In my experience, choosing the right SEO keywords is all about not being too greedy. Many small business owners I’ve worked with want their site to rank for millions of keywords and keyword phrases. Because of this, the site content becomes a bit unfocused and the SEO results are disappointing. With keywords less is more definitely more.

It’s also important to remember that search spiders view each page of content as unique, so you don’t have to cram all your keywords onto your home page. Instead you can spread them across all the site pages and posts.

Here are my keyword suggestion tips to help you when you’re writing SEO copy for your next web page:

Step one: Brainstorm

Write a list of all the keywords and phrases that might be useful for this particular post or page. For example, for this article I’d probably want to include:

SEO, keywords, keyword phrases, SEO copywriting, digital copywriting, website copywriting, copywriter, advice, tips, Google, Kate Toon.

Step two: Research

Try using the keyword suggestion tool at Google Adwords to generate more options. It might show you some interesting variations that you hadn’t thought of. For example, when I typed in ‘SEO keywords’ it suggested:

Google adwords, search engine keyword tool, keyword suggestion tools.

Also, check out some of your competitors. What keywords are they using? Any good ones you can ‘borrow’?

Step three: Check the difficulty rating

Consider using the keyword difficulty tool at SEOMOZ.org to assess whether you’ve got a cat in hell’s chance of ranking for a given keyword. The higher the % the more difficult it will be to get any any real results.

Be aware that for:

• Single keywords, e.g. Copywriter – the competition is stiff. (6,920,000 competitors on Google.com.au).
• Two-word keyword phrases get easier, e.g. Sydney Copywriter. (164,000 competitors on Google.com.au).
• And three-word keyword phrases are even easier, e.g. Sydney SEO Copywriter. (14,400 competitors on Google.com.au).

So the bigger your phrase the more chance you have of achieving a good ranking, but obviously more complex phrases aren’t searched for as much as single words. It’s all a compromise.

Step four: Narrow down your list

Now is the time to be brutal, try to pick just three or four phases for your page. For this article I’m going to choose:

‘keyword suggestion tips, keyword competition, SEO copywriting, SEO advice’

A few things to note:

• Plurals don’t make a huge difference so avoid using ‘tip’ and ‘tips’.
• The order of keywords makes a slight difference, as you’ll note if you search for ‘Copywriter Sydney’ as opposed to ‘Sydney Copywriter’, so if you’re going for a longer three or four word phrase, put the most important words at the beginning.
• Prepositions/possessive pronouns don’t add much value, so avoid if possible. Go for: ’Web copywriting Sydney’ rather than ‘Web copywriting in Sydney’.

Step five: Work them through your copy

With your keywords written down, you can now attack your copy. Be sure to place keywords in your:

• Title Tag.
• Meta Description.
• Meta Keywords (Yahoo! Still cares).
• Header (H1 tag).
• Sub headers (H2, H3, H4 tags).
• First 100 words or introduction.
• Internal and external links.
• Alt Tags.

And be sure to bold a few keyword phrases here and there for extra SEO juice.

Step six: Don’t spam

Don’t just have a paragraph of keywords repeated at the bottom of your post. Google is wise to keyword stuffing, so don’t risk it.

Step seven: Review your copy

Consider running your copy through a tool like Wordle to test keyword saturation. The bigger the word appears the more often it’s been used (see image above).

Step eight: Test when live

You can also try using the Term Target tool on SEOMOZ to assess how well your page is targeted for a particular keyword when it’s live.

Step nine: Use keyword saturated back links

When you’re linking to your article from other sites, be sure to use the same targeted keywords in your link.

In summary, when deciding on your SEO keywords, it’s better to be choosy. Don’t try and optimise any given page for too many keywords. If you come up with some great ones that you can’t use this time, save them for your next post.

About Kate Toon Copywriter

Hello! I'm an award-winning SEO and advertising copywriter with over 18 years' experience. I'm also a well-respected SEO consultant, information architect, strategist, hula hooper and CremeEgg-lover based in Sydney, Australia.
Kate Toon