Keywords are the cornerstone of any SEO strategy. Incorporating relevant keywords into web content increases the chances of the content (and the site) being viewed and therefore attracting traffic. The presence of these keywords in the domain name, in the content, titles and texts will be a major asset to improve the natural referencing of the site.
The questions to ask yourself before launching an SEO campaign are: how to choose the keywords? and how many keywords should you target?
How to choose the keywords?
The principle is that the more keywords a site uses massively sought by Internet users in their search engine queries, the better the site will be ranked in the SERPs. It is, therefore, necessary to know which words are used by Internet users in their requests, and to do this, many tools exist.
The most used tools are tools that Google makes available to professionals. Among them is Keyword Planner for Google Adwords which offers the possibility of finding relevant secondary keywords from the main keyword, giving the volume of traffic for each new keyword proposed.
Google Trends gives search trends over a given period. It indicates which words and expressions have been searched the most by Internet users. This tool allows you to stay in touch with the moving reality of keywords, the relevance of which changes quite quickly.
Ubersuggest on the other hand gives the words and phrases suggested by Google for each keyword. Knowing these suggestions will make it possible to tailor the content and use long-tail keywords.
As for us, we are very happy to use Ahref, which allows you to find keywords in a specific theme; compare the competition; to retrieve the keywords on which websites are visible. The tool is very comprehensive and allows us to work efficiently on our clients’ sites and ours.
Other tools exist, free or paid, provided by search engines or by third-party companies. Their usefulness is undeniable, but they are far from sufficient. They only allow you to obtain a list of keywords with high potential that will have to be studied closely to define their real effectiveness according to the theme of the site, the competition, the offers offered by the site, etc.
How many keywords should you target?
This is one of the big questions that we ask ourselves when thinking about the SEO strategy of a site. To answer them, it is important to have in mind the overall structure of your site and the services/products that will be offered there. In addition, it is easy to realize that for the same subject, there can be a multitude of more or less similar keywords.
Internet users do not all think in the same way and do not speak or write in the same way. It is therefore important to seek to acquire data on the keyword variations used for the same query.
Once this jargon is acquired, it must be analyzed and the words and expressions must be prioritized according to their relevance. The most relevant keywords should be retained but in a reasonable number, especially if one uses paid means of promotion. The higher the number of keywords, the more resources allocated to each will be limited. We must therefore find the right compromise between the number of keywords and the resources that can be attributed to each keyword. Indeed, a page must correspond to the main keyword and several co-occurrences. The more main keywords you have, the more pages you will get. You will therefore need to allocate a web writing budget for each page generated as well as a structuring and net linking strategy for this internal network.
To conclude, the right strategy is to acquire, through the various tools available, a list of relevant keywords relating to the theme and the offer of the site, classify them according to their relevance and choose the main one and a few other secondary ones for every page of the site. This is semantic analysis, an essential step before the start of an SEO service (semantic analysis is also part of the SEO service). It is also important to keep in mind that a page corresponds to the main keyword. (generally competitive and profitable) as well as several co-occurrences (less competitive). Don’t forget the power of the long tail, either. It is rarely spotted by keyword research tools, but it is often very profitable.
