SEO keyword strategy: A guide to success

It's simple: if you want potential customers to funnel into your website, you need a targeted SEO keyword strategy that's tailored to your business goals. But creating that strategy? Easier said than done—unless you have this guide!

Whether you're an affiliate business, e-commerce business, professional services business, or SAAS, you can use this guide to develop the right SEO keyword strategy to implement across your blog posts, product pages, and your website as a whole.

What is an SEO keyword strategy?

As many of you may know, SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it refers to the process of intentionally crafting your website content in a way that puts your webpages at the top of organic search engine rankings, generating more organic traffic and, ultimately, more business. The brands that do this best have a solid SEO keyword strategy in place to help them plan, write, and publish relevant content around relevant keywords for their target audience.

Why is a keyword strategy important?

A keyword research strategy is essential for several reasons:

• It helps you identify your target audience and determine the most relevant and realistic keywords for your business, product, or service.
• Determines which tactics and budget are required.
• According to BrightEdge, organic search remains the dominant source of trackable web traffic, greater than paid, organic social, or display traffic.
• Supports the business's lead generation, inquiry, sales, and revenue targets.

Step 1: Your goal

You're in business to make money by exchanging service or product value—that's why the main ingredient of a keyword strategy is a goal.

We've created a revenue goal in each example below and worked it back to the estimated monthly search engine traffic you need.

Generating leads or revenues online is directly related to these 4 metrics: audience, traffic, order value, and conversion rate.

Affiliate business goal

You use your website content and traffic to promote other people's products and services in exchange for a sales commission.

Business Model	Affiliate
Goal	$10,000 per month
Average Order Value	$100
Sales	100
Traffic Conversion	2%
Traffic required	5,000

Service business goal

For example, you are a property developer who does property conversions and renovations and aim to generate sales leads for your services.

Business Model	Service business
Goal	$40,000 per month
Average Order Value	$10,000
Sales	4
Lead Conversion	10%
Leads	40
Traffic conversion	2%
Traffic required	2,000

or you install electric garage doors.

Business Model	Service business
Goal	$20,000 per month
Average Order Value	$4,000
Sales	5
Lead Conversion	10%
Leads	50
Traffic conversion	2%
Traffic required	2,500

E-commerce business

Let's say you sell vehicle accessories.

Business Model	E-commerce
Goal	$20,000 per month
Average Order Value	$250
Sales	80
Traffic Conversion	1%
Traffic required	8,000

Amazon affiliate site

Andrew at Digitalworth.com uses this formula to plan for an affiliate website.

Business Model	Amazon affiliate
Revenue per visitor	$0.10
Visitors	50,000
Revenue	$5,000

Let's jump to step two.

Step 2: Don't start with target keywords; start with your audience 

So far, you've forecasted the search engine traffic you needed to meet your goal in the last step.

But don't start on target keywords just yet; first, you need to determine that there is an audience for what you have to offer—and at what stage they are at in the buying process.

Buying Decision Process

The buying process problem is the easiest model to use when planning a keyword strategy, as it takes into account the specifics of your business' value proposition and content strategy to generate keyword ideas—and it looks like this.

Buying Decision Process Stage	Definition	Keywords contain
Problem Recognition	People search for a problem they recognize.	how, what, and, for, with, where, when, for, with, and, issue, fix, improve, increase, reduce, remove, lower, grow
Information Search	They look for information from brands, products, and services that can solve that problem.	best, list, top, example, guide, learn, tutorial, video, calculator, best, top, bespoke, service, color, brand name, category name
Evaluation of alternatives	They narrow down and compare their preferred options or look for second opinions or reviews.	review, compare, comparison, vs., versus, alternative, similar
Purchase decision	Only doubt or peer pressure prevents a purchase.	Buy, nearest, cheap, dimensions, size, shop, store, discount, coupon, deal, sale, eBay, Amazon, offer

Using the table above, we can map specific search terms to each stage in the buying process.

Look at this e-commerce website selling accessories for cars.

The traffic to their top pages is product and category keywords at the informational search stage.

There are no top "how-to" or "review" keywords or pages.

