as missing from your content audit can be considered prime candidates for pillar page content. It's going to require a bit of thinking, but look through your keywords and topics, align them with the intent and customer journey you're hoping to build, and begin to form a plan for the content you want to create.

When it comes to the actual writing, filming, recording, etc., we again recommend finding yourself an expert to lean on. Even if you have to pay a little extra for an influencer's time and knowledge, it's worth it in the benefits you'll reap down the line. People have been online for a long time now — they're astute. A searcher can tell when they're consuming truly good content and when they've been tricked by clickbait. Always deliver on your content promises and seek to truly fulfill your user's intent; that's how you win advocates, not just customers.

Next up: Link Building & Link Earning Tactics

A strategic approach to link building for SEO professionals.

This chapter on Keywords & Content was written by the Moz team.