Easy methods to Use Key phrases for website positioning: The Full Newbie’s Information

On this information, I’ll cowl intimately the right way to make the perfect use of key phrases in three steps:

Discovering good key phrases: key phrases which can be rankable and produce worth to your website.
Utilizing key phrases in content material and meta tags: the right way to use the goal key phrase to construction and write content material that can fulfill readers and ship relevance indicators to serps.
Monitoring key phrases: monitoring your (and your opponents’) efficiency.

There’s actually lots you are able to do with only a single key phrase, so on the finish of the article, you’ll discover just a few superior website positioning ideas.

As soon as you know the way to seek out one good key phrase, it is possible for you to to create a whole record of key phrases.

1. Choose related seed key phrases to generate key phrase concepts

Seed key phrases are phrases or phrases that you need to use as the place to begin in a keyword research process to unlock more keywords. For example, for our site, these could be general terms like “seo, organic traffic, digital marketing, keywords, backlinks”, etc.

There are many good sources of seed keywords, and it’s not a bad idea to try them all:

Brainstorming. This involves gathering a team or working solo to think deeply about the terms your potential customers might use when searching for your products or services.
Your competitors’ website navigation. The labels they use in their navigation menus, headers, and footers often highlight critical industry terms and popular products or services that you might also want to target.
Your competitors’ keywords. Tools like Ahrefs can help you discover which keywords your competitors are targeting in their SEO and paid ad campaigns. I’ll cover that in a bit.
Your website and promo materials. Review your website’s text, especially high-performing pages, as well as any promotional materials like brochures, ads, and press releases. These sources can reveal the terms that already resonate with your audience.
Generative AI. AI tools can generate keyword ideas based on brief descriptions of your business, products, or industry (example below).

Here’s what you can ask any generative AI for, whether that’s Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.

Next, paste your seed keywords into a tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to generate keyword ideas. If you’re using Ahrefs, you can go straight into Keywords Explorer, get AI suggestions there, and start researching right away.

Using Keyword Explorer's AI feature to generate keyword ideas.

Next, make sure you’ve set up the country in which you’ll want to rank and hit “Search”.

After hitting the “Search” button, go to the Matching terms report. You will see a big list of keywords.

The list you’ll get will be quite raw — not all keywords will be equally good and the list will likely be too big to manage. Next steps are all about refining the list because we’ll be looking for target keywords — the keywords that will become the topic of your content.

2. Refine the list and cluster

The next step is to refine your list using filters.

Some useful basic filters are:

KD (Keyword Difficulty): how difficult it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

Traffic potential: traffic you can get for ranking #1 for that keyword and other relevant keywords (based on the page that currently ranks #1).

Lowest DR (Domain Rating): plug in the DR of your site to see keywords where another site with the same DR already ranks in the top 10. In other words, it helps to find “rankable” keywords.

Target: one of the main use cases is excluding keywords you already rank for.

Include/Exclude: see keywords that contain specific words to increase relevancy/hide keywords with irrelevant words.

For example, here’s how to find potentially rankable keywords with traffic potential above 300 monthly visits. Go to the Matching terms report in Keywords Explorer and set filters: keyword difficulty filter (KD) to your site’s Domain Rating, Traffic potential, and Volume filters to a minimum of 300.

Using filters to find the best keywords.

Clustering is another step to refine your list. It shows you if there is another keyword you could target to get more traffic (aka parent topic). At the same time, it shows which keywords most likely belong on the same page.

For example, here are some clusters distilled from low-competition topics about marketing.

Pro tip

Take keyword trends into account when choosing keywords.

For example, the keyword “is affiliate marketing legit” is at 8.8k monthly search volume right now, but based on our forecast in Keywords Explorer (the orange part of the chart), if it continues its current growth rate it should be more than triple next year.

The graphs will also show you if the search volume is affected by seasonality (fluctuations in search volume throughout different times of the year).

Identifying keyword seasonality on a search volume graph.

4. Identify search intent and determine value for your site

Before investing time in content, make sure you can give searchers what they want and that the keywords will attract the right kind of audience.