Their business model is to sell their products, so they use relevant keywords to earn relevant traffic to support their business goals.

Step 3: Invest in paid-for keyword research tools

You can now begin researching your audience, products, and services in more depth.

Those serious about their strategy use paid keyword research tools such as Sparktoro, SimilarWeb, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs.

We'll use the business model examples from step one to demonstrate how to build a keyword strategy for SEO.

Let's say you know absolutely nothing about electric garage doors. That means it's time to open the keyword tools we mentioned above!

Go to Sparktoro

• Type "garage doors" into the search box and press search.
• Sparktoro will return insight into what this audience talks about, follows, and visits.
• Look for relevant websites under social accounts and websites they visit.
• Copy those websites into a text file or Google Doc.

SimilarWeb

• Go to SimilarWeb.com and paste one of the websites into the search box.
• This one has total visits of 337,800 per month.

• Scroll to the marketing channels overview section, and multiple the search traffic by total visits to get the estimated monthly organic traffic, i.e., 70% x 337,800 = 236,460.

• Repeat the process for the next website on your list.

In step one, the goal for the electric garage doors was 2500 monthly visits; you now know the market demand exists.

Step 4: Seed keywords and modifiers

You not only save time using paid keyword research tools, but these premium solutions give you a crucial metric that free tools don't; traffic potential.

The starting point in the keyword research process is your seed keyword, so for "electric garage doors," you might start with a one- or two-word keyword such as "doors" or "garage door" as your starting point.

Open the SEO tool Ahrefs:

• Enter your seed keyword into keyword explorer, select your country, and search.
• Select matching terms and enter your full search query.

There's high traffic potential for this keyword, but the keyword difficulty is also high, suggesting it's a hard topic to rank for.

Step 5: Build a master keyword list

You want to build a keyword list because it can form the foundation of your strategy and catch prospects at the beginning, middle, and end of the buying process.

• Tick the box need to the keyword.
• Add To, Keyword List, New List, Garage Doors.
• Your keyword list appears to the left of the screen.

Step 6: Filter by cost, clicks, keyword difficulty

• Select parent topic.
• Filter out difficult keywords.
• Filter by clicks per search (greater than one).
• From step 2, copy and paste the keyword modifiers into the include, any box.

Another way to find keyword modifiers is to enter your keywords into Google, select the Images tab, and see related searches, e.g., wooden, roller, sectional, oak, anthracite, grey, double, black, etc.

Now look through the list, tick the box next to any relevant keywords and add them to your list.

Once you've exhausted the list, sort by the TP (traffic potential column) and repeat the process; add any keywords you've missed.

To identify long-tail keywords, remove all filters, then filter word count by 5 or more words and clicks per search of one or more.

Step 7: Intent and content type

Now, you should have a good mix of basic and long-tail keywords on your list. The next stage is identify search intent to check what the user wants from a search result and if that contributes to your goal.

Ahrefs identifies 4 types of search intent, including:

• Informational
• Navigational
• Transactional
• Commercial Investigation

For example, if we targeted definition keywords such as "What is a garage door?" or "What is an electric garage door?" these keywords might have high monthly search volumes, but we're looking to find people with commercial intent, who are searching for garage door services, installation, and quotes. Therefore, "what is a garage door?" will not be an effective keyword for us as the intent there is informational.

Here's the process you can use:

1. Click your keyword list; We've added 57 keywords to my list in this example.

2. Review the list, click the SERP button to view what types of pages rank in Google, and check and delete duplicates or any irrelevant keywords.

3. Then press export.

4. Start a Google or Excel sheet labeled"SEO Keyword Strategy".

5. Click your mouse in cell A:1

6. Select File > Import > Upload > Select a file from your device.

7. Locate and select the file exported from Ahrefs.

8. Select Replace data at the selected cell.

9. Import data.

Step 8: Review and agree

Add the following SERP data to your sheet in row 1:

• List of keyword phrases
• Country
• Difficulty
• Search Volume
• Parent Keyword (topic)
• Traffic Potential
• Content-Type
• Add to Plan

Bear in mind that the traffic potential is based on the national traffic to the number one search result.

