SEO Keyword Research Best Practices 2017

 The more things change, the more they stay the same.  So it goes in life and in SEO!  To simplify SEO, we've put together some best practices for 2017.  The first post about general SEO best practices got really long, so we are going to break it out into multiple posts, the first of which is keyword research best practices.  

SEO Keyword Selection Best Practices
Deciding which keywords to target organically is an art (research, reading and hypotheses) and a science (keyword volume, analytics and conversion data).  

​The art part (aht paht if you're from Boston) requires a deep competitive review, as well as an awareness of your own product and how your customers talk about it (looking "outside in" in marketing speak).  It can actually be a fun exercise to go to Google search and see what longer tail terms show up when using some of your core keywords with Google's autocomplete.  For example, if you offer accounting services, you could go see what people are actually searching re: this:







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This is a good place to start, but which SEO keywords are really "worth it"?  Well, that depends on your business and whether you have the content to support it (note:  keyword research is a data-driven way to identify content development needs and strategies - use it!).  

After free-associating with the Google autofill tool, get ready to use the SCIENCE piece of the puzzle and find keyword data for the keywords you think are the best fit.  To find search volume, competition and expand your list, use the free Google AdWords keyword research tool or others from paid subscriptions to Moz, BrightEdge, Authority Labs, Spyfu, etc.

Once you have a list, we recommend separating keywords for SEO targets into categories and subcategories.

Keyword Funnel for SEO Keywords - Best Practices

We like using different types of keywords in our SEO strategies to target people in three broad funnel categories from interest-seeking to ready-to-buy.  (side note:  if you're also using the list for PPC, make sure the terms align to your PPC KPIs - likely further down in the funnel)

• Researchers: searchers collecting information
• Comparers: searchers evaluating reputation
• Converters: searchers ready to decide

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search query funnel

 Best Practices for Measuring SEO Keyword Success

After creating your master SEO keyword list (which we like to call a universe), upload it into Moz, Authority Labs, BrightEdge, or whatever your chosen keyword tracking tool is.  This is really important to measure success.  Establish a baseline by running an SEO keywords rankings report prior to making any optimizations.

After you make  your optimizations, you should check these rankings reports regularly to measure how search engines accept your SEO efforts.  You ought to be able to see a correlation between an improvement in keyword SEO positions and traffic to the ranking page (and hopefully conversions!) with a good SEO strategy.   A way to prove this out is to look in Google Webmaster Tools for the Pages report and view the queries that have led to that page.  

Click here to see our next post about SEO in 2017 - SEO Predictions for 2017.