For those of you out there doing DYI SEO, or serving in web content contributor roles at your organization, you probably often struggle with choosing which keyword(s) to optimize your page(s) for. To be clear, I’m referring to the situations in which your page’s topic may be referred to in several different ways. To use a few examples from recent conversation/consultation: pc repair vs. computer repair, or millennial keynote speaker vs. gen y keynote speaker, or sports medicine expert vs. sports medicine specialist. When narrowing down the core term for which you’re optimizing and thereby, what keyword you’re seeking to rank for, there are a few ways to make sure your decision is a wise and informed one:

Define Your Target Audience and Goals

If you operate a local and/or small business, let’s say a pc repair shop, ranking on the first page of Google results for “pc repair” probably isn’t what you want to be aiming for. Will you generate targeted interest from that ranking? Probably not, and because of that, you also probably wouldn’t remain on the first page of results for very long even if you did get there.

If you’re using your website as a way to generate leads in any form or fashion, you need to define your audience before you can target it. In the example above, if the PC repair company is serving the Easton/Lehigh Valley, PA area, which my awesome friend’s, Ryan Critchett does, then it’s better to optimize for terms around local searches. In other words, Ryan will generate business from ranking for computer repair bethlehem, pa, whereas he is not seeking to repair computers on a national level, so optimizing for the general “PC repair” term is not in his best interest. (Note in the linked example that Ryan has created landing pages for each of his local target markets, a smart move to ensures he ranks for people searching across a variety of areas in his region)

Do Keyword Volume Research

Once you’ve defined your target audience and it’s time to choose between this or that keyword, the first step is to research how people are searching. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using Google’s free Keyword Tool. If you’re already using Google AdWords, you can access it by clicking on Reporting and Tools in the top nav menu, and choosing Keyword Tool. For those of you who aren’t using AdWords, you too can use the Google Keyword Tool. You can put as many variations of your keyword in the box (for step by step instructions, check out my post on using the Google Keyword Tool), and I recommend checking the box that says, “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms.” Google will throw back some suggestions and terms it thinks are related that may or may not shed some light for you on how people are searching. To go back to an example from above, if you put just title search and title examination in that box, you’ll see that 165,000 people are searching in the U.S. per month for title search, whereas 1,900 are searching for title examination.

Taking a hint from the step 1 and determining your goals, you can infer from this data and pattern that if you’re company is providing title searches in Atlanta, you’d want to optimize around more regional metro area terms. If you were a large national title firm with a variety of franchise locations, you would first want to define your goals (i.e. is each location maintaining a website for which you’re wanting to rank? Is your branding initiative a global one that instead funnels potential clients through one site?). If your goals are to funnel leads through one overarching brand website, you’ll want to optimize for the more general terms, and pick the ones that more people ae using.

DISCLAIMER – competition is a piece you should also consider before picking between this or that keyword. There are situations in which you’ll be picking between this or that and will want to choose the less searched for word, so read on…

Evaluate Your Competition

Whether the product or service you’re offering appeals to a niche of a few thousand, or a niche of millions, you must evaluate what your competition is doing from an SEO standpoint. To go back to the pc repair example, pc repair and computer repair are searched for with fairly similar frequency. So in Ryan’s case, if his main local competitor in the computer repair market had an established site and was choosing to optimize for terms like computer repair Lehigh Valley and computer repair easton, Ryan would probably want to opt to optimize for pc repair Lehigh Valley, and pc repair easton, so he can immediately see improvements in search results without havig to compete. And because the volume is comparable, there is no opportunity cost of choosing pc repair as his core term. Should he decide he later wants to rank for computer repair, he will have a foundation of content around a very close derivative term (pc repair) that will make that process a faster and easier one.

Every organization and every SEO strategy is unique. Those differentiators are what will determine what else you add to this list, but these three steps are critical when it comes to keyword selection. Do you have others? What else do you do before deciding between this or that keyword?

I’ve been asked a lot recently by people writing web content where they should most focus their on page SEO and keyword efforts. While it’s important that your core keywords appear throughout your site content and pages, keywords specific to each page should certainly be placed in a few key places. Below, I’ve outlined the most important places in which your keywords should appear on page.

1. Page URL – when infusing URLs with keywords, make sure the words are separated by hyphens. Try to place your keywords in the most upfront location in your URL possible. For example, if your website is www.CompanyABC.com and you offer multiple products, one of which being SEO services, you would want your URL to look something like: www.CompanyABC.com/products/search-engine-optimization. (As a side note – having your keywords in your site’s domain name doesn’t hurt either).
2. Page Title – The core keywords for each page should without question be placed in your page title. Using the example above, the page title could be something like “Search Engine Optimization Services”.
3. First 100 words of body content – make sure that the same keywords you are using in your search-engine friendly URLs and page titles are also placed in the first 100 words of body content. The closer to the start of the first paragraph, the better.
4. Keywords in headers – whether H1, H2, or H3 tags (and so on), including keywords in your page headers is always helpful. Just make sure that your keyword density does not exceed 5% of total page content.

This is a very basic list but a good place to start for web content writers. Please feel free to provide additional ideas and thoughts for on page keyword placement in the comments below.