Excelling at keyword research is central to developing an effective SEO strategy. It’s also one of the biggest obstacles. More than simply selecting words, keyword research requires extensive exploration in the search results to uncover insights that show you how best to create relevant and engaging content.

So here in this article, we’ll go over what aspects of the search results to focus on while you’re doing keyword research.

1. User Intent: The Reason Behind the Search

As you gather and refine your keywords, you need to know the intent behind them. This ensures the content you create fulfills a person’s needs as they search on Google.

There are typically four buckets of user intent behind keywords:

• Informational intent: Users are looking for answers or learning something new. For example, “What is keyword research?”
• Navigational intent: They’re trying to find a specific brand or resource. For instance, “Google Keyword Planner.”
• Commercial intent: These people are nearly ready to buy, but want to compare products, for example, “Google Keyword Planner vs. SEOToolSet.”
• Transactional Intent: They’re ready to act, like making a purchase. For instance, “subscribe to SEOToolSet.”

The important step here is to analyze the content that ranks for your target keyword to confirm its intent.

If the top-ranking results are product pages but you’re creating a blog post, you might need to adjust your approach.

You can also consider gathering metrics, such as the target word count for that keyword based on the top-ranking pages.

2. Assess the Competition: Who’s Already Winning?

Ranking for a desired keyword entails evaluating your competitors. You have to understand who’s already ranking and what they’re doing to stay ahead.

• Assess content quality: What makes their content valuable? Is it detailed, user-friendly or visually engaging? For more, see my guide on crafting high-quality SEO content.
• Evaluate the domain: Do competitors have strong backlinks and a high level of trust? Check out my article on the site authority metric before you do this.
• Spot gaps: Can you offer deeper insights than your competition, update outdated information or target a specific niche they’ve overlooked?

Use tools like SEOToolSet®, Ahrefs, SEMrush or Moz to uncover competitors’ backlinks and identify gaps in their keyword strategies. I discuss this more at length in How to Do Competitor Research for SEO.

3. Leverage SERP Features: Beyond the Blue Links

The search engine results pages (SERPs) are rich with information during your keyword research.

The SERPs can give you additional ideas for keywords to target and help you better understand how you will structure your content strategy for a keyword.

For keyword research, you can look at the SERPs in areas such as:

• Google’s autocomplete feature.
• People Also Ask feature.
• Related Searches feature.
• People Also Search For feature.
• Discussions and forums results.

Then, you can use the SERP to analyze the SERP features that show up for a target keyword. (For a quick beginner’s guide, see What Are SERP Features and Why Should I Care?)

For example, are videos predominant in the SERPs for an important keyword? Make sure you’re making videos to answer that query.

Every SERP feature will have a unique strategy. There’s everything from AI Overviews to the Local Pack, Knowledge Panels, Image Carousels and more.

So you’ll need a thoughtful approach to ranking in the whole SERP, and you can learn more about that in my article, What Is a Whole-SERP SEO Strategy?

Final Thoughts

For better keyword research, use the SERPs to uncover the insights you need for a solid SEO content strategy.

When you understand user intent, evaluate your competition and leverage the many SERP features available, you can craft relevant content that ranks and resonates.

Read How To Do Keyword Research for SEO for more keyword research insights.

Don’t have the time to do keyword research? Lacking resources to build a content strategy? Let our SEO experts do the work for you.

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FAQ: How can I effectively use keyword research to identify gaps and opportunities in my competitors’ strategies?

Effective keyword research gives businesses a competitive edge online. It reveals what terms are sending traffic to your competitors’ website, and it shows you the areas where their content may be lacking. This is helpful information you can capitalize on. This process involves analyzing search volume, competition level and keyword intent to ensure alignment with user needs and search behaviors.

Staying ahead requires a keen understanding of competitor strategies. Investigating the keywords they leverage provides insights into their market positioning and audience targeting. More importantly, it unveils keywords and topics they overlook.

Focusing on these gaps allows you to produce content that addresses unmet needs while offering unique value, drawing people in while strengthening SEO efforts as a thought leader and resource in your industry.

The challenge lies in the saturation of popular keywords, where competition is fierce and cutting through the noise is difficult. However, resolving this issue involves a strategic shift towards long-tail keywords or niche phrases that offer lower competition yet significant value.

These keywords often indicate specific user intents, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates when addressed effectively. By tailoring your content to meet these targeted needs, you can draw traffic away from competitors and establish a more prominent online presence.

Integrating emerging trends and technologies into your keyword strategy is also crucial. Utilizing AI-driven tools for keyword analysis can provide deeper insights into search patterns and competitor tactics.

These tools allow you to quickly identify shifts in consumer behavior, enabling you to modify your strategy proactively. Staying current with industry developments ensures your keywords stay relevant.

An experiential tip for optimizing your keyword research is to regularly conduct audits of your competitors’ performance. This involves tracking their keyword rankings, analyzing their content strategies, and monitoring their engagement levels.

By understanding what works for them and what doesn’t, you can refine your approach and implement advanced tactics that set your brand apart. Combining this with a robust SEO framework will solidify your strategy and drive sustained growth.

Achieving a nuanced understanding of keyword dynamics requires a multi-faceted approach. Engage in competitor analysis, utilize cutting-edge tools, and continuously refine your strategy based on performance data.

Step-by-Step Procedure

1. Establish Goals: Set clear objectives, whether it’s generating more traffic, earning higher search ranking or finding new markets.
2. Target Competitors: Focus your research efforts by making a list of competitors, both direct and indirect.
3. Keyword Research Tools: Use the right tools for keyword research, utilize advanced tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, SEOToolSet or PreWriter.ai.
4. Analyze Competitor Keywords: Note which keywords your competitors are ranking for, then look up their search volume, difficulty and click-through rates.
5. Find Content Gaps: Take note of topics or keywords unexplored by competitors that present opportunities for your content creation.
6. Assess Keyword Intent: Establish the intent behind each keyword.
7. Prioritize: Prioritize opportunities based on their impact, feasibility and how well they align with your business goals.
8. Content Strategy: Formulate a plan to produce content which addresses gaps while remaining search engine and user friendly.
9. Apply On-Page SEO Techniques: Take steps such as optimizing titles, meta descriptions and headers in order to enhance visibility for your content and make it more noticeable online.
10. Monitor Competitor Performance: Keep track of how competitors’ keyword rankings and content updates impact them so you can adjust your approach appropriately.
11. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords: Leverage long-tail keywords to take advantage of their lower competition and increased conversion potential, customizing content specifically to individual queries.
12. Acknowledging Emerging Trends: Remain aware of industry developments and integrate key words into your plan in order to remain competitive.
13. Conduct Audits Regularly: Assess your keyword strategy regularly to gauge its effectiveness. Tweak accordingly.
14. Engage With Your Audience: Engaging with your audience through social media will help you understanding what they’re interested in. You can build a list of targeted keywords With these insights.
15. Optimize for Voice Search: Use keywords that are conversational throughout your content. Staying current on voice search trends will help.
16. AI Tools: Use AI tools to analyze search patterns and anticipate future trends to strengthen your keyword strategies.
17. Refining Your Approach: Review performance data and market changes frequently to keep your keyword strategy effective and up-to-date, to make sure it remains effective and relevant.
18. Focus on User Experience: Make sure your content offers readers an enriching and enjoyable experience, which can boost search rankings and increase traffic.
19. Create an Effective Backlink Profile: Strategize ways of acquiring high-quality backlinks that will elevate both authority and search visibility.
20. Test and Iterate: Utilize data-driven experiments to test various strategies and approaches in keyword research and implementation processes, then utilize this feedback to further strengthen them over time.
21. Keep Up: To keep an edge in keyword research and maintain market leadership, keep abreast of emerging technologies and trends through keyword monitoring. Doing this will give your competitors less of a fighting chance while providing you with an advantage for keyword research.
22. Collaborate With Your Team: For optimal keyword strategies to meet business goals and initiatives, work closely with your marketing team in creating alignment between keyword strategies and other business initiatives.
23. Continued Education: Stay current with changes to SEO and keyword research. can ensure your knowledge and abilities stay at their most up-to-date state.
24. Utilize Analytics Tools: Leverage analytics tools to assess and adjust your keyword strategy.

The post What Should I Analyze in the Search Results When Conducting Keyword Research? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

SEO keywords are single words or short phrases that represent the search queries that people use in a search engine. Website owners select keywords and use them to guide content creation and optimize their webpages as part of their SEO strategy.

There is no one “right way” to do keyword research.

In fact, SEO professionals usually each have their own unique way of conducting keyword research. However, the steps outlined in this article will give you plenty of avenues to explore when it comes to researching and selecting the right keywords for your SEO strategy.

We have deliberate ways of selecting keywords for two basic scenarios. This article describes the method to use when you do not have tried and true keywords.

The other scenario would be for more established websites with well-honed product information and a knowledge of what makes them money. Doing both types of keyword research sometimes makes sense.

If you’re new to the concept of keywords, I recommend you first read our article What Are Keywords and Why Are They Important to SEO?

In this article, I’ll explain how to do in-depth keyword research for SEO, including examples.

1. Know Your Website’s Theme

This may seem obvious, but a lot of websites get this wrong. The first step in keyword research is to identify the website’s theme(s).

You need to hone in on what your website is about. That’s because you want your keyword research and your content to reflect those themes accurately. This step clarifies the main topics your site should be relevant for.

For example, if you sell women’s clothing, that’s a broad theme. But narrow down the types of clothing you sell (petite, plus size, new or used, dresses, shoes, styles or other). If you do local business only, that will also affect your keyword research.

This step is all about getting clarity and focus on what you’re really about and how you want your business to be presented online.

2. Perform Basic and Advanced Keyword Research

Brainstorm an Initial List of Keywords

With a clearer picture of your business, brainstorm a list of possible words and phrases related to all the themes you created in the last step.

This is often called a “seed list.” Remember, these are potential keywords because they relate to your products, services or subject matter expertise.

Some questions that you might keep in mind as you are brainstorming keywords:

• What would I search for on a search engine if I were looking for what I have to offer?
• How does my audience describe what I have to offer? Think about the audience that doesn’t use industry jargon as well. If you are hyper-focused on jargon, and there isn’t search volume for those keywords, you may not end up with a list of many keywords to refine.
• What are the problems that my products or services solve? What would someone search for if they had those problems?