To identify the type of page you need to create to satisfy searchers, look at the top-ranking pages to see what purpose they serve (are they more informational or commercial), or simply use the Identify intents AI feature in Keywords Explorer.

So, for example, if the top-ranking pages are ecommerce pages and you’re not offering products on your site, it’s going to be very hard to rank.

Then, ask yourself if visitors attracted by a keyword will be valuable to your business — whether they’re likely to subscribe to your newsletter or make a purchase. At Ahrefs, we use a business potential score to evaluate this.

Finally, if a keyword checks all boxes, add it to a keyword list.

Now you’ve got a list of relevant, valuable target keywords with traffic potential ready for content creation. You can repeat the process as many times as you like with different seed keywords or different filters and find new ideas.

There’s one more great source of keywords — competitors.

5. Enrich the list with your competitors’ keywords

In this step, we’ll do a content gap analysis to find keywords your competitors already rank for, but you don’t.

First, let’s find your competitors.

Enter your domain in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Organic competitors report.

Select the most relevant competitors and click on Copy (this copies URLs — we’ll use them in another tool).

Next, we’ll see which keywords you’re missing.

Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool, paste the previously copied URLs, enter your domain on top and hit Show keyword opportunities.

In the Content gap report, use filters to refine the report.
Select keywords and add them to your list.

Pro tip

If you stumble across two similar keywords there’s an easy way to determine if they belong on the same page.

Enter the keyword in Keywords Explorer.
Scroll to SERP overview, click Compare with, and enter the keyword to compare with.

Fewer common results and low SERP (Search Engine Result Page) similarity mean separate pages should target the two keywords.

SERP overview feature in Ahrefs showing SERP similarity score.

After getting your goal key phrase, you possibly can embrace it in related locations in your on-page content material, together with:

Key parts of search intent (content material kind, format, and angle).
URL slug.
Title and H1.
Meta description.
Subheadings (H2 – H6).
Major content material.
Anchor textual content for hyperlinks.

And, simply so we’re on the identical web page, the goal key phrase is the subject of the content material and the principle key phrase you’ll be optimizing for and monitoring later on.

Use the goal key phrase to find out the search intent

Search intent is the rationale behind the search. Understanding it tells you what customers are on the lookout for and what it is advisable to ship in your content material.

To determine search intent, take a look at the top-ranking outcomes to your goal key phrase on Google and determine the three Cs of search intent:

Content material kind – What’s the dominating kind of content material? Is it a weblog submit, product web page, video, or one thing else? In the event you’ve completed that throughout the key phrase analysis section (extremely advisable), solely two parts to go.
Content material format – Some frequent codecs embrace how-to guides, record posts, evaluations, comparisons, and many others.
Content material angle – The distinctive promoting level of the top-ranking factors, e.g., “finest,” “most cost-effective,” “for inexperienced persons,” and many others. Gives perception into what searchers worth in a specific search.

For instance, most top-ranking pages for “avocado seed” are weblog posts serving as how-to guides for planting the seed. Using simple and easy angles signifies that searchers are inexperienced persons on the lookout for easy recommendation.

Use the goal key phrase within the URL slug

A URL slug is the a part of the URL that identifies a particular web page on an internet site in a type readable by each customers and serps.

In the event you take a look at the URL of the web page you’re on, that would be the final half, “how-to-use-keywords-seo”.

https://ahrefs.com/weblog/how-to-use-keywords-seo

Google says to make use of phrases which can be related to your content material inside web page URLs (source). Usually, the easiest way to do that is to set your target keyword in the slug part of the URL.

Use the target keyword in the title and match it with the H1 tag

A title tag is a bit of HTML code used to specify the title of a webpage.

<title>How to Use Keywords for SEO: A-Z Guide For Beginners</title>

The H1 tag is an HTML heading that’s most commonly used to mark up a web page title.

<h1>How to Use Keywords for SEO: A-Z Guide For Beginners</h1>

Both are very important to Google and searchers. Since they both indicate what the page is about, you can just match them, like I did in this article.

Titles help Google understand the context of a page. What’s more, even a slight improvement to your title can improve your rankings.

Higher ranking just by changing the title of a page. — My colleague Chris Haines made a small change in the tile and jumped 3 positions.

