30-second summary:
- Proper optimization is about comprehensive basics, not the “secret tricks”.
- The most important basic tactic to get right is keyword targeting.
- First, you need to know where in the sales funnel your clients are.
- Then, you use the best-matching and most valuable keywords targeting the clients’ intent.
- By mapping the keywords to your content, you’re able to always keep track of which page is targeting which search queries.
- Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario, Aleh Barysevich’s guide will help you succeed at keyword targeting.
Sometimes we get carried away with details, letting the big picture slip from view. However, when it comes to SEO, the devil isn’t in the details or yet another little known keyword targeting and overall research technique you’ve dugout. But rather, it is in being strategic when working on your essentials.
And today we’ll try to look at keyword targeting (the cornerstone of your keyword research[1]) from a different angle. Making sure all of your efforts are truly coherent with your business goals and are best shaped to the competitive landscape you operate in.
Step 1. Deciding on the funnel stages
The idea of funnel stages is not new to SEOs.
At any given moment each of our potential customers is on a different “stage” of the purchasing process – from only suspecting they’re having a problem (top funnel) to researching available solutions (mid funnel) to actually looking to purchase one (low funnel).
However, in terms of keyword targeting, we mostly use this concept to classify the keywords we already have to better integrate them into our content plan[2] and the overall site structure.
What we tend to forget about is that different business goals are better matched by different