Let's say you're working on a business that only operates in Texas; you might want to adjust the traffic potential for that state.

Select content type

Next, you need to select a content type for each item on your list. Refer to the list of types of content below and perhaps build them into drop-down options in the "Content Type" column (column M in the images shown):

• What Is
• How to article
• List article
• Best Post
• Guide
• Service category cage
• Service page
• E-commerce category page
• E-commerce product page
• Review article
• Comparison (vs) article
• Mixed
• Calculator
• Statistics
• Tool

The content type you choose should be informed by the primary keyword you are building that content around. For example, if the keyword contains "how," the content type you should create is a "how-to" article in order to best match the search intent.

Select "how-to article" from the Content-Type column.

If the content type isn't so obvious, copy and paste the intended primary keyword into Google and look for the most frequent type of content in the SERP.

You can, of course, do this within Frase after creating a document by selecting Optimize -> SERP Scores.

After you have selected an option for every focus keyword in the Content-Type column, you can involve clients or colleagues.

Share, agree and review

It's easy to share a Google Sheet, click the Share button, and select sharing options.

When instructing a client or colleague, ask them to review the list of keywords and select Yes/No from the add to plan column.

In this example, there is a traffic potential of over 300,000 monthly clicks; if you recall, the original goal was 2500 monthly visits.

Now you have a keyword strategy you can start to put it into action.

Step 9: Tactics

Keyword strategies are only as good as the tactics you implement.

The key tactics to implement your strategy, get ranked, and traffic is:

SEO Project Management

The best way to implement your tactics is to manage your project; we've outlined how to manage an SEO campaign in our guide.

Use Trello.

Move each item from the to-do list stage to the published stage.

Content briefs

An SEO content brief tells a writer to create content targeting a specific keyword phrase to rank and earn traffic.

A well-written and properly structured brief ensures that there won't be any misunderstandings between a client and a copywriter.

A content brief will save you and your entire team time, money, frustrations, delays, and continual revisions and rewrites during content creation.

When you've written your briefs (or created them in moments using Frase's Content Brief feature), pass them to your writers.

Writers

The most important tactic that companies are concentrating on this year is improving the quality of the content.

OrbitMedia's study said that the average article takes over 4 hours to write.

Manually, it can take day for a copywriter to research, write, edit, design images, and publish one article.

But don't let that stress you out! Frase is built to help you go from target keyword to fully drafted article in a fraction of the time. Using Frase's Rank-Ready AI Documents, you can simply input your desired topic, indicate your brand voice and style guide, generate and optimize content, and have a ready-to-post article in minutes, no subscription required.

Click here to watch how you can create a full draft of an SEO-optimized article in under four minutes in Frase!

Website, CMS, design

WordPress is the go-to content management system for many brands. Create a new page or post, paste your document from Frase, save it as a draft then add images and any other relevant assets.

Outreach and Promotion

Once you've hit publish, another important tactic to include is to distribute and promote your content.

Your efforts will depend on your brand's power in other channels and your available time and resources.

Semrush has a guide to promoting your content.

Step 10: Review, measure, repeat

The final step in a keyword strategy is to put measurement systems in place.

Make sure you set up or have access to Google Search Console or Google Analytics, as these tools will help you track key metrics such as keyword rankings and clicks.

Frase customers can use Frase Analytics which provides invaluable insights such as quick-win opportunities and measuring traffic.

We reviewed our campaign after 6 months, then repeated the process, doubling down on what worked and ditching what didn't work.

Conclusion

To sum up what you've learned today, in order to develop an effective keyword strategy for SEO, you must first have an organic search traffic goal.

Once that goal is set, you must research your audience and choose keywords related to your business model and goals.

Then you must create high-quality content around those keywords that can earn you traffic.

Finally, don't forget to check back regularly on the success of your SEO content pieces to ensure that you're headed in the right direction.

Frase is built to be your all-in-one companion along this entire SEO content process. Want to see how you can leverage Frase to execute a successful SEO strategy from research, to drafting, optimization, and beyond? Get started today!