How to Target the Right Keywords

It really comes down to understanding the KW research process and why you’re doing it – it’s about creating the right content, optimized for the right query intents – shouldn’t EVER be about targeting Google and not people.
 

You can’t optimize for BERT. It’s not a ranking algorithm like RankBrain, it’s a language processing algorithm. Just be sure to keep writing high-quality content that will reside with your audience. Keep KW research the same as whatever works for your SEO efforts.

Depends on what you were doing before! If you were writing for a human audience before, you’re likely only being rewarded from BERT. If you’ve been writing in a contrived over-SEO’d fashion, you might be having issues. Write for people, not robots!

BERT is a natural language understanding framework where machines are now better able to understand conceptually what a webpage is about. So, tactics like Hx optimization, keyword placement are ineffective w/o topic support. Content strategy anyone?

If you’re still doing old-school SEO and targeting one keyword per page and not thinking about targeting concepts, then you need to change that for sure – and *maybe* that’s why you’re worried about BERT. But it’s still just regular SEO, y’all.

it’s a further move towards high quality, readable content. Thinking more about what your readers actually want and speaking to them like a real person

Depending on the industry and product, try to explain what the business is selling to a 5 year-old, then to a teen, then to an adult, and then to an expert. You should get a global understanding of how people may refer to the business.

You have to be careful when asking the client for important keywords… Great example – car dealers love to say “pre-owned vehicles” cause it sounds nicer… but it’s got less than a tenth the search volume of “used cars” (how people actually search).
 

I wouldn’t use many time-saving hacks – unless it’s aggregating data to then manually go through. When you automate keyword research, you lose to the people who spent the time to do it more in-depth.

Map it around: – your product
– key features
– questions around your product/service
– conversations with your product team, sales team and customer support. What are customer talking about to you already? For starters ツ

Here’s our B2B approach:
– Set your content pillars with head terms and core topics.
– Punch those into SEMrush position tracking.
– Find the competitors.
– Mine their keywords using the sandbox, add the good ones.
– Iterate until happy.
– Step back and listen.

Ensure your keywords are mapped around your customer lifecycle, that way, personas, content strategy, and keyword research go hand-in-hand and no one is duplicating work…

Which keywords will actually convert? we’ve had great success skipping the top tier keywords with all the search volume. Going after lower-volume, longer-tail KWs bring more conversions on a shorter timeline.
 

Are these keywords actually valued by the customer? Do they care?

1️⃣ What are people searching for? 2️⃣ How many people are searching for it? 3️⃣ In what format do they want that information?
 

What words best describe what we offer our customers? How would a potential customer unaware of our industry and what we offer articulate their search.

– What keyword/query is my site the PERFECT solution/answer for?
– What keyword/query has the strongest intent from the customer related to the goal I’m wanting to achieve?
– What’s too broad? (those go to the bottom of the list)

Is this relevant long term? Are people actually looking for this? Am I actually offering this? Will this help get people in the funnel? What part of the funnel is this?

Tons of people forget to talk to the client too… all the KW research in the world won’t matter if you don’t really understand the business and its goals.
 

Deciphering the user’s real need. Keywords are codes the audience uses to retrieve information. You have to know (1) what they’re really asking and (2) what type of content they really want.

Do a sense check!! Just because it’s on the list, doesn’t mean it makes sense for the client.

The manual work for sure. I don’t wanna hate on SEO tools but they are getting so lazy! No one wants to get their hands dirty anymore.

In my opinion, the most overlooked part of the keyword process is understanding your audience (who they are), what they would use to find your produce and using keywords that are relevant to them and your content.

The most overlooked step is considering the humans! We get so caught up pleasing the computer and the algorithms we have to remember that actual people are behind the searches.
 

It depends*. What’s guaranteed is that you’ll see improvement if you’ve done you work the right way. *Results in SEO can never be guaranteed. Results depend on your niche, your site, your commitment, your investment, and Google’s web crawlers.

Depends on the competitiveness of your keywords and search landscape, but patience is a virtue!

String length of? Anything from days to months, according to a lot of variables 🙂 SEO is a long-term game, so be very grateful for any short-term wins.

Really, it depends on whether or not you’re targeting high volume/high competition terms or not. Those obviously take MUCH longer… but sometimes the long tail/low competition stuff can catch fire quickly…

What’s a “result”? Impatience with SEO is one of the biggest failure modes with clients and agencies. Been in way too many meetings where teams mined analytics for some nugget of joy without considering KPIs or causality. Look for some rate of change on KPIs.