Building a Keyword Strategy in 2021: 6 Key Considerations

By now you probably know that there's much more to a keyword than its monthly search volume. There are dozens of other factors to keep in mind, including a keyword's competitiveness, search intent, and user behaviors. As you look to refine your own strategy, the below tips can help you weed through the billions of keywords out there and choose the right ones to focus on.

Building a Keyword Strategy Now vs. Before

In prior years, keywords arguably had even more power than they do today. Before Google's Florida update in 2003 (often called the first major algorithm update that "hit the SEO world with a vengeance"), keyword stuffing was common practice. You could easily manipulate search engine rankings by filling your page with the same target word repeatedly.

Now, things work very differently. Search algorithms have become much smarter, and Google uses natural language processing (NLP) to discern the actual meaning and sentiment behind a query. For example, "Shirley Temple" could refer to America's sweetheart or a popular fizzy drink. If Google sees a query for "Shirley Temple recipe," it can determine that the user is interested in the drink version.

Beyond this, Google analyzes content relevance and other factors to decide if you are the right result to show in connection with a keyword. There's a lot that happens in the background, which makes SEO strategy both fun and difficult.

6 Non-Generic Tips for Optimizing Your Keyword Strategy

1. Prioritize Topics, Not Just Keywords

Ironically, you shouldn't start building a keyword strategy by thinking about keywords. A keyword strategy exists to support a larger content marketing strategy, which relies on having a clear understanding of your target audience. If you try to reverse engineer this, you'll waste hours arbitrarily looking up keywords you think align with your site and miss many strategic terms.

Save yourself the headache by creating a list of questions and concepts that your existing leads and/or customers care about. This will serve as the basis for your topic clusters—groups of webpages that collectively cover a wide topic.

This topic-based approach will earn you credibility with Google and help you form a clearer, more deliberate way of brainstorming content ideas. After deciding on your main topics, you can then start generating subtopics that naturally indicate long-tail keywords to include in your strategy.

2. Find Inspiration by Talking With Coworkers and Customers

SEO is too often treated like a solitary endeavor, where an SEO practitioner works alone through multiple databases to generate a keyword plan. In reality, SEO works best when it's a collaborative effort.

Talk to your colleagues and clients about what types of information they need to feel confident about a solution like yours. What challenges are your users looking to address? Which stakeholders are involved in a purchase decision? What questions repeatedly come up during sales conversations?

If customers, prospects, and/or team members aren't immediately available to chat, consider reaching out to brand partners or influencers for their insights. Social media may additionally serve as a great channel to poll potential buyers.

Remember to analyze buyers at both the top and bottom of the awareness funnel; you'll want to understand what types of content are needed at each stage and for whom.

Bonus tip: You can glean a lot by examining a competitor's blog to see what key topics they've identified as important to post about, as well as which ones get shared the most by readers. Search filters and blog tags can be particularly informative.

3. Focus on Low Competition Words

Low competition words offer prime real estate, especially if you're just getting started with content marketing. Use platforms like SEMRush or Moz to check a word's competitiveness. Make sure you're looking at organic difficulty, not advertising difficulty. These scores typically range from 0% to 100%—the higher the percentage, the more difficult it is to rank.

While it's not impossible to rank for highly competitive words, you likely won't see immediate results and will have to work harder for your position.

Consider plugging in your target keywords directly into Google. See what results appear on the first page. Do they stem from a variety of companies, or does a company like Facebook or Amazon dominate all results? If the latter, you'll likely want to think of another related term because you probably won't outrank these industry giants.

4. Check That Keywords Align With Your Offering

You'll be surprised by how easy it is to get sidetracked while expanding your keyword strategy. For instance, if your company sells a project management tool, you may write blogs on topics like "How to Manage Multiple Client Projects at Once" or "How to Keep a Multi-functional Team on Track."

You then see an opportunity to rank for keywords like "role of project manager" and "how to become a project manager." As a result, you start creating content for a very different audience (aspiring project managers, as opposed to existing project managers) and writing about topics that have little relevance to your brand.

You could try to illustrate how becoming a successful project manager is associated with using your software—but the likelihood of your reader converting into a customer is far lower than if your reader was already familiar with the job and searching for suggestions on how to make their life easier.

Double check that all of your keywords are related to your business' area of expertise. This will help ensure that you attract more qualified leads.

5. Compare Non-Branded Keywords Against Branded Keywords

Branded keywords include your company name (e.g., "ContentEdge platform"), while non-branded keywords don't (e.g., "content optimization platform").

Branded keywords naturally target a much narrower audience more likely to convert into a sale, whereas non-branded words have greater reach but aren't as focused. That said, only 10% of queries are branded, while 80% are informational (the other 10% are transactional).

It's no wonder most focus on winning non-branded terms. But bear in mind that you should be ranking at the top of branded keywords. This is crucial for directing warm leads to the right site and establishing your authority as a brand.

Use Google Search Console to check for the branded search terms that currently bring people to your site. These queries can help you identify what leads want to know about your brand before making a purchase.

Do they search for price, your business location, or how your product compares to a competitor? By looking at the data, you can get ideas for which questions to address in your website copy and content.

6. Use Variations and LSI Keywords

When actually creating content, include multiple variations of your primary keyword in moderation. Be careful not to add synonyms unnaturally since this can still be dinged as keyword stuffing.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) terms are equally—if not more—important. These are words that Google understands as contextually relevant to your subject area. For example, if you're writing about Shirley Temple (the drink), then using words like "recipe," "glass," "syrup," and "soda" can reinforce that your page is about the drink.

As keyword density becomes less important to Google, LSI words are becoming increasingly important. Google autocomplete is a fast way to identify LSI words.

Welcome to the Era of Advanced Keyword Research

Building a keyword strategy is certainly not as straightforward as it used to be. The silver lining is that there are plenty of resources you can tap for ideas, and best practices you can apply to keep your strategy aligned with your business goals.