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Anytime you need to write content for your website pages, blog posts, social posts and profiles, email blasts, and more, you need to have a good understanding of the best keywords to use in that content. Otherwise, you can seriously miss the mark. Granted, keywords may not be your concern if you’re trying to create something like clickbait or viral content. But, most of the time, your goal is to get more eyes on your content.

By implementing a good keyword research strategy, you can save some serious time and resources. Even more, if you choose the very best keywords for your content, you’ll end up more successful in the end. Let’s take a look at 4 simple steps that will help you streamline, and perfect, your keyword research:

1. Determine Your Focus

For keyword research to really evolve into an easy, seamless practice, you need to determine your focus before anything else. Each page of your site, blog post, or email you craft needs to have its own focus and set of keywords. This is not to say you can’t recycle some of your money keywords, or branded keywords, in multiple content pieces. But, when you start to spread low-quality keywords too far across your site, you create decreased value.

On your site, it’s best to start with the most important pages. If you’re just starting out with optimizing existing content, or even taking on writing new content, you should take it slow. Taking your time to think about what you’re selling, why, and to whom, will help you create better content than a couple of thoughtless paragraphs would.

The same goes for any bigger content pieces, like blogs. You need to be aware of who you’re writing or creating the piece for. More importantly, you need to think about why someone will find that content valuable. Too many times, content is created without the user in mind. You can’t really expect someone to find content useful that’s not tailored to their wants or needs. This is where knowing your audience works hand-in-hand with keyword research – you need to know your ideal customer to create their ideal content. Being conscious of your content creation, and especially the value it provides to users, helps the keyword research process get off the ground.

2. Choose The Right Keywords

This step may seem like a no-brainer, but choosing appropriate keywords for multiple website pages can be complicated. The biggest issue people run into is something called “keyword cannibalization.” This happens a lot, and often goes unnoticed. Keyword cannibalization happens when the same keywords are spread across multiple pages of a site. This oversight ends up spreading the authority of certain keywords too thin across multiple pages – it even causes pages of your site to compete against each other for visibility.

Keyword cannibalization is a real threat to your visibility and ability to rank for multiple keywords on the SERPs (search engine results pages). Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t reuse your money keywords and branded keywords on multiple pages. These are often the base of your business, and can help to build a consistent brand message when used correctly. Keyword cannibalization really applies to long-tail keywords, or keywords that are really specific to a certain product offering or idea.

One of the most important steps to choosing the right keywords is to be realistic. Here, you want to make sure you are choosing keywords you are able to rank for, rather than what you think you deserve to rank for. Choosing “vanity keywords” will only become a massive waste of time and resources. Think of it this way – a site selling phone cases wants to rank for the keyword “phone cases.” This is great in theory, but let’s think about who shows up on the SERPs when a user types in that very broad query. Of course, we see Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and Ebay.com coming in as the top three results.  The chances of a user clicking through multiple pages of their search results to land on a smaller, less authoritative site that may be ranking for “phone cases” on page 10 is very, very slim.

Instead, this ecommerce site that sells great phone cases should shift their focus to keywords that can gain the most visibility and impact. We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with using these broad keywords on your site and in your content. Instead, to stand out and make an impact, long-tail keywords are the way to go concerning rankings. These would be keywords like “cool phone cases”, “elegant phone cases”, or “where to buy phone cases.”

3. Use A Good Tool

Granted, long-tail keywords can still be too competitive or have too high of a CPC (cost per click) to be the best fit for that page. That’s why using a good keyword tool is so important. You need solid data to back up your choices – data should always be the driving force behind any type of change you make to your site or marketing practices. Otherwise, this process becomes an uneducated shot in the dark.

If you’re stuck finding some of those long-tail versions of higher cost keywords, we suggest using a tool called Ubersuggest. This tools allows you to input a broad keyword phrase. You’ll then get a list of hundreds of long-tail options organized alphabetically and numerically by the add-on word. You can then add these long-tail keywords into our next tool to see if these equal a good opportunity.

As mentioned, search volume and CPC have a lot to do with the effectiveness of your chosen keywords. Here, we can follow a simple formula for success: high SV + low CPC = a good opportunity. Let’s go back to the “phone cases” query. If we input this keyword into one of our favorite keyword research tools, semrush.com, we can see the search volume at 49.5K per month, and the CPC at $1.12. The CPC may not seem like a lot, but the search volume is way too competitive – so this is not a good, realistic choice. Alternately, if we search for our long-tail keyword, “cool phone cases”, we can see a search volume of 3.9K and a CPC of $.90 – a much better target. SEMrush allows you input almost any keyword phrase and get lots of valuable cost and volume data. This tool in conjunction with Ubersuggest helps you find good, untapped opportunities in terms of SV and CPC.

4. Test And Test Again

In marketing, testing, revisiting, and testing again is key. Just like the data that’s necessary to make changes, those changes need to be evaluated for success. There’s nothing wrong with trying some new keywords on your website pages for an amount of time, then revisiting and tweaking them later. This will allow to you test the effectiveness of your choices and whether you can stand to improve visibility. We don’t recommend changing your content on websites pages very frequently – Google needs time to crawl and index new content. We also recommend making small changes – there should be no reason to completely overhaul your content every week.

In fact, refreshing and repurposing content can create new and better ranking opportunities. While small changes are good to refresh on-page content, bigger overhauls are best-suited for blog posts. There could be blog posts on your site from a few years ago that still have great, relevant information. Giving these a refresh with some new, more relevant keywords can help to spark interest again. You may even be able to create evergreen content (content that ranks well for a very long time) by spending some time reworking it.

At the end of the day, your keywords are one of the most important parts to any of the content on your site. Sure, the topic and tone of that content is important, but using the very best keywords in that content is the difference between high visibility and no visibility. With a little bit of effort, you can turn yourself into a keyword research machine! Once you learn what keywords matter, why they matter, who’s searching for them, and how often – you can create some really impactful content that’s sure to get noticed!