Other places to find ideas for your seed list:

• Keywords from your website’s navigation.
• Your competitor’s keywords (see how to do competitor research for SEO). These can help you do a content gap analysis.

Here, it can be helpful if you know your audience.

Not every business takes the time to build personas of their ideal customers, but it’s useful to have an understanding. Knowing the needs and desires of your target audience will help you as you brainstorm an initial list of keywords.

Similarly, you want to understand the needs and desires of internal stakeholders. They typically have a lot of ideas when it comes to the types of words and phrases they think the business should target.

You will validate these ideas later using other techniques. So don’t worry too much about trying to get the phrasing right or to match exactly how your audience might type a query into Google.

Tools and data will often help you discover the best keywords to use.

Read more about seed keywords: What Is a Seed Keyword and How Can I Use It in My Research?

Use Tools to Discover More Keywords

Now, it’s time to turn to SEO tools and data.

Take the keywords you have brainstormed and enter them into the keyword research tool(s) of your choosing. You will get data back on those words as well as suggestions for many other keywords related to those words.

Some tools to consider:

Google Ads Keyword Planner: This tool can help you discover new keywords from Google, view approximate monthly search volume for those terms and more. Note that you will get better data on keywords if you have an active ad account with Google Ads.

PreWriter.ai: PreWriter, our AI-powered content creation suite, is a great way to conduct keyword research. Simply input a keyword and a specific URL (your competitor’s webpage, for example) into the Keyword Research tool and PreWriter will give you an exhaustive list of related keywords to build your content strategy around.

Give PreWriter a try for free and see the power of the Keyword Research tool in action.

SEOToolSet®: Our Keyword Suggestions tool finds terms that are semantically related to the keywords in your seed list. For each keyword, the tool can provide search activity, three metrics to indicate competitiveness, categories and a trending chart. (See more below …)

Keyword Suggestions Tool: The free version of our SEOToolSet keyword tool will serve up 20 related words and phrases for your keyword (entered one at a time) pulled from search engine data.

Google Analytics 4: You can get some data on keywords here if you have an account. Go to Reports > Search Console > Queries.

Wordtracker: This tool can help you discover new keywords, uncover trending keywords for a niche and discover competitor keywords, too.

Semrush: Semrush allows you to discover new keywords, understand a keyword’s value, analyze competitor keywords, analyze keyword metrics in real time and discover the “not provided” keywords in your Google Analytics.

Google Search Console: Find out which search queries are generating impressions and clicks to your website in Google’s search results. Once you set up your Search Console account, you will have access to up to 1,000 queries. Under the ‘Performance’ section on the left-hand side, click Search Results. On the results page, scroll down and be sure you are on the Queries tab.

Google Trends: Some keywords are more seasonal in nature and see spikes and valleys throughout the year. If you’re in a business that is impacted by the seasons, exploring Google Trends offers some key insights around words and phrases you may already be thinking about and some you may not have. You can also spot search behavior changes, such as new terms replacing older ones. (For details, see our article on how to use Google Trends for keyword research.)

Answer the Public: This tool provides long-tail, conversational keyword phrases based on autocomplete data from the search engines for any given keyword that you input.

People also ask: Dive into Google’s search results for additional keyword research. Manually search (always in incognito mode so that the results are not as biased) for your target keywords and then look at the “People also ask” section. Consider adding those questions to your keyword list.

Related searches: Another way to get more ideas for keyword phrases is by manually searching for your keywords and scrolling down to the “Related searches” section.

Wikipedia: Search for a keyword in Wikipedia and then dive into that Wikipedia page’s table of contents to find more ideas for related terms.

Using one or more of these tools is going to give you plenty of ideas. You can export the data and start compiling the keywords and metrics in a central location (usually a spreadsheet).

Note that not all tools are going to give apples-to-apples metrics for a keyword.

Example of How to Do Keyword Research Using the SEOToolSet

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of how you can use our SEO tools, the SEOToolSet, to perform keyword research step-by-step.

1. Use the Keyword Suggestions Tool

The SEOToolSet’s Keyword Suggestions tool finds terms semantically related to a seed and/or keyword phrase.

The report shows search activity, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click, confidence percentage and a trending chart for each.

The confidence metric shows how prevalent the keyword was in the SEOToolSet’s sources (which consist of multiple APIs).

You can set up multiple keyword lists (such as one for each silo). From the Keyword Suggestions tool, you can add any reasonable keywords to one of your lists.

2. Run the Real-Time Ranking Monitor

The SEOToolSet Ranking Monitor allows you to see which keywords your site is ranking for with (relatively) unfiltered and unbiased ranking data across Google and Bing.

You can then assign the appropriate keywords to the right webpages and strengthen those pages by better optimizing them.

For more information, read What Is a Search Engine Ranking Report.

3. Use the Domain Ranking Report

The Domain Ranking report shows which webpages are ranking by keyword or by page. Data points include:

• The keyword.
• The activity for that keyword.
• The number of results in a Google search and Bing for that keyword.
• The average cost per click of that keyword in a PPC ad.
• The number of pages in Google and Bing that use that keyword in their Title tag.
• The rankings for each search engine selected when you ran the report.

The data you get from this report will inform your content strategy. It shows you what the best keywords are to build content around and shows you what content needs improvement.

Export to a Spreadsheet

Once in the Domain Ranking Report, you can export the data to an Excel spreadsheet.

• Click the “Export” button in the upper right-hand side of the report window, then select ‘CSV.’



• Using Excel (or a spreadsheet of your choice), sort the information so that you can look at all keywords with a $0 CPC and determine if you want to keep the keywords none of your competitors bid on.
• Using the spreadsheet, sort the information in Excel so you can see all the keywords with a “0” activity count and determine if you should delete keywords few people search for. Note that this is an approximation of traffic and should be used more as an indicator that a keyword is popular, not as an exact number. Basically, the higher the number, the more likely more people are searching for a keyword.

These steps are typically the first steps in refining the keyword list. Next, I’ll touch on more refinement techniques.

3. Refine Your Keyword List

You should have an extensive list of ideas from the previous steps. Now comes the arduous task of refining that list.

Here are four basic questions you should ask about each keyword:

1. Is this keyword relevant to the site? Right off the bat, you can go through the lists and delete any keywords that are not relevant to your business. That should take out a good chunk of keywords that you don’t need to waste any more time on.
2. Is there a page within the site that specifically talks about that keyword topic? If not, would you be willing to create a page for that keyword topic?
3. Would you expect to see your website listed in the results if you typed this keyword into a search engine?
4. Does this keyword have any search volume?

If your answer is “no” to any of these questions, then delete that keyword phrase from the spreadsheet.

Analyze Metrics

Keyword metrics are another way to determine whether a keyword is a good fit. In general, you want high ROI, CPC, KPI keywords (and then branded terms, of course).

But you also want to strike a balance between what is attainable for your website and the resources you have in order to compete for rankings.

Some data points to consider for each keyword:

• Search volume: Higher search activity means it’s a popular search term. Higher search volume might also mean there’s a lot of competition, which makes the keyword harder to rank for. Newer websites might not want to start with these terms.
• Clicks: Tools like Ahrefs’ “Keywords Explorer” can show the estimated number of clicks for your keywords.
• Cost per click: This can indicate whether PPC advertisers perceive this keyword to be a money-maker. The going CPC rate for a keyword is one measure of its competitiveness.
• Traffic potential: Again, Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer can help you estimate traffic potential for certain keywords.
• Keyword difficulty: This is often a manual process that looks at the top-ranked pages for certain keywords and takes into account several factors. However, many keyword tools can help refine this process for you.
• Competition: If the competition seems too stiff for your website to compete with right now (for example, if multinational companies show up on page one), then you might skip the keyword. On the other hand, if your market competitors are showing up in the search results for a keyword, it’s probably a good one to keep. (Here’s how to clarify who your SEO competition is.)
• Traffic versus conversions: High-traffic keywords may bring in more traffic, but you also want to consider keywords that may drive less traffic but more conversions.
• PPC data: You can find out which keywords bring in clicks, traffic and conversions by testing them through PPC campaigns. To learn more, read our series on building and managing search campaigns.
• Rankings: If you are already ranking for certain keyword terms, you will want to evaluate those keywords. If they are relevant to your site, then keep them on the list. To find out what terms your website ranks for, check your Google Search Console data by queries. Some SEO tools, such as Semrush, can also help identify your traffic-driving keywords. Note that if you aren’t starting from scratch with keyword research, you’ll want to make this step a priority to better understand the terms you are already succeeding with.

Match to Theme

Get rid of any search terms that don’t reinforce the theme(s) of your site. This is a bit different from just getting rid of irrelevant keywords.

This step is about further refining the keywords in the categories based on the theme of your website. To better understand this concept, read SEO Siloing: What, Why, How.

Cross-Reference Personas

You might go through the lists of keywords with your personas in mind. You can get rid of those that you think don’t align with their needs and desires.

As a reminder, personas can also include internal stakeholders who will have an opinion on which keywords to target as well.

Determine Intent

As you analyze the keywords, ask yourself what intent you believe the searcher has when using this keyword.

Turn to the Google search engine to see what sort of content Google is ranking for that keyword to determine its relevance to your website.

For example, intent can be:

• Informational: These keywords are used by people seeking to learn more about the topic and who are not ready to buy just yet.
• Transactional: These keywords are used by people with the intent to purchase something.
• Branded: These keywords are related specifically to your business or brand.

As an example, if someone is trying to optimize a shopping site for a keyword phrase, and what Google is ranking are research pages with content about “what is [keyword phrase],” then it might not be the right keyword phrase or content.

Another layer might be local keywords, phrases that someone might use searching for a nearby business (think “near me”).

In all cases, you can have a mix of broader category keywords (i.e., the one- or two-word queries such as “women’s clothing”) and longer keywords that produce long-tail traffic (i.e., three or more words in a phrase such as “high heel womens designer shoes”) depending on where a searcher is on their searching journey.

You can try organizing your spreadsheet into the buckets listed above to start, and then further organize by broad versus long-tail.

An important note: Doing keyword research for things like shopping sites can be radically different than what’s outlined in this article. That involves a combination of both how people search and an evaluation of how filter/faceted navigation is set up on the site.

TOFU and BOFU Keywords

You can also organize your keywords by TOFU (top of the funnel) and BOFU (bottom of the funnel) categories.

