Defining your SEO keywords is an essential step to improve the SEO of a website.

This is a pillar of search engine optimization on which the SEO expert will use as a base to define the SEO strategy and optimize the content of the site.

Why keyword’s defining is essential to SEO?

3 reasons why should take the time to define your SEO keywords:

Without keywords, you have no SEO strategy

SEO is the process to optimize a site to appear in a better position for relevant keywords, reporting qualified traffic to the site. It is therefore essential to define these keywords upstream and why they are pertinent to your site. Without keywords to optimize, your SEO strategy will be much less clear and consistent.

This allows qualifying your SEO traffic

Moreover, this step will enable you to define criteria keywords selection to work for example according to their relevance to your business or their impact regarding industry (figure of an associated company).

This makes it possible to follow your positioning on the strategic queries

Once you have defined your priority keywords, you will be able to support your positioning on the search engines thanks to SEO positioning tracking tools. You will understand, this stage of keywords research and definition is essential to optimize your site’s SEO.

What are the criteria taken into account to determine your keywords in SEO?

Several criteria can be taken into account:

Search volume: you can find the monthly search volume of keywords with several tools including the Google Keyword Planner, a free Google Ads tool, Yooda Insight, SEMRush.

Current organic position: again many tools allow you to know your current natural position for given keywords, e.g. MyPoseo, SEMRush …

Positioned URL: MyPoseo, SEMRush also show you the URL of your site’s position for each keyword.

Impact Business: The business impact is the importance of the keyword regarding turnover for your company.

SEO Difficulty: The Mangool KW Finder tool gives you an idea of the SEO difficulty of given keywords. This index is calculated from the URL link profile of the first page of organic results. But Yooda Insight and SEMrush can help you too.

Difficulty SEA: KW Finder, but also Google’s Keyword Planner, allows you to get the average CPC (cost-per-click) and competition to position yourself in SEA on the keyword.

3 steps to define your keywords in SEO

1. Create a database of relevant keywords

To create a database of relevant keywords with a thematic and semantic rich cover, you can use several techniques :

Your web site: browse to your site and note the issues that you put forward and the keywords you use to describe your products/services. Your site, and how it is organized for good user experience is often your first source of inspiration. In addition, make a list of the relevant keywords on which your site is already positioned in the search engines. To do this, use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The competitor’s sites: in the same way, analyze the sites of your competitors and note the keywords and themes that come back often. Especially the sites of competitors in a better position than you in the Google results. You can also search for the keywords of your competitors by using Alexa.

Brainstorming: brainstorm with your team the words that are the most relevant to describe your products/services.

Method of personas: define your customer profile types, and put yourself in their skin. Identify their needs, problems, issues as they arise.

Google Ads: if you advertise on Google or Bing Ads, the search terms can be a source of great inspiration to find new ideas for keywords.

Keywords related to any questions: You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Kw Finder or KW Shitter to find ideas for keywords related to the keyword or theme of the original. Answer The Public may also help you.

Synonyms: search for synonyms to the keywords you have identified.

Word combination: to combine several lists of words, use tools like Mergewords.

2. Filter the keywords list

Once this list of keywords is created (sometimes there can be really many!), you will have to do sorting to keep a list of keywords that are most relevant to work on your site. The search volume of the keywords is also very important to do this sorting. Better to work the keywords a minimum sought. The size of this list depends a lot on the size of the site and of the area, but as a general rule, I think that a list of 100 to 200 keywords, up is amply sufficient. With more, you risk diluting your efforts!

3. Group and prioritize keywords analysis

Finally, it is essential to prioritize the keywords for the analysis to make it actionable. For this, I advise you to group keywords, for example :

Thematic: if you have different categories of products, services, content,
search Intent: there are 3 types of search intent.

The research navigational have aimed to find a specific website that the user wants to view, for example ‘facebook’ to get on the famous social network. Research informational, they are designed to get more information on a topic, to learn. In particular, they may contain questions like, ‘ what is SEO ‘. Finally, the research transactional purpose is to perform an action, such as buying a product ‘black boots not expensive,’ or find a shop / a place of ‘ Auto parts Calgary SE ‘.
Relevance: the keywords do not often refer not all to your core business. It may, therefore, be interesting to establish a scale of relevance to be able to rank more easily and know where to optimize first.
Impact business: in the same way, it may be interesting to establish a scale (for example 1 to 10) according to the impact business of each keyword, based for example on the price of the item/service associated with the keyword or the average price of the category of products.
The definition of your site’s keywords is a pillar of SEO. It is essential to take the time to conduct this analysis because it will be useful to you throughout your SEO project.