Keyword Targeting May Be Dead, But Using Keywords Isn’t

In the old days, search engine optimization relied heavily on keyword targeting. Writers had to find a way to bake in variations of keyword phrases into content and use them multiple times. At the same time, SEO specialists worked to include keywords in everything from webpage URLs to meta data.

Unfortunately, this strategy was abused by webmasters, and users were increasingly disappointed by search results. With this type of keyword strategy, websites could rank for keywords even though the website failed to answer user queries or provided a poor user experience.

Since then, search engines have become smarter about the way the rank websites, and keyword targeting doesn’t work the way it used to.

Despite algorithm updates, search queries are still very powerful. They help us understand user intent and identify what to write about to convert visitors into customers.

Ranking for multiple keywords in an article helps you get more out of the content you create, but it can be difficult to do – especially when you don’t have a well-defined strategy.

How to Rank for Multiple Keywords

Here are the best ways to rank your webpages and blog posts for multiple keywords.

Longer Content Pieces

Long-form content is one way to rank for multiple keywords. Search engines determine that longer articles provide more information and are therefore more useful to the searcher. While that isn’t always the case, writing long-form content could help you rank for more than one search query.

Longer content also keeps visitors on your pages longer. It’s no surprise that bounce rates play a part in ranking. Time per page and click through rate play important roles in ranking. By providing readers with more information, you can keep them engaged on your site longer, which will improve your time on site.

Find trending topics or topics your target audience is searching. There are a variety of tools that can help with this. Use Google trends to discover trending queries, and to determine if your existing queries are still popular. Set up Google alerts to stay up to date on industry stories and topics. To find popular questions use AnswerThePublic.com. You’ll get a great visualization of topics you can answer with your content.

It’s important to provide useful content. You should answer questions as completely as possible, which should help you reach your target words per page. What counts as long-form content? Articles with 2,000 words are more are considered long-form.

Not every post you create needs to be long-form. Some topics don’t lend themselves to that many words. Long-form content is also harder and more expensive to generate. There’s still value in short-form content, as long as it’s targeted for user intent.

Backlinks Are Still Powerful

While poor backlinks can hurt your SEO, search engines still look to backlinks to determine the quality of your content. The more backlinks you have, the more of an authority you appear to search engines, but backlinks can be hard to get, especially if your topic is short-term loans or other less popular topics.

Backlinks are created when another website links to a page on your website. The better the authority of the website, the more powerful the backlink for your SEO and the more traffic you can receive. In this case “authority” refers to the popularity of the website. A site could be considered an authority if they rank highly for your keywords, have a lot of backlinks, and receive a high amount of traffic.

While building backlinks can be challenging, there are several ways to get backlinks. One way to get backlinks is the broken-link method. You find broken links on a website, then write to the site notifying them of the broken links and recommend they replace the link with a link to your site. Of course, this only works if you have similar content on your website. To start, find websites in your niche that are linking to sites with similar content to yours. You can find these sites by using the following search queries in Google:

• Keyword + links
• Keyword + resources
• Keywords inurl:links

Once you’ve formed a list of websites, use the Google Chrome plugin Check My Links. This plugin will help you identify any broken links on the page.

Choose Related Keywords

To rank for multiple keywords, it’s important to choose keywords that are closely related. Use a keyword clustering tool like SerpStat to help you find similar keywords. The website provides keywords that are somewhat related, which they call “soft clustering,” and keywords that are highly related referred to as “hard clustering.”

According to SerpStat, keyword clustering is the process of grouping semantically related keywords in a way that is relevant to a particular website page. Keyword clustering is important for websites that promote or sell multiple products from various industries. A financial blog for example, may write about several loan products from small loans to mortgages. Keyword clusters help you find the right keywords for specific pages.

How Do I Find Related Keywords?

There are several keyword tools to help you find search queries, but to find similar search queries use a Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keyword generator. LSI will help you find search terms that are related to each other. You have multiple options when it comes to LSI keyword generators, but one popular one is LSIGraph.

Get more out of your content by ranking for multiple keywords. How do you rank for multiple keywords? Share your strategies with us.