Top-of-the-funnel keywords are usually more general topics (think “how-to” keywords) that build brand awareness and are used in educational-type resources like blog articles.

Bottom-of-the-funnel keywords typically are those that are highly specific and drive conversions. One example is searching for the “best [product name]”, which may bring up a targeted landing page.

Consider the “Zero-Click” Reality

Dig deeper to understand how certain keywords might instigate certain search results.

Google continually invents new SERP features that allow people to get answers to their queries without ever clicking through to a website. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t compete.

Google’s latest is AI Overviews, which gives an AI-generated summary of the search results for a query.

That doesn’t mean SEO is dead. Far from it. Google still relies on the content of websites to do its job. Still, SEO continuously evolves.

To learn more, read How to Adapt SEO in a Zero-Click World.

4. Assign Keywords and Optimize / Build Content

Keyword research is just the beginning of your SEO journey.

The keywords you choose will serve as a roadmap for your content, including the structure of your main webpages, your blog content and beyond (remember to keep in mind your whole-SERP SEO strategy!).

Identify “Unicorn” Webpages and Strengthen with Keywords

You can identify the webpages that rank well and are bringing in the most traffic first using tools like Google Analytics and our SEOToolSet, as I outlined earlier. Assign relevant keywords to those pages and then optimize them well.

Optimize Other Existing Webpages

Assign relevant keywords to other webpages that are already published. See how to get customized, real-time SEO advice per keyword.

Tips for Assigning Keywords to Webpages

Generally speaking, pages higher up in the site hierarchy should target the high-value keywords (“head” or “money” terms), while pages lower in the hierarchy should target long-tail keyword phrases.

The home page and top landing pages should be assigned the most important, the most competitive and the most-searched keywords, while product/content pages should be assigned long-tail keywords.

Primary and Secondary Keywords

For each page, pick one primary keyword and two or three secondary keywords.

The amount of content on the page determines how many secondary keywords are appropriate. The more content on the page, the greater variety of keywords it can be optimized for.

The secondary keywords should be related to the primary keyword. For example, if the primary keyword is “retirement communities,” then good secondary keywords might be “senior living” and “55 plus communities.”

“Nested” Keywords

Look for opportunities to use nested keywords — combining multiple head terms that share words.

For example, “Arizona retirement” and “retirement communities” both have high search volume. The term “Arizona retirement communities” has a lower search volume but contains both high-volume terms.

By optimizing for “Arizona retirement communities” you also optimize for “Arizona retirement” and “retirement communities.”

Build Content That Is Missing

Assign keywords as new topics for new webpages that you don’t yet have, like important keywords that you can’t assign to any pre-existing webpages. Make sure that you put those new webpages in the right SEO silo.

For more on developing great SEO content, see our guide to Google’s E-E-A-T, what makes a webpage quality, and crafting high-quality SEO content.

Final Thoughts

Keyword research is a lengthy and technical process. It’s worth spending the time up front to get this foundational step in your SEO strategy right.

Then, a good SEO strategy will deliver on your keyword research with quality, authoritative content to satisfy the people who are searching.

To build a solid SEO foundation, I recommend you check out our SEO Guide. This free resource starts with keyword research, then leads you through the important areas you need to know to get ranked. It’s a good idea to bookmark this page as well as the SEO Guide.

Don’t have the time or resources to conduct thorough keyword research? Let our SEO experts do the work for you.

Get your free consultation

FAQ: How can I perform effective keyword research to identify the right keywords that will improve my website’s SEO strategy?

Keyword research is an integral component of an effective SEO strategy, helping website owners uncover the most apt and impactful keywords to target. But exactly how will it benefit us? Let’s delve further into a process which leverages search behavior insights into effective content strategies.

Understanding user intent is vitally important if you wish to accurately portray what your audience is searching for through certain keywords. Tools like PreWriter.ai help you uncover popular and pertinent terms.

An evaluation of keyword difficulty and search volume using tools like the SEOToolSet® is crucial in order to create the ideal balance of high-volume keywords with manageable competition levels and those which add greater relevancy for increased chances of ranking higher in search results.

Creation of content clusters can be an efficient means of conducting keyword research. By organizing relevant information into groups of similar articles on your website, content clusters allow it to increase in authority and visibility while offering visitors relevant, organized data – perfect for both keyword optimization as well as user experience improvement!

Keyword research can be daunting due to an overwhelming volume of data and algorithm updates; but by employing professional tools and remaining up-to-date on SEO trends, these challenges can be overcome successfully.

Step-by-Step Procedure

1. Outline your SEO objectives.
2. Plan an initial brainstorm session in order to compile a list of keywords.
3. Use SEO tools like SEOToolSet, SEMRush or Ahrefs to track the rise and fall in popularity over time of particular keywords.
4. Take advantage of keyword research tools in order to efficiently collect data.
5. Analyze competitor websites to identify their top keywords.
6. Generate long-tail keywords using tools such as PreWriter.ai.
7. Assess the search volume and keyword difficulty for every potential keyword.
8. Arrange similar keywords into clusters to strengthen their organization thematically.
9. Leveraging semantic keywords and synonyms to boost content relevancy.
10. Prioritize keywords by their impact and feasibility.
11. Create a content strategy incorporating keywords related to your products/services.
12. Create high-quality and engaging content that meets user intent.
13. Optimize on-page elements including titles, meta descriptions and headers with keywords for maximum keyword usage.
14. Gain insights into keyword performance using analytics tools that track rankings and traffic levels for accurate tracking of performance metrics.
15. Based on performance data and SEO trends, make necessary modifications.
16. Stay abreast of algorithm updates to maintain competitive edge for your website.
17. When reviewing user trends when revising keyword lists.
18. Experiment with different content formats to broaden the exposure of your keyword targets, and ensure maximum impactful exposure for them.
19. Integrate internal links within content clusters to improve navigation and SEO performance.
20. Engage with your audience through comments and feedback to understand their needs.
21. Utilizing social media platforms such as X to expand and disseminate your content further will allow it to reach farther than it originally could.
22. Join forces with industry specialists or influencers to bolster your credibility and extend the scope of your reach.
23. When optimizing the technical aspects of your website, ensure it can provide optimal speed and mobile performance to maximize speed and mobile functionality as effectively as possible.
24. For maximum effectiveness and relevance, regularly review and edit your content to stay fresh.

The post How To Do Keyword Research for SEO appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

PPC for beginners – overwhelming, right? Many newbies will agree. But, you can skip the struggle if you acquire some solid knowledge about Pay Per Click (PPC) fundamentals and terminology.

PPC for beginners could fill an entire book, but this high-level overview serves as an ideal place to begin.

In this article:

• Understanding PPC: For Beginners
  • What Is PPC and How Does It Work?
  • 3 Benefits of PPC for Businesses
• Setting Up Your First PPC Campaign
  1. Choosing PPC Ad Platforms
  2. Understanding the Account Structure
  3. Doing Keyword Research for PPC
  4. Writing the Ad Copy
• Maximizing Your PPC Campaign Performance
1. Targeting Options
2. Negative Keywords
3. Remarketing
4. Tracking
5. Evaluating ROI
• FAQ: How can I successfully set up my first PPC campaign for optimal results?

Understanding PPC: For Beginners

What Is PPC and How Does It Work?

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) refers to online advertising where competitive bidding takes place for each click that goes out. Different firms bid to show ads to users on their chosen ad platform. You pay absolutely nothing unless someone clicks on your ad. That’s where the term “pay-per-click” comes from.

See also: 4 Practical Ways Beginners Can Succeed in PPC Ad Management

3 Benefits of PPC for Businesses

In this microwave society, simply coming up in the search results isn’t enough. You need to be seen first. Here are three reasons that PPC is such a gamechanger:

• Traffic boost: Want traffic fast? PPC delivers faster than many methods out there. For many businesses, it’s the first segue into digital marketing, used to send search traffic to their site while they build their SEO presence in tandem, which is a longer game.
• Precision targeting: Age, location, interests—you can segment your audience however you see fit. Tailored ads lead to better engagement rates and loads more bang for your buck.
• Data: Every click tells a story. You can use insights from each campaign to sharpen future strategies or pivot entirely if needed.

See also: 8 Ways PPC Services Take Small Business Advertising to the Next Level

Setting Up Your First PPC Campaign

As you set up your first PPC campaign, consider the following initial steps:

1. Choosing ad platforms.
2. Understanding the account structure.
3. Doing keyword research.
4. Writing the ads.

1. Choosing PPC Ad Platforms

The very first step is to choose an ad platform; they run the gamut from search engines to display networks to social media platforms.

To find a platform that best fulfills your needs, consider factors like your target audience, the types of ad creatives you want to pursue and your budget.

Search Engine Advertising

Search engines like Google offer PPC advertising through their ad platforms. Take Google Ads, for example. Here, keywords are king. Ads pop up in the search results when someone searches for what you have to offer. It’s straightforward and effective.

Display Advertising

Display ads come up when users peruse third-party websites. They are commonly shown in the form of ad banners, popups and videos.

Display ads can support the ad practice of retargeting (or remarketing), which keeps your brand top of mind when people have previously expressed interest in your brand by visiting your website.

Social Media Ads

You can advertise on popular social media networks and create super-targeted ads based on the vast amount of data that social networks collect from their users.

Of course, the power move is to use a mix of everything, keeping in mind which platforms and which ads are best at which stage in the customer journey. But many businesses simply start with one ad platform and expand from there.

For this article, we will focus on PPC for beginners interested in advertising with Google Ads.

2. Understanding the Account Structure

Organizing your account will set you up for success. In Google Ads, there are three main components:

1. Account
2. Campaigns
3. Ad groups

A. Account

Your account is a unique profile associated with your email address and billing details.

B. Campaigns

When you set up your account, you will choose a campaign type to start — this dictates where people will see your ads online.

Ad campaigns allow you to group your products and services so each offering has its own advertising campaign.

You could also have campaigns for certain promotions, for instance, if you’re having a seasonal sale.

C. Ad Groups

Under each ad campaign, you have groups of ads and their keywords. Ad groups are subsets of your products and services.

Imagine a scenario where you’re doing a campaign for dresses; you may create one ad group for midi dresses and another for maxi dresses.

3. Doing Keyword Research for PPC

Keyword research requires more than simply guesswork about what searches your target audience might use to locate you online.

