Trimming and Finalizing Your Keyword List

February 27, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 135 views // View Comments

Tips to help you trim and finalize your target-keyword list.

We’ve finally come to it! Time to learn about Trimming & Finalizing Your SEO Keyword List! This is the point where you will take your huge list of keywords and trim it down to about 10 or 15 that you will target in your SEO campaign.

If you haven’t read the other parts on this series about identifying and picking your SEO Keywords, here are the links:

Lesson #1: Keyword Brainstorming

Lesson #2: Expanding Your Keyword List

Lesson #3: Using Keyword Research Tools

Lesson #4: Gathering Keyword Data

Finding the Right Balance

The most useful keywords will show a balance between popularity, relevance & competition. Now is the time to review your keywords and assign each keyword a score of High, Moderate or Low for each of the above factors.

Here are the types of keyword combination’s you should look for:

High Relevance/Low Popularity Keywords. Even though this is a keyword that is not highly searched, the ones who do search for it are more likely to click on your site and convert. FYI – Rule out keywords with 0 popularity unless it’s your company name or something similar.
High Relevance/High Competition Keywords. These are terms that are super hard to rank for, so make sure to weigh the risks before you target this term as it is a high risk/high reward deal.
High Popularity/Low Competition/High Relevance Keywords. This refers to a keyword that recieves a lot of searches & are closely related to your site, but that don’t have too much competition. FYI – These are probably the most optimal keywords for you to target initially.

Cutting the Fat

It’s time to cut away the fat and get to the real meat. Your keyword list is probably still pretty large, so we need to shave off some loose ends.

Review your keywords and see which combinations of popularity, relevance and competition suites your needs. Then ask yourself a few quick questions:

Can You Comine Any Keywords? For example, if one keyword is “real estate” and one is “commercial real estate,” you can combine the two into one keyword.
Can You Match the Keyword to the Correct Landing Page? For a keyword to perform well in the search engines, it needs to be matched to the landing page that is most relevant to the keyword.

A good strategy is to use your more general (but more competitive) terms on your site’s homepage, and save the more targeted terms for the correct subpages within your site.

The Final Cut

Now that you’ve trimmed the fat, you can finally start finalizing your keyword list! Try to get your list down to 10 or 15 manageable keywords.

However, before you finalize the list here are a couple things to ask yourself…

Does each keyword have a good home? Does each keyword on your list have a landing page that is highly relevant to that particular word. If the answer is “no” you may want to consider revising your list a bit.
Are You Overcrowding Any Pages? For the best optimization, each page should target 1 to 3 keywords at most. If you have pages that target too many terms, you may want to consider revising your list or adding more pages to your site to target other terms.
Are You Over-Optimizing? It’s is possible for your site to be over-optimized for a key phrase, its called Keyword Cannibalization. If you review your site and find that too many pages are targeting the same term, you may want to revise your list.

Thats all for the Keyword Discovery Series! Stay tuned for the next SEO Sniper Series, where you will learn how to check your site’s SEO Metrics and Baseline Reports.