One of the first steps in creating SEO content is usually to analyse the keywords that are most relevant to your target group. Put simply, such keywords – also called search terms, keywords or key words – concern terms entered into the search mask of a search engine. The search engine then evaluates the corresponding words via its search algorithms or compares them with the respective index. As a result, the user receives numerous search result pages (SERPs) on which the suggestions for the respective keywords are listed.
Keywords
These keywords need to be determined by means of a sufficient analysis. The so-called keyword analysis includes the research, definition and evaluation of important keywords for your web presence. The general goal is to filter out exactly those keywords that your target group is likely to use to search for facts that relate to your goods or services in some way. The detailed keyword analysis usually forms the basis for your SEO content. Some central keywords will run across all your content, others will have to be captured again and again for individual contexts.
As soon as you have identified the relevant keywords for your website, you can optimise it very precisely or create SEO content. First, however, you need to find out which terms customers in your subject area use at all and particularly often. Various tools, such as the Google Keyword Planner, can save you a lot of work here. Then summarise the keywords you have researched. Furthermore, find out exactly what the search intentions are behind the individual keywords. This is the only way you can really offer the most suitable content.
A keyword analysis can have very different scopes. If a complete website has to be considered, several days may be needed to find the appropriate keywords. For a single blog article, keyword research using the right tools usually takes no longer than 30 minutes.
Basically, there are two approaches to keyword analyses:
Either start by researching so-called seed keywords, which give a rough direction without further specification and are generally applied to a web presence as a whole or even a blog post.
Or you can start by looking at your competitors and their keyword use. Central questions here are: For which keywords do your direct competitors rank and optimise, how are they positioned on Google and Co. Should your own company also cover these keywords and where is the greatest unique selling proposition potential?
Before you start with a keyword analysis, you should conduct a brainstorming session in which the following questions are answered centrally:
- Which designations generally describe the goods or services distributed, what constitutes them conceptually?
- Do clients perhaps use different terms for their own services or could these be described differently in general?
- What problems or needs do customers have that your goods or services can help with, and how are they likely to put these into keywords within the major search engines?
You now have a large collection of keywords that you should further differentiate. The seed keywords or the keywords of the competition serve as starting points. From these, determine the so-called focus keywords. These form the keyword cornerstones of your SEO content. As a rule, these are exactly the words that receive the greatest attention from your target group during their searches.
The main keyword
Usually, main keywords fulfil one or even more of the following criteria:
- High search volume at the end of the customer journey: These are very valuable keywords.
- High search volume at the beginning of the customer journey: With these keywords you can build up many contact points with your brand or influence the purchase decision very early on.
- There is an optimal cost/income ratio.
- There is a virtually guaranteed conversion of the search terms – for example through an Ads campaign.
- There is a clear, very probable search intention.
- Now there is usually a further sequence of sorting, grouping and ranking for different areas of your web presence and different content forms.
It is important to choose the right keyword density and to position the keywords as advantageously as possible in the respective content. Keyword density is used to highlight how often specific words occur in a text.
Unfortunately, there is no “one right value” that is always the same across topics, texts, languages and target groups. For example, certain terms occur with a completely different frequency in a scientific context than in a recipe or travel report.
Even within one and the same subject area, there are no fixed values. For example, in the case of travel reports, the description of a hiking holiday in the mountains can have a completely different recommended keyword density than the report of a sightseeing trip in a big city.
Furthermore, the distribution of certain words in a text is no longer as important for SEO as it was ten or even 20 years ago. It is much more important to integrate exactly the right keywords. Make sure that your focused keywords appear at least once and in the most prominent places. This is usually enough for Google and Co. to use the content for a possible ranking on these words.
Keywords may explicitly be used more than once. However, the use should always be in a natural way. In fact, keyword density is more relevant today in order to avoid too many keywords. Because this gives the major search engines the impression that texts were only created for ranking purposes. Companies can be penalised for such SEO measures. Exceeding a keyword density of one percent for the main keywords is not recommended.
Always keep in mind that heavily keyword-heavy texts are less readable and thus sometimes not perceived as desired by customers. If bounces accumulate, the resulting negative user experience will probably have a much greater impact on the ranking than keyword voting of any kind could ever have.
Far more useful than focusing on a certain number of keywords is their appropriate positioning. In the past, corresponding measures were among the most important success factors for SEO content. And even today, significant relevance is still attributed to keyword positioning. Thus, main keywords should always be embedded as far forward as possible in texts or headlines. This helps Google and Co. to classify content thematically more quickly in general and, in addition, keywords positioned upstream are regarded by search engines as particularly relevant in the respective context. These requirements must also be observed when integrating other types of content or transferred to them – for example, with regard to the meta data of videos or alt texts of images.