Step 1: Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Think like them. What problems are they trying to solve? How do they describe their issues or needs? Create a “seed list” of keywords related to your business and your audience’s needs. You will use it for further research.

Step 2: Use tools designed specifically to perform keyword research. Google Keyword Planner is a classic go-to, but don’t stop there. SEO tools like our SEOToolSet®, SEMrush and Ahrefs offer deeper insights into not only which keywords to target but also how competitive they are.

Step 3: Look beyond single words. Dive into long-tail keywords — these phrases may have lower search volumes, but they’re gold when it comes to relevance and conversion rates.

Step 4: Refine your lists. Think beyond just finding high-volume searches; aim for relevancy, too. You want users who click through because what you’re offering solves their problems.

Step 5: Evolve. Effective keyword research is an ongoing process. That means regularly revisiting and refining your list based on performance data from your campaigns as well as emerging trends within your industry.

Yes, this step takes time, but each well-chosen keyword brings you closer to capturing more customers.

See also: Should I Bid on Branded Keywords in Our PPC Campaign?

4. Writing the Ad Copy

Creating engaging text ads is an art form. There are two major elements in a text ad. Within the allowable space, you can do quite a bit to hook prospective customers.

• The headline: The headline is the very first thing people see on your ad – make it scroll-stopping. You can use up to three 30-character headlines max.

• The description: This is the meat of the ad. You can use different assets to engage potential customers. Everything you include should demonstrate value, benefits and trust. And don’t forget to throw an eye-catching call-to-action into the mix.

With the basics explored, let’s get into some promising ways to maximize your PPC campaign return.

Maximizing Your PPC Campaign Performance

The average ROI for PPC ads is estimated to be $8 for every dollar spent (per Google). But getting to that number involves serious PPC skills.

As you launch campaigns, keep in mind that they require active management from start to finish. Don’t assume they will just run themselves!

Below are some promising ways to perfect your approach and maximize the efficacy of your ads; though this isn’t an exhaustive list, it’s a fantastic start:

1. Targeting: Make sure the right people see your ads.
2. Managing negative keywords: Keep refining those negative keyword lists. They’re key players in preventing wasteful spend.
3. Remarketing: Retarget your ads to past website visitors to keep your brand at the top of target audiences’ minds when they browse online.
4. Tracking progress: Take inventory of which keywords are drawing in high-quality traffic and leads or those that could cost too much/little.
5. Evaluating ROI: Learn to maximize your return for every penny spent.

Remember: Even miniscule changes can add up over time to produce substantial results.

1. Targeting Options

Target your ads only at people who need what you offer with precision by employing effective targeting techniques. Here are just a few approaches you could try:

• Demographics: Age, gender and location are good starting points when targeting audiences.
• Interests and behavior: Truly understanding your intended audience and what makes them tick is integral to your success.
• Milestones: Reach out to people who have reached a major milestone.

This is just scratching the surface. When you use Google Ads, you can dive deep into audience segments.

2. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are words or phrases you don’t want your ads to show up for.

For instance, perhaps you sell gourmet coffee beans online. Someone types “free coffee samples” into Google. Without negative keywords, your ad might just pop up. But this person isn’t going to pull out their credit card anytime soon.

Add “free” as a negative keyword and you’re telling Google Ads not to display your ad for any search query containing that term.

Here are some tips:

• Analyze what doesn’t work: Start by looking at terms that bring traffic but no conversions — these could be potential negatives.
• Spy on competitors: Check out high-performing queries for them that aren’t relevant to you — another source of inspiration.
• Leverage tools: Use platforms like SEMrush or Ahrefs to dig deeper into search trends and find unwanted terms sneaking through.

Using negative keywords effectively means fewer wasted clicks, better targeting and improved ROI. But it does require regular check-ins. You want fresh eyes on what’s working (or not).

3. Remarketing

Remarketing or retargeting gives you another chance at turning previous visitors to your site into customers.

Here are some scenarios where you might remarket:

• Visitors who checked out your homepage but bounced.
• Shoppers who abandoned carts.
• People who engage with your content or product pages.

4. Tracking

All in all, it’s about more than the number of clicks an ad receives. It’s about understanding whether those clicks turned into money for your business. That’s where ROI, or return on investment, steps in.

You can further analyze how your ads are performing through conversion tracking, Google Analytics and experiments.

Conversion Tracking

You can monitor your conversions in multiple ways on Google Ads. Just set up conversion actions in Google Ads and then install the Google tag on the backend of your site.

For more on this, see the Google Ads help file about conversion tracking.

Google Analytics

To further analyze your PPC ads, you should link your Google Ads account and Google Analytics (GA4) account together.

(If you have yet to set up Google Analytics, read Google Analytics 4: What It Is and How To Get Started).

This allows you to track what happens after a click when someone gets to your site, allowing you to get the big picture of ad performance.

Data matters because knowledge isn’t just power — it’s profit.

Experiments

Try running experiments to evaluate what works best and ditch what doesn’t.

5. Evaluating ROI

Digging into the data helps you better understand what’s really working. In general, you’ll allocate more budget to campaigns that drive conversions at lower costs per acquisition (CPA). This sounds straightforward because it is.

A well-oiled PPC machine runs efficiently, meaning every dollar counts toward reaching people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Know Your Numbers

The cost-per-click (CPC) varies wildly based on the platform and your industry. Do the math. This way, you can budget like a pro.

Review Your Goals

Are you reaching your goals? More brand awareness? A sales increase? Knowing this shapes how you allocate funds across campaigns.

Remember: Your settings could make or break things right from the get-go; think location targeting or choosing between manual versus automated bidding strategies.

Starting from scratch in PPC as a beginner can feel daunting, but having just a tiny bit more knowledge about your advertising choices, how PPC accounts function and ways to boost your success can give you a bit more confidence to get started.

Need a professional to build out your PPC campaigns? Looking for better results from your PPC efforts? Our PPC experts can help.

Schedule a free consultation

FAQ: How can I successfully set up my first PPC campaign for optimal results?

Building a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign that gets you results is an involved task. It requires a sophisticated strategic approach. But don’t worry – I’ll take you through every facet of campaign creation to help you create a campaign that hits the mark.

When crafted well, PPC campaigns are capable of driving large volumes of traffic straight to your site. The process typically involves everything from preliminary research to progress tracking and more, all of which are integral to your overall success.

To start, you’ll perform keyword research to find the unique terms and phrases potential customers use to locate services or products like yours. You can gain access to deep keyword insights with targeted resources like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or SEOToolSet.

As you’re targeting keywords, be specific; it’s the long-tail keywords that tend to attract the best leads, even though they have lower search volumes. Going this route can yield considerable results.

Choosing the right keywords alone isn’t nearly enough; you also need some strong ad copy that catches the eye and clearly explains what you offer. The most successful ads pull at searchers’ emotions, promise to solve a big problem and have a meaningful, persuasive call-to-action.

Test out multiple versions of your ads to decide which ones resonate with your target demographic. You want to set yourself apart from other businesses in the search engines.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention strategies around PPC bidding, a central part of this mode of advertising. You can use one or more of numerous tactics – manual and automated bidding are a couple of them. Manual bidding affords you the most possible control, which is great if you already understand keyword values.

On the other hand, with automated bidding, machine learning comes into play. You can use it to maximize conversions and efficiency.

PPC campaign success hinges directly on landing page optimization. It’s critical to ensure that the landing page you lead traffic to is painstakingly relevant to your advertisement. It needs a crystal clear message, captivating graphics and a CTA that’s incredibly easy to complete (a purchase button or sign-up form, for example). Cultivating a seamless and intuitive user experience is the objective here.

It’s also critical not to overlook tracking and analytics during your PPC campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics will help you out. Review click-through rates (CTR), cost per acquisitions (CPAs), conversion rates and more to see what’s working well and what changes need to be made. Continually keep an eye on these metrics as you craft and update your strategy.

To further augment your PPC ads and boost their impact, consider ad extensions like callouts, sitelinks, structured snippets and more. All of these components work to provide increased value to your prospects and raise your conversion rates.

Then there’s the concept of competitor analysis, where you seek to cultivate a solid grasp of what industry competitors are doing. SpyFu and Ahrefs are two insightful tools that give you a snapshot of their advertising strategies and overall performance. Businesses that use these tools and resources benefit from learning from their competitors’ successes and failures and can alter their campaigns accordingly.

Continually tweaking and perfecting your ad strategy is a necessity. Given how dynamic the digital ad environment is, you’ll need to make periodic adjustments for the best possible ad performance. Remain alert to changes in the PPC industry and be ready to adapt quickly based on what’s taking place now.

It’s not uncommon to struggle with building your first PPC campaign. But it’s essential to get a handle on the best practices, as ill-crafted ads often translate to lackluster results and wasted budget. By following expert advice in areas like tracking, ad extensions, landing page optimization, bidding, ad copy creation and more, you can circumvent these challenges and claim substantial success.

Step-by-Step Procedure

1. Conduct thorough keyword research. Utilize tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords.
2. Analyze search volume and competition for each keyword.
3. Choose long-tail keywords for higher quality leads.
4. Create multiple ad variations for A/B testing.
5. Craft compelling ad copy with clear value propositions.
6. Incorporate emotional triggers and strong calls-to-action in your ad copy.
7. Decide on a bidding strategy: Manual for control, automated for efficiency.
8. Set your maximum bid limits based on budget and keyword value.
9. Develop a highly relevant landing page for each ad group.
10. Optimize landing pages for speed, clarity and conversion.
11. Add persuasive visuals and simplified navigation to your landing pages.
12. Set up conversion tracking in Google Ads.
13. Integrate with Google Analytics for in-depth monitoring.
14. Monitor key metrics like CTR, CPA and conversion rates.
15. Implement ad extensions like sitelinks, callouts and snippets.
16. Research competitors’ PPC strategies using SpyFu or Ahrefs.
17. Identify and leverage gaps in your competitors’ strategies.
18. Launch your PPC campaign and begin initial monitoring.
19. Review campaign performance after the first week.
20. Adjust bids and ad copy based on performance data.
21. Test new keywords and ad variations continuously.
22. Update your landing pages periodically based on user feedback.
23. Stay informed on PPC trends to adapt your strategies.
24. Continuously optimize your campaign to maintain and enhance results.

