Writing consistent blog posts is one of the best ways to keep your website up to date, provide valuable educational content, and add more of those oh so valuable “keywords” to your site. Therefore, when developing your copywriting/blog writing strategy you don’t want to repeat the same focus keyword on multiple pages, over and over. However, it is highly suggested to internally link keywords from page to page, designating a unique keyword specific to each page can reap massive results. As a result, the questions now become, how to choose your blog keyword? How will it be unique to my site’s other keywords? What should it’s synonyms, word forms, and related keywords be? How the heck does all this work together. And….. what are we talking about again?
The first step is to do a little research. There are a ton of paid tools out there to fork over your $$$ but a quick Google Trends search will show you whether a term should be your focus keyphrase, or a synonym, or a related keyphrase…all based on which gets more “interest” compared to the other. As a heads up, Google Trends does not show you the numbers of searches, but you’re going to be working with “interest”, framed over a time period, in relation to the other keywords words you type in. FYI: This should merely be used as a tool to compare similar terms, it’s not your go-to strategy foundation.
Before we get too far, how are focus keywords and focus keyphrases different? Usually a keyword, in regards to SEO purposes, refers to a singular word that is a search term. Often times users don’t just search one word so the term “keyphrase” has become more prevalent. For the sake of this article, we are going to treat them like the same regardless of how they’re mentioned.
Now let’s define the different forms of your keywords so that you can best optimize your blog post for SEO purposes.
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01.
FOCUS KEYWORD- THIS IS THE PRIMARY KEYWORD (OR KEYPHRASE) YOU WANT TO SHOW UP IN SEARCH RESULTS
For example “best hotel on Lake George” could be the designated keyphrase for a blog that announces that your hotel won an award from a third party publication. Now how do you explicitly tell Google that you want to show up for other similar phrases?
By using a tool such as Yoast SEO that enables you to enter more than just 1 focus keyphrase. This leads us to the next step, determining keyphrase (or keyword) synonyms.
02.
SYNONYMS- SIMILAR KEYWORDS AND PHRASES TO YOUR FOCUS KEYWORD
Therefore, you entered “best on hotel on Lake George.” Maybe someone is searching for “best resort on Lake George” or “best lodge on Lake George.” Enter this as a synonym to designate this as an alternate focus keyphrase. Google recognizes synonyms, so by designating synonyms you make it clear that you want to show up for these. In short, don’t leave it up to chance.
03.
WORDFORMS- PLURAL, SINGULAR, COMPARATIVES, AND PAST-TENSE FORMS OF YOUR FOCUS KEYWORD
To clarify, make sure you cover the different word forms of your keyphrase too. Not every user is alike, and Google takes this into account in search results. In Google Ads you can designate exact, phrase, and broad matches for your ads. Score.
04.
RELATED KEYPHRASES- OTHER VARIATIONS THAT VARY MORE FROM YOUR SYNONYMS
This is where you might think there is some overlap between synonyms and the related keyphrases. There very well might be too. So starting with your initial focus keyphrase – “best hotel on Lake George,” let’s look at some related keyphrases we could add to our hotel example:
- “best hotel in Adirondacks”
- “award-winning Adirondack hotel”
- “luxury Lake George hotel”
These are just a few related keyphrases/keywords you could add to your blog post. For instance, using Yoast SEO, related keyphrases are scored a little different to help you earn that “green” light for each. Therefore, keep in mind that the more related keyphrases you add the more difficult it will be to achieve “all greens.”
05.
HOW DOES THIS FIT INTO YOUR SEO STRATEGY?
As we mentioned above you don’t want 2 pages with the same focus keyword. Diversify that keyword portfolio. You most likely have quite a few keywords already worked into your pillar content too. Writing blog posts are great for adding more longtail keywords and highly specific searches to your site. However, they don’t always give you as many page views as your primary keywords, there are some key benefits to using longtail keywords:
- Less competition to show up in the top few search results
- More total keywords to show up in search results
- More qualified, targeted traffic to a specific topic
- Your site will appear up to date with fresh, new content
- Internal linking between pages will provide value to users and help Google to better understand your site
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Next time you are getting ready to write a blog post, think about what your blog’s focus keyword, synonyms, word forms, related keywords could be. How do they all relate to each other? Having a clear direction for your posts (and all pages too) will make your life much easier trying to optimize your site to show up in search results. Let us know of any questions you have on this topic and we’ll gladly help direct you towards the best solution! Be creative. Don’t think from your point of view, think from your customers.
