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The success or failure of an SEO strategy depends first and foremost on choosing the right keywords .
If you don't choose your keywords wisely, either because there's too much competition or because they don't fit your goals, your efforts to optimize on-page SEO and generate links to your website will be in vain.
On the other hand, a good selection of keywords will help you attract more qualified traffic and increase your online sales. So let's see how to choose the best keywords for your website .
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How to choose keywords: SEO tricks and 20 tools
How to choose keywords correctly
How many keywords do I need?
To better organize your keyword research, we first need to set clear goals . With keywords, it's not just a matter of "the more, the better" approach; we need to be selective, since ranking each one will take work.
The easiest way is to structure your keywords following the same hierarchy as your website or blog. Therefore, we'll search for keywords at different levels:
A primary keyword for which you want to rank your entire website in the long term. This keyword will typically be associated with your domain name.
A series of secondary keywords that are highly relevant to your business. Typically, between 3 and 7 will suffice. These keywords are the ones you'll use for the main sections of your website or the categories of your blog.
Finally, in addition to this general keyword structure, we'll need to find 3 to 5 more specific keywords for each of our website articles or blog posts.
The 3 most important criteria for choosing keywords
The market we want to target. In general, generic keywords are highly competitive and don't generate the highest conversion rates. Therefore, it's better to choose more specific keywords, which are more relevant to our buyer personas and easier to rank for. For example, "buy furniture online" would be too generic. Something like "eco-friendly wood furniture" might work better.
Keyword search volume . There are many tools that allow us to know how many people are searching for a specific keyword; we discuss some of them in the last section. Obviously, the most interesting keywords are those that generate the most searches, but we have to be aware of our resources and what we can aspire to. Typically, keywords with massive search volumes have extremely high competition, so unless you have a lot of time and resources, it's best to discard them. However, if you're an SME or an entrepreneur with a limited SEO budget, you may be interested in focusing on several very specific or "long-tail" keywords .
Competition . Competition typically goes hand in hand with high search volumes. We can see the competition for a specific keyword using the tools in the last section of this article. We can also run a Google search (preferably using incognito mode) to see if many competitor websites appear. The idea is to focus primarily on keywords with a high search volume relative to the level of competition, but keep in mind that there are many companies competing in SEO, so it will be rare to find high-volume keywords to exploit.
Keywords for pillar pages and clusters
For many years, SEO positioning has focused on introducing keywords that literally correspond to user searches, sometimes even sacrificing the naturalness of the text. But as Google's algorithms have evolved, the situation has changed.
The latest trends point to semantic search , that is, Google interprets the search user's intent instead of focusing solely on literal keywords. This has given rise to a new way of organizing web pages: pillar pages and topic clusters .
Topic cluster and pillar page: how to choose keywords - tips and tools
Pillar pages are the foundation of a website's organization. These pages cover all the main aspects of a topic in a concise manner and are generally positioned for a more generic keyword. For example, if you have a company specializing in digital marketing, you could create a pillar page about content marketing.
Pillar pages are usually longer than a typical blog post, as they attempt to cover all the main aspects of the topic in a concise manner.