In order for your PPC campaign to bring you the results you want, continual attention and deep digital marketing knowledge are all-important. Equally important is infusing character and personality into each campaign – they should be treated as creative endeavors instead of formulaic exercises. And it also helps to reexamine and improve your ad approach to keep things engaging and fresh.

Getting your first PPC campaign up and running involves a myriad of strategic efforts ranging from continuous optimization to keyword research. With a good understanding of all of the facets of a lucrative advertising campaign, you’ll know just how to allocate every penny of your budget. Always be ready to learn and adapt, and be careful not to underestimate the power of a well-placed click.

The post PPC for Beginners: A Quick-Start Guide on Search Ads appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Google has been tight-lipped about its ranking factors since the beginning, but we can guess which factors make the top of the list. And, if I were to guess, content would be the No. 1 ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

That is because search engine results wouldn’t exist without content to rank. Of course, Google provides all sorts of other indicators that content is of the utmost importance.

But not just any content — quality content. Google wants to ensure that its users get the best results.

Knowing that content is a major ranking factor, it’s important to periodically review your content and ensure that it’s as good as possible so that you can compete in the search results. In this article, I’ll share nine strategies on how to upgrade your content.

1. Do a Content Audit

If you already have a lot of content on your website, begin with a content audit. This will give you a starting point and clear direction on which webpages to upgrade.

First start with a trusted SEO tool to get a big-picture view of all your web pages (you can use our SEOToolSet to do this but there are others).

Once you have a master list of URLs, you’ll divide the webpages into three buckets:

1. The first bucket includes webpages that get the most rankings and traffic, such as those ranked up to position 10 in the search results.
2. The second bucket is webpages that have the potential to get better rankings and traffic, for example, those starting at position 11.
3. The third bucket is webpages that perform poorly and aren’t in either of those categories.

Then, focus on strengthening the content in the first two categories.

Read more:

• The 13-Step Web Content Audit to Boost Visibility in the Search Results

2. Perform Keyword Research

Once you understand the webpages that you are going to optimize, look at the desired keywords for each page.

Find out what keywords have been assigned and compare that to what search queries bring in traffic.

Again, you can use our SEOToolSet to find out what keywords are bringing in traffic. You can also tap into Google Search Console to find out which search queries are generating impressions and clicks to your website in Google’s search results.

Examine the keywords — do they still resonate with the content of the webpage and your audience intent? Does the page need to be optimized with different keywords now?

Read more:

• What Are Keywords?

3. Do Some Competitor Research

With a keyword list for the webpages and content you are updating, it’s time to dive into some competitive research.

Without understanding who your competition is in the search results for each keyword (aka those ranking on page one) you will not have a clear picture of how to optimize your content.

You can analyze your competition in a couple of different ways: 1) The manual “old fashioned” way, where you plug in a keyword into the search results and start digging or 2) The automated way using tools to discover which webpages rank for your keyword.

The tools will give you much more data quicker on the top-ranked pages and their websites. For example, if you used our SEOToolSet, you could find out things like:

• The on-page ranking factors
• The off-page ranking factors
• How often they use your targeted keyword and where
• Readability metrics of the webpages
• Recommendations on how to optimize your webpages based on the competition
• The health of your competitor’s website

Check out these free versions of tools in our SEOToolSet to get you started:

• Multi-Page Informational tool
• Check Server Page tool

Competitor research helps you be the least imperfect compared to your competition. And, once you understand how the competition is optimizing, you can do as good or better.

Read more:

• How to Do Competitor Research for SEO

4. Implement E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Google invented this concept and it’s outlined in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

That document was first used internally to train search quality raters. These people evaluate the quality of the search results, so Google can use that data as a feedback loop for its algorithm.

Eventually, the internal document was leaked, and in 2015, Google made the full version available to the public. It has been revised several times since then, and anyone can view it.

The Search Quality Rater Guideline is a sort of manual for website publishers to understand how Google human quality raters view quality content. So it’s worth understanding it and how it can apply to your website.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it applies to the algorithm; it doesn’t. It can, however, be used as a loose guideline for building higher-quality webpages.

Building on the steps you’ve taken thus far, use the concepts in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines to examine your top webpages (and your website as a whole) to ensure they demonstrate E-E-A-T.

Read:

• Complete Guide to the Fundamentals of Google’s E-E-A-T
• E-E-A-T and SEO: You Can’t Have One Without the Other

5. Make Sure Your Content Is Evergreen

It’s not uncommon for old webpages to rank well and bring in a lot of traffic. But most webpages need updating over time. It does not create a good user experience when someone lands on an outdated webpage.

This is where “evergreening” comes in. Evergreening ensures that content stands the test of time.

Practically, that means reviewing and editing the content to ensure it contains the most up-to-date information. Maybe the advice is outdated, or the stats and research to support your points can be updated.

This is an important step in upgrading the webpages you are working on. And, in reality, it should be performed on a schedule throughout the year.

6. Do Some On-Page and Technical Optimization

In this step, you will take the intel you’ve gathered from your competitor research and start applying it to your webpages.

What on-page optimization factors are helping your competition? What technical factors are helping them?

Make sure you’re doing it, too. You can additionally one-up your competitors by using an SEO checklist to see what else might be missing when it comes to optimizing your content and web pages.

Read:

• The Always Up-to-Date SEO Checklist
• Technical vs. On-Page SEO: The Differences

7. Address Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can work against your SEO goals.

When you have two pages that are too similar, Google will choose the one it believes is relevant for a search and filter the other one out — and it may not be the page you want.

So, you want to make sure that the webpages you are upgrading are not duplicated on your website. “Duplication” could be as simple as having the same meta information.

But you might have duplicate content on your site for many other reasons. And here are some of the ways duplicate content is generated:

• Two site versions
• Separate mobile site
• Trailing slashes on URLs
• CMS problems
• Boilerplate content
• Parameterized pages
• Product descriptions
• Content syndication

It goes without saying to avoid other types of duplicate content, too — like the spammy kind. This is when the content on your webpage is too similar to the content on another person’s website.

Read:

• Is Duplicate Content Bad for Search Engine Rankings?
• Understanding Duplicate Content and How to Avoid It
• How to Get Rid of Duplicate Content in WordPress

8. Try SEO Siloing

Where your content is placed on your website can impact your webpage’s rankings. SEO siloing is an SEO technique that structures your website’s content by grouping related webpages together.

How you organize a webpage on your website (whether it’s how you link to it or what directory you put it in) can impact:

1. How search engines crawl and understand that webpage
2. The relevancy of that webpage for a search

You might still wonder how organizing a webpage can improve rankings. Here’s one explanation: One way that search engines determine the most relevant webpages for a search is by sifting through and analyzing the webpages in their index and finding the best fit.

Taking it a step further, search engines like Google may analyze the overall website structure of the web pages it is considering. This helps the search engine determine if a website has enough supporting content for the search term used.

Here, the search engine assesses whether the website is an authority on the topic and, therefore, the best fit for the query.

So, when you are upgrading your content, the big picture of how that content fits into an organized website cannot be overlooked.

Read:

• SEO Siloing: What, Why, How
• 5 Times When SEO Siloing Can Make or Break Your Search Engine Rankings

9. Look at a Whole-SERP SEO Strategy

And last but not least, another “big picture” strategy when upgrading your content is not so much about fixing old pages as it is about creating more targeted new content. This is the “whole-SERP” strategy.

A whole-SERP SEO strategy analyzes the features that appear most in your target keywords’ search results and then creates new content based on your findings. Features can be anything from videos to images to featured snippets and much, much more.

The goal is to create and optimize the content that Google believes is most relevant for a search. For some searches, that might be videos in addition to blue links.

So, in that example, you’d want to ensure you’re also creating videos for those searches. This gives you another opportunity to take advantage of all the search engines’ real estate.

Read:

• What Is a Whole-SERP SEO Strategy?
• Quick Reference Guide to Common Google SERP Features

Content is a major SEO ranking factor. It’s important to get it right. Follow the steps outlined in this article and your content will be optimized to compete better in the search results.

Our SEO experts can help you upgrade your content for better performance and results — higher search ranking, more online visibility and organic traffic, and increased revenue. Schedule a free SEO consultation with us today.

FAQ: How do I ensure my content demonstrates E-E-A-T for better SEO results?

Demonstrating Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is one of the best ways to improve your SEO results. Because Google prioritizes high-quality content that is helpful and valuable to users, it is important to understand how implementing E-E-A-T can affect your rankings.

Let’s look at each factor that make up E-E-A-T and how you can incorporate them into your content:

Experience: Experience builds trust with your audience because it demonstrates that your brand is well equipped to solve their needs. Include first-hand experiences, case studies and detailed reviews in your content to authenticate its depth. Use personal anecdotes and in-depth experiences into articles to make your content relatable and build trust with your readers.

Expertise: Expertise helps establish your brand as a trusted expert in your field and demonstrates to your audience that you possess the right knowledge to answer their questions. Establishing expertise involves producing well-researched content backed by credible sources, statistics, and in-depth analysis. Your content should be comprehensive, meticulously detailed, and vetted for accuracy. Establishing yourself as a subject matter expert means you can offer insights and solutions that users can’t find anywhere else. When possible, display credentials and link to other authoritative sources to further improve perceived expertise.

Authoritativeness: You can establish authoritativeness by consistently publishing high-quality content that is recognized — and cited — by others in your industry. To accomplish this, you’ll need to acquire backlinks from reputable sources, get featured in popular industry publications, and engage with thought leaders. You’ll have to stay current on the latest industry trends so that you can always provide valuable insights. Nurturing professional relationships also contributes to building authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness: If your audience doesn’t trust you, you can forget about successfully competing online. Build trust by maintaining transparency, always adhering to ethical standards, ensuring your site is secure, well-structured and easy to navigate, and maintain data privacy for users. Be sure to disclose any kind of affiliations and always present information transparently. Encouraging your users to provide user-generated content such as reviews or testimonials can also improve trust.

When developing your content, you must include keywords and their variants naturally throughout. This keeps your content relevant and is an important factor in boosting your search engine visibility. If you’re writing an article, naturally incorporate keywords into text while providing valuable information to improve your SEO results without compromising readability.

It’s a good idea to frequently audit your content to make sure it always demonstrates E-E-A-T. This helps to maintain and improve your search engine ranking. Identify content areas that need improvement and adjust your strategy as necessary.

