The good thing about having a website is that, you can build your own credibility, without having to depend on social media for exposure.
But before you can get that credibility of an authoritative figure, there are lot of things to do. And most certainly, you need to grow your site's traffic to a degree that appeals search engines as well as people that seek for information.
To grow your organic traffic, you need to have your contents to mirror what users are actually searching for. Here, you need to have a proper content planning and creation, keyword mapping, and have all those optimized to align with the market.
One of the strategies, is using keywords grouping.
In terms of SEO. "keywords" are those words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines. They are called "search queries" that represent what people are looking for.
To get the best keywords for your site, you need to do several steps in your keyword research, which include: collecting possible keywords, terms analysis, knowing the hot words, and keyword grouping.
Going down to the details, here are their explanations:
Collecting Keywords
Your website may have many pages that can rank for multiple keywords. You can focused on planning and optimizing content that targets dozens of similar and related keywords, but it's better if you can target a lot more keywords rather than just a few.
Because there can be a lot of keywords you can use, you need to group them into clusters. But before you can do that, you need a dataset of keywords first.
This is where you need to collect as many possible keywords as you can.
To do this well, you need to also get as many relevant keywords, as well as irrelevant keywords to get the understanding of long-tail keywords that may make those irrelevant, relevant.
To fetch a pool of keywords to target, your sources can include:
- Your competitors.
- Google's Keyword Planner tool, or third-party data tools.
- Your existing Google Search Console/Google Analytics data.
- Creating your own keyword combinations.
- Google's autocomplete suggestions and "Searches related to".
Analyzing The Terms
Your potential keywords can go from hundreds to thousands. It can even go beyond that if your contents are broad.
Since dealing with huge numbers can be daunting, you need to break them down to make them more useful. You can do this by analyzing the terms by breaking those keywords apart into its bare keyword. This should allow you to see which terms are more popular.
For example, the keyword: “best restaurant in Jakarta" has 3 terms: “best,” restaurant," and “Jakarta.”
By breaking this keyword apart into their component parts, you can analyze and better understand which terms are recurring the most in your keyword dataset. In this example, the keyword "restaurant" is the most popular.
You can then use this term, and match that with your list of keywords. In this case, you get the idea that "restaurant" can be best combined with other top recurring keywords, like local Indonesian cuisines that are popular.
Know The Hot Words
Hot words are the terms or phrases that are relevant to your web page. These are the most important keywords as they can really represent your contents.
Knowing the hot words allows your to get a handful of the most important terms and phrases for traffic and relevancy, which can then be used to create the best content strategies.
When developing your hot words list, you need to answer the following question:
- Which of these terms are the most important for your business?
- Which of these terms are negative keywords (keywords you want to ignore or avoid)?
Now that you have the best keywords, it's time to prepare grouping them. But before that, there are word stems you need to take care of.
For example, the word "blog," "blogs," "blogger," "bloggers" and "blogging" have he same underlying relevance and meaning.
Before preparing your first group of keywords, you need to consider similar keywords as part of the same cluster. Word stems should be your best friend when grouping. Synonyms like "create" and "build" can also be organized in a similar fashion.
Keyword Grouping
In this part, you need to have:
- A deep understanding of your target audience, their intention, and why there are important to your business.
- An understanding of keyword - content relevancy.
- A good judgement to make tradeoffs when breaking keywords into groups.
To prepare keyword grouping, it's better for you to start with the most niche topics that have the least overlap with other topics. This is because if you start too broadly, your keywords will overlap with other keyword groups, and you'll have a hard time segmenting them into meaningful groups.
So here, it's wiser to start with the most narrow and specific groups first.
To begin, you may want to sort your keywords by word stem.
As you continue breaking apart one keyword group and then another, by the end, you're left with many different keyword groups. If the groups you have are still too broad, you can further subdivide them into narrower keyword subgroups for more focused content pieces.
Creating Contents
After carefully selecting the keywords and grouping them, you can start planning to create new contents you probably never knew you needed to create.
Alternatively, you can use the selected keyword groups and subgroups to your existing contents on your various web pages, by adding them to the body text, header tags and others.
But remember to consider how many times you should repeat your keywords. Since search engines have introduced "weight", or "density" to words, abusing keywords to trick search engine algorithms won't help you in getting a higher rank.
Further reading: Rank Higher With The Best Keywords That Match Your Contents