Who is your audience and what do they need?
Audiences
Who is your audience? What do they need? What is your content and how is it aligned to the user’s needs?
Objective: Understand the needs of your site visitors.
To create content that ranks well organically and drives visitors to your site, you need to understand the needs of those visitors — the language they use and the type of content they seek. You can do this by doing your own keyword research with a tool like Keyword Explorer https://moz.com/explorer or Answer the Public https://answerthepublic.com/
What is your content and how is it aligned to that audience?
Content
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. By extension, they also describe what a piece of content is all about, and they are the words at the heart of on-page optimization. They still play an important role in a site’s ability to rank, so identifying the right words and phrases to target can have a great impact on achieving your SEO goals.
What are the different kinds of keywords?
Singular keywords might appear to be your goal as they often have high search volume. However, they usually have extremely tough competition and can be very broad, for example the keyword “college,” which doesn’t have a clear intent. Is it a specific college or is it directions to a specific college?
Long-tail keywords usually have more clearly defined intent. For example, “best engineering colleges in Ohio.” You’ll also find that long-tail keywords have less competition, with room for a smaller site to break in and make its mark on the search engine results pages.
How should you use keywords on your page?
Unique keywords should be employed on each page of a site in areas bots and people normally look to reassure them you have what they’re looking for. This includes both the title tag, meta description and body content.
Primary keywords should be used in your URL, an H1 tag on the page, the meta description and alt attributes of images on the page. All of these places will help signal search engines to what your content is really about.
As keywords define each page of your site, you can use them to organize your content and formulate a strategy. The most basic way to do this is:
- Create a spreadsheet (your “content to keyword map”) and identify your primary keyword for each page.
- Add keyword variations like long-tail keywords, keyword search volume and organic traffic to the page.
Ideally, each page on your site should target a unique primary keyword. It’s recommended the homepage should target abroad industry term and as you create category pages and articles, you should drill down into your target audience’s more specific needs.
Sample keyword research
Mapped Topic/Keywords: living kidney donation, kidney donor, living kidney donor surgery, kidney donor requirements, living kidney donor process.
Current Ranking Keywords: There are 50 ranking keywords – data is pulled from a keyword tool for the page that is undergoing optimization.
If this is new content, this research will help find opportunity keywords for your website to rank.
| # | Query | Volume per Month | Position |
| 1 | kidney donation | 2.9k – 4.3k | 34 |
| 2 | donating a kidney | 2.9k – 4.3k | 40 |
| 3 | kidney donor | 851 – 1.7k | 17 |
| 4 | donate kidney | 851 – 1.7k | 28 |
| 5 | donate a kidney | 501 – 850 | 20 |
| 6 | kidney donor requirements | 501 – 850 | 28 |
| 7 | how to donate a kidney | 501 – 850 | 46 |
| 8 | living kidney donor | 201 – 500 | 32 |
| 9 | kidney transplant donor | 201 – 500 | 41 |
| 10 | kidney donor recovery | 101 – 200 | 30 |
| 11 | donating kidney | 101 – 200 | 35 |
| 12 | living donor kidney | 101 – 200 | 38 |
| 13 | can you donate a kidney and live | 11 – 50 | 25 |
| 14 | criteria for donating a kidney | 11 – 50 | 25 |
| 15 | how to be a living kidney donor | 11 – 50 | 28 |
| 16 | kidney donation requirements | 11 – 50 | 32 |
| 17 | kidney donations | 11 – 50 | 33 |
| 18 | kidney donation testing | 11 – 50 | 36 |
| 19 | process of donating a kidney | 11 – 50 | 42 |