Step-by-Step Procedure

1. Research and identify key topics that are relevant to your audience and that will demonstrate your expertise.
2. Compile authoritative sources like academic papers, industry reports and other credible sources/websites.
3. Create detailed content outlines that cover topics comprehensively.
4. Include personal experience, case studies and real-world examples into your content.
5. Write your content clearly and concisely, make it engaging and always address the needs of your audience.
6. Review your content to ensure it is completely accurate and backed by verifiable data.
7. Highlight any credentials, qualifications, or other relevant expertise to establish credibility.
8. Include high-quality internal and external links to reputable sources and related content.
9. Use headers, bullet points and conversational language to optimize your content for readability and SEO.
10. Regularly audit your content and refresh as needed to keep it accurate and relevant.
11. Engage with the community by responding to comments and participating in discussions.
12. Build authoritativeness by publishing your content on trusted platforms within your industry.
13. Promote your content on social media and other relevant networks.
14. Acquire backlinks from trusted websites and other authoritative sources.
15. Demonstrate qualifications and expertise by including author bios in your content.
16. Maintain a consistent publishing schedule to build audience loyalty and trust.
17. Optimize your website to be user-friendly and secure. Always follow best practices for data privacy.
18. Use structured data markup to help search engines better understand your content.
19. Frequently monitor content performance. Analyze data to understand user behavior and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
20. Experiment with various multimedia content like videos and podcasts to add even more value to your content.
21. Encourage users to generate content like reviews to further boost credibility.
22. Proofread and fact-check your content meticulously to maintain editorial standards.
23. Expand your reach by collaborating with other industry experts and influencers.

Demonstrating E-E-A-T in your content is more than an SEO technique; it’s an ongoing commitment to providing value, building trust, and positioning yourself as a credible authority. Follow these steps to upgrade your content that naturally attracts a wider audience and achieves better SEO results.

The post 9 Practical Steps To Upgrade Your Web Content appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Today, it’s not enough to have a nice-looking website. You need to build SEO into your web design to make sure it can compete in search engines from the get-go. Unfortunately, ignoring this step can cause bigger problems down the road, and more time and money fixing them.

In this article, I’ll cover 10 SEO-friendly web design rules to live by, including:

• Creating a process for SEO-friendly web design
• 1. Deciding on the Content Focus
  • Informational
  • Transactional
  • Both informational and transactional
• 2. Choosing keywords
• 3. Using header tags
• 4. Making page code clean
• 5. Organizing the assets
• 6. Naming files
• 7. Having a dynamic site
• 8. Creating a strong, SEO-friendly site navigation
• 9. Implementing a site search
• 10. Including media and optimizing it
• Bonus tip: Site redesigns
• Final thoughts
• FAQ: How can I incorporate SEO-friendly web design principles to ensure my website ranks higher in search engines?

Creating a Process for SEO-Friendly Web Design

For those who have ever been involved in a website design or redesign, I see you. I know how challenging it can be to get to the other side.

Every color, image, word, link and video are scrutinized like never before.

And because many of the people involved don’t have SEO expertise, it’s our job as SEO advocates to make sure some of the most important SEO-friendly web design rules are incorporated.

That is why creating a website design process that has SEO baked into it is key. The first step? Make sure SEO has a seat at the table in the very first design meeting.

The next step: Create documentation that summarizes what everyone needs to consider and how to do it so that anyone working on the site can see the big picture of how SEO fits in before they start working on their portion of the project.

This allows for plenty of discussion on the best way to do things before the process begins.

Read more: 5 Steps to SEO Project Management Bliss

1. Deciding on the Content Focus

First, you need to understand the site’s primary focus. This will influence how you organize your site and your keyword research.

The three major types are:

• Informational
• Transactional
• A mix of both

Informational

Any site with a primary goal of providing information is informational. This applies to everything from recipe sites and B2B websites to sites about hobbies or educational topics and everything in between.

Transactional

A site with a primary goal of enabling purchases is an e-commerce site, and those are transactional.

Both Informational and Transactional

Many sites mix informational and transactional content. For example, influencers who blog may have content reviewing products that they then link to. A clothing site may also have information on fashion and how to pick clothes.

2. Choosing Keywords

Keyword research is part of SEO-friendly design because it influences things like site navigation and how you organize your website’s content (more on that later).

Keywords help you focus on the topic on each webpage that will be featured on your site. If you’re starting from scratch, this is straightforward.

If you are redesigning an existing site, you can run a ranking monitor tool to help you discover what keywords are already running. This will tell you if a page already ranks for a particular keyword.

If so, you’d designate that page as the main page for that keyword.

You can remove other unrelated keywords from that page, ensuring the primary keyword is front and center. You can keep a few related keywords on the page as supporting phrases for the topic.

Once you have your keywords, make sure the main keywords (and supporting when relevant) show up in the:

• Title tag
• Meta descriptions
• Headings on the page
• Throughout the body of the page, the content

Read more: What Are Meta Tags?

3. Using Header Tags

Heading tags organize the content on a webpage. They help both search engines and website visitors get a better understanding of what the page is about.

That is because they act as a table of contents, guiding readers and crawlers through the sections and subsections of the content.

This helps search engines to quickly understand and index the content. In addition, using heading tags strategically can increase the likelihood of your content being featured in the search results (position zero).

When setting up heading tags, it’s important to maintain a clear hierarchy. Start with an H1 tag for your main topic and use H2, H3 and so on for sections and subsections.

Each tag should provide a clear and concise headline for the content it precedes, and it’s essential to include relevant keywords to enhance your SEO.

It’s important to know that SEO best practices around heading tags are based on years of experience and research; sometimes, these best practices contrast with what Google says.

For example, Google says this of heading tags:

If for nothing else than the user experience, using heading tags in the proper order is key.

However, we also know that every little bit counts in the competitive search results. If we can make our site the least imperfect compared to the competition, we do.

Read more: What Are Heading Tags?

4. Making Page Code Clean

The code serves as the building blocks for your website. It is what the search engines “read” to understand the site’s content.

The goal is to keep the code “clean” so that search engines can easily crawl, understand and index the content.

What does clean code look like? Using as little on-page markup as possible allows search engines to get to the page’s most important content immediately. It avoids things like “code bloat.”

Some ways you can achieve clean code include:

• Using an external CSS file to define the look of your website versus inline formatting has advantages, including the ability to have one source that controls the entire look of the website. You can also remove inline formatting in exchange for a CSS tag that dictates style elements, which reduces the code on the page. Less code means pages are smaller, and smaller pages load faster. Speed is an important user experience and ranking factor.
• Moving JavaScript code to an external JS file. Having a JS file means you have a single line of code on the page that calls the JS file versus having a ton of code on the page. Much like an external CSS file, a JS file reduces the size of a page.
• Removing extraneous tags on the page that may have been collected over the years, such as when copying and pasting content from another older webpage or when a page has a lot of history.

When you’re ready to clean up your code, you can use things like Notepad, HTML Tidy or Dirty Markup to streamline the process.

If you’re aiming for squeaky-clean code, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops web standards and guidelines that you can try to follow. But you’ll need to prioritize your efforts based on the resources it will take and its impact on SEO.

Remember that search engines do not require W3C compliance, but it’s not a bad idea because their standards often align with SEO.

5. Organizing the Assets

All of the steps leading up to this one are necessary before you can start organizing the assets on your site.

What does it mean to organize your website assets? This is about finding the assets you want to feature on your new site and discarding the ones you don’t.

Consider any marketing or sales materials you have on hand as an asset that may go on your new site.

Here are some things you will consider as you organize your assets:

• Images
• Videos
• Podcasts
• News coverage
• Blog articles
• Maps

Once you’ve taken stock, it’s time to organize. File all your assets into categories in a place that’s easily accessible to the web development team.

6. Naming Files

As you upload the files to the new site, make sure you follow best practices for naming them. Remember that search engines look at the file name to indicate what’s in the file.

Here, you want to make file names descriptive and simple, separating words with hyphens. What is the most concise way to describe the file, and can you include an important keyword?

If you’re uploading an image of a house, you might name it as single-family-ranch-home.jpg.

During this step, you’ll also want to consider how you will name assets like your page URLs.

Google talks about using descriptive URLs in its SEO Starter Guide:

How you name your files is a key part of SEO siloing, which I’ll cover in another section of this article.

7. Having a Dynamic Site

A dynamic site uses a good, SEO-friendly content management system and template.

Most sites built today will use a CMS. According to W3 Techs, only 31% of sites don’t use one. The bottom line is that you want the engine under the hood to be primed for SEO success.

You need to be able to make important SEO changes to the site with ease. And if you can’t do that with your current CMS, don’t even start designing a website without a new one.

Some of the things you want to look for include the ability to carry out on-page SEO and technical SEO. This includes things like:

• Customizing HTML templates
• Producing unique meta tags
• The ability to control heading tags
• Responsive themes for mobile
• Blogging capabilities
• The ability to customize URLs
• Managing internal links

… and more.

Of course, WordPress is the most popular content management system. You can choose from endless themes and thousands of plugins, many of them which make WordPress more SEO-friendly.

8. Creating a Strong, SEO-Friendly Site Navigation

One of the most important elements of your site is the navigation. How people and search engines move through your site is critical for both user experience and rankings.

If search engines can’t properly move through your site, they can’t properly index your content.

Most sites will have:

• Top navigation is the navigation elements at the top of the website, reserved for the most important pages.
• Footer navigation, which are the links at the bottom of the website, and contain key reference links (“about us,” etc.).

These are important decisions, and one of the most important is how you will categorize and organize the webpages (content) on the site, which will be the destination for the navigational links.

We refer to this as SEO siloing. SEO siloing is a technique used in search engine optimization that organizes a website’s content into hierarchically structured categories.

These categories group related webpages in a way that mirrors common search behaviors, moving from more generic topics to more specific topics.

By concentrating content around how people search during the entire customer journey, a website can:

• Create a great user experience by providing throughout and complete answers.
• Demonstrate its subject matter expertise, effectively fulfilling the “expertise” aspect of Google’s E-E-A-T criteria.

Read more:

• A Jam-Packed Guide on Internal Linking for SEO
• SEO Siloing: What, Why, How
• How SEO Supports the Customer Journey

9. Implementing a Site Search

Let people easily search for information on your website by including a site search feature.

