SEO Writing: 4 Quick Tips About Keyphrases

While keywords are always important in creating optimized content for your website, search engine technology has grown in its ability to pull out phrases and groups of related words. Utilizing a keyphrase instead of just one word can help your website to stand out against others, as keywords can have too much competition from seemingly endless results. Here are four tips to help you utilize a keyphrase in your web content to boost SEO:

1. Determine the Specificity of Your Keyphrase

Some keyphrases are shorter than others. The longer the keyphrase, the more specific it’s likely to be. For example, if you’re writing a blog about trending home décor, you’ll want to show up in a general “home décor” search. A search this broad is going to be very competitive and have abundant results. However, longer searches such as “bohemian home décor” or “small bohemian sofa table” are going to be much more specific and yield a more particular search result. The longer the phrase, the more unique it will be, making it easier to rank higher for those searches.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

A significant part of choosing the keyphrase you’d like to use is understanding who is going to be making the search. What adjectives may your target audience use when searching for your product? Certain research tools will also allow you to collect information on the demographics searching particular phrases. Maybe your home décor blog pertains more to women. Even further, maybe women in the 30–55 age range are more likely to search for related content. Make sure to understand who your website, blog, or product is for when choosing your keyphrase.

3. Research Keyphrase Search Frequency

Tools like Google Trends and Yoast Suggest allow you to research keyphrases to determine how often they’re being searched. This is one of the most important steps, as you want to make sure that people are actually searching your keyphrase. These tools can also show you if a keyphrase is too general or too competitive, meaning it is searched too frequently. Using keyphrases that are too popular make it difficult to rank high in its search results.

4. Don’t Overuse

Once you’ve decided on a keyphrase that is specific, tailored to your audience, and searched regularly, you’re ready to write your blog. Here’s the catch: it is not recommended to use your keyphrase more than once. Using your focused phrase too many times can clog up your writing and cause you to compete with your own content. Optimize a particular blog using your keyphrase and choose a different focus for your next one, filling your writing with related content and accessible language.

Written by Liz Wordham