As you all may know, content is King, and you are kings and queens of writing great articles! When writing your articles, you also want to make sure you’re using keywords that searchers are looking for and you want to answer the question the searcher is asking. This LEARN article will cover what is a keyword, the difference between primary keywords and secondary keywords, how to perform keyword research, best practices for using keywords, and a look at how keyword best practices have changed. Let’s get into it.
What Are Keywords?
A keyword is a word or words that define the topic or subject matter you are writing about. They are the words that searchers may type into search engines like Google. The queries below are all keywords, sized by search volume (the more monthly searches for the keyword, the bigger the word/s is).
Keywords can be short or long
A keyword can simply be ‘hotel’ or it can be a long-tailed keyword like ‘30 minute hotel gym workout’. One-word keywords like ‘hotel’ may not get you very far in terms of ranking, but writing an article about the Top 30 Minute Hotel Gym Workouts You Can Do on Your Lunch Break may have a good chance for ranking for ‘30 minute hotel gym workout’.
How to conduct keyword research
If you are running paid advertising, you can see specific monthly searches for a keyword in the Google Keyword Planner. If you aren’t running paid ads, then Google may give you a range for a keyword like ‘100-1K’ monthly searches, which doesn’t tell you a whole lot, except that there is search volume for this keyword. So if Google is giving you a range, then check out some of these other tools for your keyword research:
SEMRush (costs $$$, but you can create an account and view some keyword data for free). I love looking at competitor sites to see what are they ranking for to find relevant keywords.
MOZ Keyword Planner (the free version will give you a range, but not quite as large of a range that Google Keyword Planner gives). You can always pay to access this data.
The Hoth - There is a free version, and it uses data from SEMRush. It gives you a phrase match from SEMRush, but you don’t see related keywords that SEMRush gives.
UberSuggest - Free and gives you search volume, related keywords, CPC, and Competition
Google Search Console - See what keywords your pages are currently receiving clicks for by clicking on the property → Search Traffic → Search Analytics, then click on queries and clicks and filter by page to view queries and clicks to a particular page. This shows you current clicks, but you can’t search for new keywords here.
Ahrefs - This is a paid tool, but provides global search volume and breaks down search volume for a keyword by country, and also provides keyword ideas and other related keywords.
What is the difference between a primary keyword and a secondary keyword?
A primary keyword is the number one keyword you want your article to rank for. Secondary keywords are your supporting keywords to the primary keyword that should be woven into the copy, subheadings like H2s, H3s, and other images on the page. You may have looked at what you’re ranking for and see that one page may be ranking well for 20 different keywords (yay!!), and it’s probably because you have great content that uses a keyword in many different ways.
What are the best practices for using Primary and Secondary Keywords?
A primary keyword for a page may be ‘CrossFit hotel workouts’.
Secondary keywords may be: ‘fitness hotel’, ‘workout hotel’, ‘CrossFit hotel gym workouts’, and ‘30 minute hotel gym workouts'.
Your title tag may be ‘The Top 10 Crossfit Hotel Workouts To Try Today | ABC Blog’
Your URL for this page could be: abc.com/top-ten-CrossFit-hotel-workouts
Your meta description* should include ‘CrossFit hotel workouts’ and a secondary keyword you find relevant to your post. *Some bloggers have it configured in Yoast (or other plugin settings) where the excerpt field is used for the meta description and the excerpt, however, this may not be the default setting for your blog. So make sure your primary keyword is in the excerpt field also.
Your primary keyword or a variation of your primary keyword should be in your H1 Heading
Secondary keywords can be in subsequent headings. One of the H2s could be ‘These are my favorite fitness hotels to stay at’. Another H3 could be ‘The best hotel gym workouts for your lunch break’.
Your primary keyword and variations of the keyword should be in the copy and a primary and secondary keyword should be in the first paragraph, and also sprinkled throughout the copy, not stuffed.
Write for humans, not search engines. If your primary keyword doesn’t read well like ‘hard water hair’, then don’t title your article ‘hard water hair’. You can change up the keyword and use variations of it like ‘How Does Hard Water Affect Your Hair?’ or ‘How does your hair respond to hard water’.
Use primary and secondary keywords in your image file names and image alt tags. Your images should be relevant to the content and be named appropriately like: CrossFit-hotel-workouts.jpg. The alt tag for this image should be ‘CrossFit hotel workouts’. Another image on the page may be named 30-minute-hotel-gym-workouts.jpg and the alt tag for that image should be ‘30 minute hotel gym workouts’.
How Has Keyword Optimization Changed?
The old school of thought is only optimizing for one keyword and one keyword only and the entire page is about that one keyword like so:
The thing is, Google has gotten smarter and it understands synonyms. That page about chocolate donuts may also be about chocolate frosted donuts, chocolate glazed doughnuts, baked chocolate donuts, and so on. Searchers may search ‘donut’ they also may search ‘doughnut’ so you would want to include different variations of the word on the page if it is relevant and makes sense.
Key Takeaways
Think of keywords as a cloud of keywords. You don’t have to pick only one keyword for a page.
Think of your cloud of keywords as a topic and check to see how the searcher is talking about your topic and answer the searcher's questions.
Write for humans, not search engines. You don’t have to include an exact keyword throughout the page especially if it doesn’t read well. You can switch up your keywords a bit and use synonyms and essentially you want to answer the searcher's question around the topic you are writing about.
Your Title Tag, Meta Description, Excerpt, Headers, URL, Images, and Videos on the page support your topic and cloud of keywords you are focused on and make your articles compelling, unique, and amazing!