How to Build a Keyword Strategy For SEO?

In seobase guide on how to create a keyword strategy for SEO benefits your search marketing efforts! Having a documented strategy before diving into content creation is crucial for any business looking to improve its online visibility. 

Also, with Google holding a 75% market share of all keyword searches in 2017, according to Smart Insights, optimizing your website with the right keywords is more important than ever. 

seobase will explore the keyword strategy concept, discuss how to create SEO keywords, and provide tips on building a strong keyword strategy that drives traffic and generates results. Whether you're just starting or looking to refine your existing approach, this guide has everything you need to create a winning keyword strategy.

How Can You Create a Keyword Strategy for SEO?

Are you looking to build a successful keyword strategy for your SEO efforts? A keyword strategy involves creating documentation of several keyword clusters you'd like to target, which includes both focus keywords and related "long-tail" keywords.  Also, it includes a content plan to achieve your goals, with action items such as writing a blog post, publishing an SEO page, or optimizing an existing page. With a keyword strategy in place, you can map your approach and get your whole team on board. So, how can you create your keyword strategy? Here's a step-by-step guide on how to build a winning SEO keyword strategy:

Understand your business' audience.

The foundation for creating a successful keyword strategy lies in understanding your target audience and their language.  Often, businesses tend to heavily rely on branded terms to describe their products or methods, but these terms may need to be more effective in a keyword strategy. To create SEO keywords, follow these steps to build a successful keyword strategy:

1. Conduct interviews with your target audience to gather the phrases they use.
2. Deliberately ask them if they understand the terms you're considering using.
3. Research industry publications and hashtags being used in your niche.
4. Conduct research on keyword volume to ensure your strategy's efficacy.
5. Be bold and rethink your business's language - keyword research can be a valuable and enlightening experience. 

Use the seobase Keyword Explorer tool to Create a Keyword Strategy.

Building a successful keyword strategy for SEO involves utilizing various tools. Consider using tools such as seobase keyword explorer for tracking keywords over time for research purposes. Experiment with this tool to determine how it fits your needs and budget. seobase is an affordable tool offering a reasonable pricing plan for the best metrics. However, a critical aspect of building a keyword strategy is investing in a tool that continually crawls your website and tracks your keyword progress over time. 

Add lots of keywords to track and analyze.

To build a successful keyword strategy for SEO, it is important to create a large database of keywords to research. Utilize your tracking tool to add a wide range of keywords, including new phrasings you haven't used before.  Furthermore, the more phrases you have in your database, the larger the sample size and the better insight you will have into your target audience's language. Also, aim to have at least 50 to 100 keyword options in your database. A useful tip to generate new ideas is to perform a Google search for your desired term and take note of the related searches. These can often provide new insights into your audience's mindset.  Thus, to build a keyword strategy, having a diverse set of keywords is crucial to ensure a comprehensive understanding of your target audience.

Choose the best target keywords.

When building a keyword strategy for SEO, it's essential to narrow your keyword options to the best targets. To determine the best targets, consider the following criteria:

• Relevance: The keyword must be immediately relevant to your business.
• Volume: The keyword should have a high volume of searches, with at least several dozen to several hundred monthly searches, and more if you want to scale with that keyword.
• Difficulty: The keyword should have low to medium difficulty, as you will have little authority in the beginning and can't rank for high-difficulty keywords (more than 7/10).
• Existing ranking URL: If you're already ranking for a keyword that shows up in a Google search, it can be a good target as you build momentum.

Tip: Assign low, medium, and high priorities based on the analytics and consider color coding for ease. Focus on keywords that are the most relevant to your business, have enough volume to drive visitors to your website, and aren't too difficult to rank for.  These are high priorities. When creating a keyword strategy, it's crucial to prioritize the keywords that will bring the most value to your business. keyword strategy for SEO

Organize your keywords into topic clusters.

When building a keyword strategy for SEO, it's important to create topic clusters or content groupings around similar topics. Furthermore, this demonstrates to Google that you have extensive knowledge on the subject and can help you rank in search results. From your high-priority keywords, choose 1-2 that will serve as the main focus of your topic clusters. Then, come up with long-tail variations of these keywords to provide more specific information. Also, it's important to remember that Google is becoming more sophisticated and can understand semantic similarities in keywords, so write in a way that makes sense to your audience. Based on your keywords, assign an action item for each. If you're already ranking for a target keyword, your action might be to add more links to your website or refresh and optimize the content.  If you're not ranking for a keyword, your action item will be to create an SEO page, which will become the center of your topic cluster.

Write, publish, and refine content.

With a defined action plan for your SEO keyword strategy, it's time to take action. Moreover, consistently publishing high-quality blog posts at least once a week can help keep your content fresh and relevant. Furthermore, consider publishing twice a week if your industry requires a lot of content. Updating existing content with new keywords is also a great way to maximize your efforts. Also, remember to create SEO pages for your content marketing mix. Tips: 

1. SEO pages should be specifically targeted to a relevant keyword and include rich content, images, and a form for conversions. 
2. Remember to link your content with hyperlinks, as Google views these links as a trail of breadcrumbs demonstrating your authority on a subject.

Analyze your keywords and iterate.

It's crucial to keep track of your keyword performance using tools that allow you to monitor your progress over time. Regularly checking the following metrics will help you optimize your SEO keyword strategy:

• Your ranking position on Google, whether it's on the first, second, or third page.
• The URL associated with each ranking position.
• The number of visitors your website receives from the targeted page.
• The strategies and tactics that led to your success, which you can replicate and scale to strengthen your SEO presence further and generate more leads.

By continually refining your keyword strategy, you can build a strong SEO presence that will bring in a steady flow of new leads.

How to Create a Keyword Strategy for SEO: Conclusion

In conclusion, building a keyword strategy is essential in optimizing your website for search engines. With the right approach, you can create a strategy that will help you rank higher and drive more traffic to your website.  The 7 steps outlined in this post will guide you through selecting relevant keywords, tracking your progress, and refining your strategy over time.  By following these steps and utilizing seobase SEO tools to track your keywords, you can build a strong SEO keyword strategy.