These little search boxes, usually featured in the upper right corner of a site, allow people to type in a query and find specific information on your site.

There are other benefits, too. You can collect data from your site search on what people are looking for and use that information to fuel your website content strategy. Is there missing information you could be providing?

Make sure that your site search feature works well, though. If not, it could be the last thing people do on your site before they leave, frustrated.

10. Including Media and Optimizing It

An engaging site has media, specifically images and video. Either one of these presents another opportunity to be found in search.

Images should not just be uploaded to the site, they should be optimized. Optimized images on a webpage can rank in Google Search and Google Images.

Videos create another way for your audience to consume content. You have a couple of options for videos on your site:

• You can host videos on your own site.
• You can create and upload to YouTube, and embed them on your site.

Usually, the decision is case-specific and considers the context of the video content. In general, though, creating and hosting videos on YouTube gives your brand the benefit of:

1. Being found in the Google Search results for a query since Google favors YouTube videos in the results over other types of videos like those hosted on a website, and
2. Another opportunity to be found by people searching in the YouTube platform itself.

Read more:

• How to Improve Google Image Search Ranking
• A CMO’s Guide to YouTube SEO

Bonus Tip: Site Redesigns

As one final tip for this article, if you are redesigning a website, make sure you understand the ins and outs of a site migration for the best SEO outcome.

For more, read the SEO Website Migration Guide and watch the on-demand webinar Website Migration Dos and Don’ts to Avoid Disaster.

Final Thoughts

Embracing these 10 SEO-friendly web design tips sets a foundation for your website that prioritizes user experience and search engine visibility. Remember, SEO is not just an add-on but an integral part of the web design process that should be considered right from the planning stage.

Struggling to implement SEO-friendly techniques on your website? Our SEO experts can give you actionable advice to get you better search ranking, more qualified traffic and increased revenue. Schedule a free consultation with us today.

FAQ: How can I incorporate SEO-friendly web design principles to ensure my website ranks higher in search engines?

To get your website to rank high in search engines, you need to incorporate SEO-friendly web design practices.

Let’s go over some key foundational and advanced techniques to consider.

Mobile Optimization: Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites in its algorithm, so make sure your website design adapts to fit the screen of various mobile devices.

Site Speed: Websites that load quickly usually rank higher because they provide a better user experience. When optimizing your site, use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to locate and fix any speed issues.

Other techniques to improve site loading speed include optimizing your server settings, leveraging browser caching and implementing a content delivery network (CDN).

Clean, Structured Code: Code that is clean and well-structured helps search engine bots crawl your site quickly and efficiently. It also minimizes the chances of running into technical SEO problems. Use semantic HTML tags such as header tags (H1, H2, H3), to organize your content for better readability and SEO.

Image Optimization: When using images, you have to balance file size with image quality. Use correct image formats (.png, .jpg), and compress them to improve loading speed. Be sure to add alt tags to describe what the image is about — this significantly helps search engine crawlers.

Keywords: Strategically place keywords throughout your site. Don’t forget to include them in places like meta tags, title tags, headers and naturally throughout your content. Avoid overstuffing because it can lead to penalties. A well-written meta description can improve click-through rates and potentially increase ranking.

Internal linking distributes page authority across your site, so create a logical link structure that guides users and search engines through your content smoothly.

User Experience (UX): User experience should be a large focus as you design your site. Make your navigation clean and organized so users can get to your pages quickly. Design your site to be visually appealing to reduce bounce rates and increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

Content: Quality content remains an essential driver of how well your website ranks. Regularly audit your content and refresh as needed. Search engines reward sites with content that is current, informative and engaging. A content management system (CMS) that supports SEO tools can improve the optimization process.

Use SEO tools like Google Analytics 4, Search Console, or SEOToolSet® to track your SEO efforts. The data and insights from these tools will help you adjust your strategy as necessary.

Step-by-Step Procedure:

1. Ensure your website template or design framework adjusts to display properly across all devices, desktop and mobile.
2. Compress image files, minimize heavy scripts, and consider using lazy loading for images.
3. Use semantic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code to keep it clean and easy for search engine crawlers to read.
4. Structure your content accordingly — apply H1 tags for titles, H2 for major sections and so on for better readability.
5. Compress images using tools like TinyPNG, use descriptive alt tags that incorporate relevant keywords and include image dimensions.
6. Strategically place primary/secondary keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, headers and throughout body content.
7. Write compelling meta descriptions of 150-160 characters. Meta descriptions must summarize the content succinctly and should include primary keywords.
8. Create a logical internal link hierarchy that improves user navigation and distributes page authority.
9. Design a website interface that is intuitive, clean and visually appealing. A beautifully designed site improves user engagement, usability and retention.
10. Look for ways to acquire high-quality backlinks through guest blogging, partnerships and influencer marketing.
11. Regularly audit your content and refresh as needed so that is relevant and valuable. Consider choosing a content management system with built-in SEO tools or plugins to streamline the optimization process.
12. Use schema markup to give search engines better clarity about what your site’s content is about.
13. Optimize URLs by making them short and descriptive. Include primary keywords when possible.
14. Set up XML sitemaps and submit them to search engines to improve crawling efficiency.
15. Secure your site by using an SSL certificate to ensure your website is secure. (Also known as HTTPS)
16. If you’re a local business, optimize your site for local SEO. Incorporate local keywords and create a Google My Business profile for better local search visibility.
17. Amplify your content on social media platforms to boost visibility and qualified traffic to your website.
18. Keep track of your site’s performance using tools like Google Analytics 4 or SEOToolSet. Adjust your strategy accordingly.
19. Audit your site regularly to find and fix broken links.
20. Utilize browser caching to improve site speed. This technique stores static files locally on user devices.
21. Implement a content delivery network to distribute your content globally, reduce server load and improve load times.
22. If you’re using a CMS, be sure to use latest version of the platform and your plugins.
23. Use SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SEOToolset to identify and fix technical SEO issues.

Follow these strategies as you design your website to increase search ranking, visibility, performance and traffic.

The post 10 SEO-Friendly Web Design Rules To Live By appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Keyword research is a big job, and you need the right tools to do it successfully. There are plenty of keyword suggestions and research tools on the market — here are seven of them (in alphabetical order) you should be using to better meet your audience’s needs and rank better in search.

1. Answer The Public
2. Bing Webmaster Tools Keyword Research
3. Google Ads Keyword Planner 
4. Google Trends
5. Keyword Generator (Ahrefs)
6. Keyword Suggestions (SEOToolSet)
7. QuestionDB

FAQ: How can I leverage keyword research tools to enhance my content strategy and SEO efforts?

1. Answer The Public

Answer The Public serves questions and phrases related to your keyword by using autocomplete data from search engines.

Add the data to your keyword research list, then write content to address each relevant question or phrase. You can write a separate webpage for each question or phrase, or include a bunch of them within one article (you might even rank for a featured snippet if you do it the right way).

You can do a couple of searches for free each day, or upgrade to a paid subscription.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools Keyword Research

If you’re trying to compete in Bing, then you’ll want to use its Webmaster Tools keyword research tool to discover the keywords and phrases people are using on the Bing search engine.

Take your seed list of keywords and input them into the tool. The keyword tool will suggest matching or relevant keywords related to them, including search volume and trends. Keywords suggestions fall into the following three categories: related, questions, or newly discovered.

Plus, the tool also provides the top-ranked URLs for the root keywords and can also give data on the keywords that are already driving traffic to your website. There are all sorts of filters you can apply to the data to refine it as well.

Bing Webmaster Tools keyword research feature is free for those who have an account.

3. Google Ads Keyword Planner

The Google Ads Keyword Planner is not just for advertisers; it’s also a handy SEO keyword research tool for websites competing in Google.

Input your seed list and the keyword suggest tool will help you find the most relevant keywords. Or, you can enter your website and Google will look for keywords related to the content.

The Keyword Planner gives data on search volume and will provide bid estimates for advertisers (which can also help gauge how competitive a keyword in organic search will be). You can narrow down your search by using various filters as well.

Keyword Planner is free for anyone who has a Google Ads account.

4. Google Trends

Google Trends offers — you guessed it — trends on search queries. You can enter a given keyword and get various data points on it, including:

• Interest over time
• Interest by region
• Related topics
• Related queries

You can also apply filters like what type of search — web search, image search, news search, etc.

You can also check out the Trending Now page to see what’s currently trending around the world. This can be useful for writing on timely topics.

Google Trends is a free keyword research tool.

5. Keyword Generator (Ahrefs)

Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator is a keyword suggestion tool that lets you enter up to 10 words or phrases and generates keywords for the search engine of your choice (there are nine of them), including Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon and more. Filter by country.

The data is offered up into six categories of keyword types, including: Phrase match, having the same terms as your seed list, keywords the top-competing pages also rank for, search suggestions via autocomplete, newly discovered keywords and question formats.

Get data like keyword difficulty scores and search volume for each keyword listed. You can use filters to find those keywords with good search volume and low competition (the sweet spot!).

Also, find out any SERP features associated with that keyword (a must when you are doing a whole-SERP SEO strategy). And, you can use this tool to find out SEO metrics on the top-ranked webpages for a term, too.

You can use the free version with limited functionality, or try a paid trial for a small fee. After that, if you upgrade to a subscription, the Lite version is $99 per month, and the Standard version is $199 per month at the time of writing.

6. Keyword Suggestions (SEOToolSet)

Of course, we have to mention our solution to keyword research, too, and that’s our Keyword Suggestions tool, which is part of our SEOToolSet®.

With the Keyword Suggestions tool, you can find terms that are semantically related to the keywords in your seed list. The tool can provide search activity for each keyword, three metrics to indicate competitiveness, categories, and a trending chart.

The SEOToolSet allows you to research keywords further by presenting more data, including keyword relative “activity” as a search query.

You can use the Keyword Suggestions tool for:

• SEO research
• Content planning
• Discovering word associations for video descriptions
• Finding keywords you might want to exclude from your PPC campaign, and more.

The SEOToolSet offers a free trial and then is $24.95 per month after that. The free version of the Keyword Suggestion tool will serve up five related words and phrases to your keyword (entered one at a time) pulled from search engine data.

7. QuestionDB

QuestionDB allows you to enter a broad keyword and find relevant questions related to it, pulled from its database of more than 32 million questions that “have been asked on various websites over time.”

