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It’s never been easier to generate long lists of potential keywords for your site. These are the terms people might use to find your website in a search engine. But how do you know if the keywords you’ve selected are relevant for your site? Keyword relevance is an important factor to consider when optimizing your landing pages for SEO. And it’s easy to overlook relevance of a particular keyword during your selection process.
Using Keyword Relevance Strategically
For more context on how search engines view relevance see the Google ads documentation on the subject.
As you may recall, strategically placing relevant keywords in your page content will help search engines rank you appropriately. But if you abuse your keywords, or try to stuff too many into one page, the search engines are sure to drop you in the rankings.
Drop in keywords organically. Make sure you, at least, place the target keyword in an H2 heading. But other than that, your keyword usage should be organic, flowing naturally from the writing.
Do not compete with yourself. Place your main keywords on individual pages. If you use your keyword on multiple pages, you are having your own pages attempting to rank for the same term. Wherever possible, optimize individual pages for a certain keyword and hyperlink your pages together. The same rule applies for blog posts. Each post should represent a different phrase and link up to your main landing pages.
Is Organic SEO Important To Your Site?
In some sense, all sites should at least consider organic search. But believe it or not, this depends on your audience, your business, and how people use your site. There are many different ways for someone to land on your site:
- Organic search: finding your site by search engine search term
- Direct traffic: typing in your domain manually
- Email: link to your website from an email marketing campaign
- Social: linking to your website via social media posts, YouTube videos, or some other third-party platform
For most businesses, but not all, some mix of all of these is recommended. But advancing your content on all of these platforms will take significant investment. So it’s best to prioritize.
Be Careful to Avoid Broad Terms
Apple famously developed their own programming language called “Swift.” But imagine typing “swift” into a search engine. You may get a lot of results, but probably not all of the results will be immediately associated with the Swift language. You might get a transportation company, or even information about Taylor Swift. However, as search engines get more intelligent, they are able to guess what you’re looking for with greater accuracy. Nevertheless, broad keyword targeting can hurt you if your business name is competing with a similarly named services.
False keyword relevance can easily hinder your SEO efforts if you do not carefully think through a typical search journey for keyword.
Try out your search terms beforehand to see what your competition might be. And then see how your initial search term can be sharpened with more specificity.
Keyword Relevance Checklist
As you’re selecting keywords for your landing pages, use this checklist to make sure your keywords are relevant.
- Is the keyword relevant to the page itself? For example, if you sell mountain bikes, don’t use a keyword relevant to motorcycles.
- Does the keyword compete with another page? Don’t use the same keyword for another landing page.
- Is the keyword specific enough? Trying to rank for the word “bike shop” may be too specific.
If your selected keyword meets the above criteria, you will be in good shape.
Some More Resources on SEO
Check out these other resources from the Support Center:
