Keywords!
Key phrases, focused keywords, secondary keywords,
synonymous keywords, broad keywords,
longtail keywords...
These can quite often pose a challenge for the writer,
but for the marketer,
creating content around the right keyword can result in huge rankings
and amazing opportunities in Google.
In my writing agency,
what perplexes the writers in our team is really not the keywords themselves
or even how to use them
but the odd combinations of those key terms.
Sometimes they are anything but grammatically correct.
Throw in the name of a city and a state, punctuation, spacing,
what do you do?
How do we creatively insert a keyword in our content for best results?
Let's explore.
Today, I'm drinking some coffee bean and tea leaf, Papua New Guinea.
Delicious!
They actually have a local shop here in Austin, Texas.
So if you like a flavorful coffee bean,
definitely recommend that one.
So when you're looking up keywords to optimize your content with,
you can either go with broad or you can go with longtail keywords.
Broad keywords are usually one to two words long.
They're also known as short tail or head terms.
Longtail keywords are anywhere from two to three to five words long.
So I've been able to rank my site expresswriters.com
for over 11,000 key phrases in the last six years.
Do you know what these keywords are?
The majority are longtail phrases.
Now why are longtail terms such an opportunity?
#1 Lower competition.
They are so much easier to rank for than broad terms.
They are awesome opportunities for new or emerging sites.
#2 Higher buying intent.
So when someone looks up a longtail keyword,
they're usually looking for a more specific answer
to their question.
So they're much more likely in the last stage of the sales funnel
which is consideration or decision.
So for example,
someone looking up shoes isn't really ready to buy.
But someone looking up a specific type of shoe
and a specific size and a specific gender
and a specific color is much more ready to buy.
Now I often hear that broad keywords are tempting
because of the high search volume.
So you may have hundreds of thousands of people
looking for that broad term
and maybe only 10 to 20 or 30 people looking for that longtail keyword.
But here's the facts.
Do you want the right traffic or a ton of traffic?
And you need a keyword research tool to get the right data,
otherwise you're kind of just guessing.
Two of my favorite tools are SEMrush and Mangools Keyword Finder.
Take a look at Keyword Finder.
I researched the keyword blogging statistics
and I found, at the time when I was researching it,
that this keyword was 50 out of a scale of a hundred.
That number has since gone up to 52.
So we grabbed this keyword,
wrote a long-form piece that was over 2,000 words,
and we were able to get that blog in the top four results
for that keyword.
On the left side of Keyword Finder,
you'll see goldmines,
longtail keyword opportunities that you can write content pieces around.
So that scale in these keyword research tools is really great
because you can know at a glance the keyword difficulty,
and anything over 50,
I usually don't write content around.
50 and below is a great number.
That means you have a possible chance
at getting your content in high rankings in Google.
I also recommend going really long-form at 2,000 words.
You can watch my last Content Marketers Café
to see why long-form content works so well.
That's an episode too.
You should also write one content piece around one keyword.
You don't want to dilute that content piece
with too many keywords.
The question you've been waiting for is up next, big-ticket question.
Let's talk about natural usage for keywords
in your content.
So first of all,
the days of keyword stuffing are just gone.
No more do you want to stuff a content piece
with as many keywords as you can fit in it.
That'll actually get your content de-ranked in Google, not ranked.
This also means that
you don't want to keep using the same keyword
over and over again.
You want to be synonymous and natural.
Think of it like a conversation with a real person.
Would you insert the same phrase over and over in your conversation?
If you want to get a point across
you might word it in a few different ways.
So think of being synonymous and natural with your keyword.
Okay, so what does that look like
when you get a keyword to write content around?
Let's say for example a client gave us this keyword
"best UX designer Austin".
That's a great keyword for our client
but it's a bit too clunky to use in our copy as is.
The best approach is to weave that keyword in your content naturally.
Here's an example of a title we could create
for the content piece.
"How to Find the Best UX & Web Designer in Austin".
Doesn't that sound normal?
Then you can use variations on that keyword phrase
throughout your copy.
So the secret is, don't force the keyword.
Be synonymous with the content you create
and how you fit that keyword in.
And always remember, natural usage is the best usage.
So what do you do with really awkward phrases
that you have to write content pieces around?
Let's say for example we're given the phrase
"eyedoctor in Burlington VT".
There's no spaces between the first two words.
What the heck do we do?
In Google search results,
there is absolutely no difference between "eyedoctor" and "eye doctor".
We're humans writing for humans,
so there should be no difference in how we would normally pronounce,
write or use our language when we write content.
Also, remember that keyword research is done by a tool.
Whenever you use these tools like SEMrush, Keyword Finder,
Ahrefs, Moz,
so the data you're presented with is created by an algorithm
not a human.
But the people that use the search engines
are not robots.
They're all humans.
Placement of keywords is really important.
Remember to always use your keyword in your meta description,
your meta title and your headers.
This is really important
because it kind of gives Google a table of content,
like what's at the beginning of a book,
that tells Google what the content is all about,
what the topic's about.
So you have to put your keywords in the right places.
Lastly, remember that you can get creative
with these longtail keywords.
So for example,
let's say we're given a keyword "glutenfree pasta Phoenix".
So you don't have to jam this keyword everywhere on your page.
You can break it up in a number of ways like "pasta", "Phoenix", "glutenfree",
"glutenfree pasta", "glutenfree in Phoenix",
"pasta in Phoenix".
This is a lot of variations for that one longtail keyword phrase.
It's all about balance.
Be creative, don't overdo it,
and write like you're speaking to a human.
And don't forget to place that keyword in optimal places
where Google can find it and pick it up,
like your meta description, your meta title
and your headers.
Question,
how can you tell if you're overdoing it with a keyword?
Read your content out loud.
Does it sound natural to you?
If not, rework it.
You'll be able to hear where it sounds clunky
and you'll be able to hear where you used to term
too many times.
Reading your content aloud
is a great way to get the flow of that content piece down.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Content Marketers Café
with Julia McCoy.
Be sure to come back next Saturday as I record these every single Saturday.