The generated list will give you the relevant questions for keywords, plus volume and difficulty data from DataForSeo, an SEO data API provider. (“Keyword difficulty represents the median backlink profile strength of the top 10 webpages ranking for a specific keyword,” according to DataForSEO.) From here, you can view related topics and download the list of questions.

QuestionDB is free with limited functionality, offering 50 results per search. You can upgrade for deeper dives into the data and unlimited searches for $15 per month at the time of writing.

Keyword research is not a small feat, and the right tools can help you get the keywords most relevant to your audience and your business. For more on keyword research, check out:

• What Are Keywords?

Don’t have the time or resources to conduct thorough keyword research? Let our SEO experts do the work for you. Schedule a free 1:1 consultation to discuss how we can help.

FAQ: How can I leverage keyword research tools to enhance my content strategy and SEO efforts?

Navigating the complexities of content strategy and search engine optimization demands strategic precision. Keyword research tools are beacons of insight, guiding your content toward relevance and your SEO efforts toward success.

Engaging in a comprehensive content strategy necessitates more than just high-quality writing; it involves strategic keyword integration. Keyword research tools serve as the compass in this journey. By delving into these tools, you uncover trending keywords and gain insights into what your target audience seeks. This valuable understanding empowers you to curate content that resonates deeply with your readers.

Seamless integration of meticulously researched keywords directly influences your search engine rankings. Search engines thrive on relevancy, and these tools offer you the means to align your content with user intent. As you strategically pepper your articles with these keywords, you provide search engines with clear signals, ultimately enhancing your chances of climbing the results ladder.

One key advantage of leveraging keyword research tools lies in uncovering untapped niches. These tools illuminate the uncharted terrain of long-tail keywords, where competition might be less fierce and relevance is more attainable. Incorporating these hidden gems into your content enriches your strategy and helps you reach a more targeted audience.

Beyond keyword discovery, these tools facilitate monitoring and adaptation. Continuously tracking keyword performance offers insights into user behavior shifts. As search trends evolve, these tools empower you to adjust your strategy in real time, ensuring your content remains aligned with your audience’s evolving needs.

Keyword research tools transcend mere words; they are the compass, guide and beacon illuminating your path to successful content strategy and SEO. By harnessing their power, you position your content to resonate with audiences and increase search engine ranks.

Step-by-Step Procedure: How To Leverage Keyword Research Tools for Enhanced Content Strategy and SEO

1. Understand the significance of keyword research in content strategy and SEO.
2. Familiarize yourself with different keyword research tools available in the market.
3. Research your target audience’s preferences, interests and pain points.
4. Explore trending keywords related to your niche using keyword research tools.
5. Identify long-tail keywords that align with your content’s focus.
6. Analyze the search volume and competition level of selected keywords.
7. Prioritize keywords with a balance of search volume and competition.
8. Incorporate relevant keywords organically into your content.
9. Ensure that keywords match user intent and enhance the overall reader experience.
10. Monitor the performance of integrated keywords using tracking tools.
11. Adapt your content strategy based on emerging keyword trends.
12. Utilize keyword research tools to identify content gaps and potential niches.
13. Create content that addresses specific long-tail keywords and user queries.
14. Incorporate keywords in key areas such as headings, subheadings and meta descriptions.
15. Regularly update your content to reflect evolving keyword trends.
16. Engage in competitor analysis to identify keywords driving their success.
17. Leverage keyword research tools to refine and optimize paid advertising campaigns.
18. Collaborate with your SEO team to align keyword research with technical optimization.
19. Continuously educate yourself on emerging SEO and content trends.
20. Keep a pulse on your audience’s preferences to consistently refine your keyword strategy.

The post 7 Keyword Suggestion and Research Tools to Figure Out the Right Keywords for Your SEO Strategy appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

During a recent live SEO Q&A at SEOtraining.com, someone asked me: Does SEO mean the death of creative page titles? This is a great question – it seems like there are so many “rules” when it comes to writing page titles that it can stifle creativity.

Good news: There is a way to write attention-grabbing page titles that also support your SEO goals.

In this article:

• Keywords, page titles, and SEO
• SEO targets for title tags
• What about when Google rewrites title tags?
• How to write creative page titles that support SEO
• FAQ: Does SEO mean the death of creative page titles?

Keywords, Page Titles, and SEO

When creating a webpage, you want the keywords for the page to show up in strategic places. Those places include but are not limited to the title tag.

​​The most basic signal that information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search query. If those keywords appear on the page or in the headings or body of the text, the information is more likely to be relevant. – Google, How Search Works

The page title, or title tag, is one component of the meta tags that show up in the “head” section of a webpage on the HTML code side. The title tag serves as a headline for the web page in the search results – it’s what shows up as part of the snippet when you rank in Google.

Here is a screenshot of the head section on a webpage on BruceClay.com:

And here is a screenshot of the search results for that page in Google where you can see the page title is showing as “BruceClay – Search Marketing Agency: SEO Services …”

​​Research from Backlinko shows that most pages ranking high on Google contain page titles with keywords that are an exact or partial match of that search. In other words, Google uses the title tag to determine the relevance of a page to a Google search.

Our own research confirms this. We took a page ranking well and took the primary keyword out of the title. It lost its rankings. We added the keyword back into the page title, and the rankings came back. (I should also mention that we did the same with the keyword in the body text and had the same results.)

That said, the page title is an important part of SEO. Not only does Google use it to determine relevance, but searchers read it in the search results and decide if they want to click through.

SEO Targets for Title Tags

So, yes, we have SEO targets when it comes to title tags. This is where some people get creative paralysis because there are a few things to remember.

For instance, some of the things we consider in SEO for the title tag include:

• Make sure the keyword you want to be found for shows up in the title tag, preferably towards the beginning.
• Use 6–12 words in general, and for custom advice based on the top-ranked pages, use our SEO WordPress plugin.
• Make the title tag sound natural and not forced.
• If your brand is established and trusted, consider putting the brand name in front of your keywords.
• Write in headline format and appeal to the reader, making sure to address their reason for searching.
• Make it unique for every page on the website to avoid duplicate content issues.

So in addition to writing an attention-grabbing title tag, you have all these little details to consider. SEO is a little bit of science and a little bit of art and nobody claims it is easy.

What About When Google Rewrites Title Tags?

Nothing kills your creative spirit more than pouring your soul into attention-grabbing page titles, only to have Google change it in the search results.

It’s true, Google does do this. In fact, research coming from Zyppy (2022) shows that Google does this 61% of the time. And the reason Google does it, according to Zyppy, is because webpages have:

• Overly long titles and short titles
• Very short titles
• Used the same keyword more than once
• Used separators, such as dashes “-” or pipes “|”
• Had titles with [brackets] or (parentheses)
• Had identical “boilerplate” used across many titles
• Had missing or superfluous brand names

I believe too many websites do not pay attention to title tags and that is why Google rewrites them. Here, my advice is to follow best practices for title tags and there is a better chance that Google will retain your title.

However, it’s important to note that Google still uses the information in the title tag that you create to understand if your page is relevant. The rewrite is simply a rendering issue in the search results. Google’s John Mueller confirmed that, too.

There is some evidence that matching the page title with the headline can limit the amount of title rewrites by Google. Research from Zyppy found that “using H1 tags strategically could limit the amount of title rewriting Google might perform on your site.”

And that “matching your H1 to your title typically dropped the degree of rewriting across the board, often dramatically.”

For more, read:

• What Are Heading Tags and Why Are They Important to SEO?

How To Write Creative Page Titles That Support SEO

Guess what? Creativity and SEO can exist in harmony.

So what to do?

• Start with a killer headline formula. Do a search for “headline formulas” and you’ll find ample results to get you going in the right direction. Semrush analyzed more than a million articles and found that list-focused headlines followed by how-to headlines got the most page views. Other types of headlines that garnered interest included questions and guides.
• Tweak it to include your primary keyword. In most cases, it shouldn’t be hard to include your primary keyword in the headline you are trying to create. It might be harder to get it towards the beginning of the title tag – sometimes you’ll accomplish it, sometimes you won’t.
• Refine it using SEO best practices. Take into consideration the SEO criteria for title tags, including the length of the title. As I mentioned earlier, you can get a range for how long your title tag should be based on the top-ranked websites by using our SEO plugin.

A note: It is common for there to be a separation of the creative writer who wrote the page and the SEO professional who has the final say on optimizing the page, including the page title.

And while SEOs are usually savvy marketers, not all of them may be as creative as a writer. So sometimes this title and heading tags end up, well, kind of SEO-y.

That is something to think about if you are looking to improve the creativity of your page titles. Can the creative team and the SEO team work together?

Our SEO experts can provide you with content development services that ensure your content — and your page titles — get you ranked in top search engine positions. Reach out to us for a free consultation.

FAQ: Does SEO mean the death of creative page titles?

Some have voiced concern regarding SEO’s effect on creative page titles – could we witness an end of creative, catchy titles being replaced with more keyword-driven options?

Page titles play an integral role in engaging users and conveying their essence. Users’ first experience when browsing search engine results is often the page title, meaning it has an irrevocable impression on visitors. Does SEO mean creative page titles no longer matter? No – just because including relevant keywords into page titles for SEO purposes is key doesn’t mean creativity must go by the wayside!

An effective SEO strategy must strike a balance between optimizing titles for search engine results and engaging users through compelling content. To find the optimal keywords, conduct in-depth research about your audience to understand their needs and the needs of their titles.

Use long-tail keywords as page titles to increase SEO without compromising creativity by targeting specific niche audiences with these phrases. Instead of choosing generic terms like “Best Cameras,” more engaging titles could include something such as: “Capture Memories With Our Top-Rated DSLR Cameras!”

Experiment with various title structures. Consider employing more engaging headlines than simple questions or bold statements to draw in users and encourage them to click. Include emotive or descriptive words into page titles so they are memorable and appealing.

Optimizing other website elements, such as headers and meta descriptions, can ease some of the pressure to place all keywords in the title. Achieve effective SEO without over-stuffing titles by strategically placing keywords throughout the content.

While SEO requires including relevant keywords in page titles, creative and engaging page titles can still exist within SEO’s parameters. Achieve this balance through keyword research, using long-tail keywords, and playing around with title structures — essential tasks for digital content publishers who aim to capture users’ attention in today’s online environment.

The post How To Write Attention-Grabbing Page Titles That Support SEO appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..