Content marketing has become one of the dominant forms of marketing for most small, midsize and even large businesses. Focus keyword phrases play a big role in it.
Making sure that the content you create has the best chance of success is imperative, and including focus keywords is part of that mandate.
What’s the value of keyword phrases?
Focus keyword phrases are essentially signals that get sent to the search engines to help them classify what type of content their algorithms are reading. Each focused keyword phrase has a different value, depending on how many people actively search for it, as well as how much demand there is from advertisers.
Let’s use the word credit card as an example. We can see that hundreds of thousands of people type that phrase into search engines every month because it is a commercially appealing, focused keyword phrase. Many advertisers are willing to spend money for every click that comes from that keyword. So that’s an example of the value that is associated with keyword phrases.
How many times should the keyword be included within one piece of content?
Let’s define content. Content can take many different forms, such as news commentaries, thought leadership sources, blog posts, etc.
A typical blog post is anywhere between 800 and 1000 words, so it’s going to be meaty and it will help convey certain information, thoughts or insights. So it’s going to be meaty and that’s going to help convey certain information, thoughts or insights. However, your focused keyword should appear no more than six or seven times, as you don’t want to stuff your article with focus keyword phrases, especially in an unnatural fashion. Doing so detracts from the readability.
Search engines have evolved their technologies to a point where they can easily detect artificial means of gaming the system. And they’re ultimately going to penalize not only an article with too many keywords, but potentially your entire website. So it’s just not worth stuffing an article with keyword phrases.
The best places to include focus keyword phrases are where they are most relevant: in the title, the article, some of your sub headers and any bullet lists, and then either at the beginning or the end where there’s a call to action that’s typically associated with the article.
How to keep the balance in keywords to make them work for the audience and search engines
You need to focus your content marketing program on the visitor as the primary target and on the search engines as the secondary target. If you focus on readability and value to the reader first, you’re going to have a much better chance of success than if you focus on the search engines as your primary driver.
So when you’re thinking about the balance between the two, you want to make sure that you place more weight on visitors and readability. This is not to say that you’re should ignore the search engines – just make sure that you put everything in perspective.
In summary
Focus keyword phrases are a great way to accentuate the content that you’re creating and make it easier for the search engines to quickly ascertain and understand the type of content you’re producing so that they can correctly classify it within their results.
But don’t go overboard. Keep your keyword density down somewhere around 0.6% of the total words in your content and make sure you focus on the reader. If you do that, you’ll not only draw new visitors to your site, you’ll also develop your brand and start putting these people into a sales funnel that’s going to be successful.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our eBook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This eBook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
