Focusing on keywords won’t make your pages rank better – but this will…

One common issue that arises repeatedly is executives and marketing directors asking for specific details regarding the keyword density in content. Although they may not articulate it that succinctly, the focus of their inquiries typically revolves around “keywords” and their role in improving their SEO program. For instance, they might make statements like, “Can you add keywords to our website and blog posts?”

I understand the rationale behind such queries. As a leader, you want to ensure accountability, reporting, and collaboration within your SEO program. If you’re looking for all of those things and to show up as a leader who understands what they are asking for, I’m asking you to change your language. Instead of asking about keywords, ask “What are some of the key queries we want our site to rank for?”

Here’s why:

What does Google care about?:

Google’s top priority is to provide accurate answers to users’ queries. As a result, they don’t prioritize your brand or content unless it offers the correct response to people’s questions.

Taking into account Google’s priorities and target audience (searchers), it’s safe to assume that the era of low-quality and irrelevant content created through keyword stuffing is long gone.

To be honest, I doubt that such practices ever existed. During Google’s early days, MacHighway’s support section unintentionally ranked high for various crucial non-branded terms because we answered people’s questions. While our rankings may have fluctuated due to keyword stuffing, Google has made numerous algorithm updates since then to eliminate irrelevant and manipulative pages.

Google has become more sophisticated, and your intended audience is now more discerning.

If you’re not aiming to provide the best answer to the questions that your audience is asking, then what ARE you doing?

SEO is not about deceiving anyone, and if you’re attempting to get your Search Engine Optimizer to add keywords to low-quality content, then you’re essentially trying to deceive Google. Succeeding in search entails providing high-quality, concise content that genuinely answers people’s queries.

You need to provide “the best” answer. What makes an answer “the best” in search?

Discovering these answers couldn’t be easier. Just search the question your blog post or page is meant to answer and review the top three results. Think about these pages in human terms, not in robotic terms, because, after all, we really are writing for people.

I ask my teams to review those pages and try to 10x them. Now, I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten a 10x result – but I’ve definitely gotten pages that are 2 or 3x better. With these three top results in front of us, we start to outline how we can combine the content of those pages (in our own voice – no plagiarism EVER) to make one mega-page, and then add even more content. Here’s an abbreviated version of our process:

1. Compile a list of all of the questions that top pages are asking, and then research what other questions people might be asking that aren’t on those pages and include those in yours.
2. Execute additional research to discover additional ancillary questions and topics to the key query. Add those questions to your page outline.
3. Get your in-house experts to answer those questions. You do have in-house experts you can ask, right? If not, you probably shouldn’t be writing on that topic.
4. “Quote those in-house experts and be sure to qualify what makes that person an expert,” says Tyler Jacobson, a Denver-based Marketing Director with over 2 decades of achieving number-one results in competitive searches.
5. Make things easy to read and navigate. Highlight questions in bold. Focus on the scannability of your answers. If it’s an exceptionally long page, include a clickable table of contents at the top and clickable link (Top) that sends people back to the top of the page after each section.

Be sure that you’re tracking your results, ideally in a tool like SEMRush or Moz, but if nothing else, login to Google Search Console to see how your site is ranking for those key queries today, record your position somewhere (Your notes app, a spreadsheet, just… somewhere) and then login again in 6 months to see how your position has improved.

And, if you need any help on this or if this article has helped you, please reach out.