Google advises focusing on creating good titles, which should be “unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describe the contents of the page” (source). It’s exhausting to consider a greater solution to precisely describe the contents apart from utilizing the goal key phrase.

If it is smart for the title, goal for an actual match of the key phrase. But when it is advisable to insert a preposition or break the phrase, this gained’t make Google suppose your web page is much less related. Google understands shut variations of the key phrase rather well, so there’s no have to stuff in comparable key phrases, misspellings, and many others.

For example, my previous article on the right way to see key phrases that Google Analytics gained’t present ranks #1 for a lot of variations of the phrase within the title.

Article header - example of using target keyword in the title.

Keyword variations of the target keyword.

Use the key phrase in meta description

Nonetheless, don’t write meta descriptions solely for Google; Google rewrites them greater than half of the time (study) and doesn’t use them for ranking purposes. As a substitute, deal with crafting meta descriptions for searchers.

These descriptions seem within the SERPs, the place customers can learn them. In case your description is related and compelling, it may enhance the probability of customers clicking in your hyperlink.

Together with your goal key phrase within the meta description is often pure. As an example, think about the outline of the article talked about earlier. Incorporating the key phrase into the sentences merely gives a complete solution to describe the situation.

Use the goal key phrase to seek out secondary key phrases

Secondary key phrases are any key phrases carefully associated to the first key phrase that you just’re focusing on along with your web page.

You’ll find them by your major key phrase and use them as subheadings (H2 to H6 tags) and speaking factors all through the content material. Right here’s how.

Go to Key phrases Explorer and plug in your goal key phrase. From there, head on to the Associated phrases report and toggle between:

Additionally rank for: key phrases that the highest 10 rating pages additionally rank for.
Additionally speak about: key phrases steadily point out by top-ranking articles.

Also rank for and also talk about reports in Ahrefs.

Now, to know how to make use of these key phrases in your textual content, simply manually take a look at the highest rating pages and see how and the place they cowl the key phrases.

For instance, one of many prime articles for “digital advertising and marketing”, we will see immediately that a few of the most necessary elements are the definition, a template and significance. You should use the free Ahrefs SEO Toolbar to break down the structure of any page instantly.

Content structure displayed in Ahrefs SEO Toolbar.

Another place you can look for inspiration is the People Also Ask Box in the SERPs. Use it to find words and subtopics that may be worth adding to the article.

Pro tip

Optimizing an existing article?

Use the Content Gap tool to find subtopics you may be missing. The tool shows keywords that your competitors’ pages rank for, and your page doesn’t.

Go to Keywords Explorer and enter your target keyword.
Scroll down to the SERP overview, select a few top pages, and click Open in Content Gap.

Accessing content gap via a shortcut in Keywords Explorer.

In Content Gap, click on Targets and add the page you’re optimizing in the last field.

Content gap tool in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Use primary and secondary keywords in the main content

To rank high on search engines, it’s important to include your keywords in your text. Even though Google is good at understanding similar words and variations, it still helps to use the specific keywords people might search for. Google explains that in their short guide to how search works:

Essentially the most primary sign that data is related is when content material incorporates the identical key phrases as your search question. For instance, with webpages, if these key phrases seem on the web page, or if they seem within the headings or physique of the textual content, the knowledge may be extra related.

When writing, it’s necessary to include key phrases naturally. Begin your content material with essentially the most related data that persons are more likely to seek for. This ensures that key factors are instantly seen to your readers and serps.

Close variations of the target keyword included naturally in the intro. — Shut variations of the goal key phrase included naturally within the intro.

You probably have a secondary key phrase that’s much less important however nonetheless related, think about giving it a devoted part. This method means that you can discover the subject intimately, slightly than briefly mentioning it on the finish of your content material.

Secondary keywords included in subheadings. — Secondary key phrases included in subheadings.

Nonetheless, keep away from overemphasizing the frequency of your key phrases. Efficient website positioning includes extra than simply repeating key phrases. If website positioning have been merely about key phrase density, it could be easy, however such methods don’t result in long-term success and might make your content material really feel spammy.

As an example, if ‘content material technique’ is a central theme of your dialogue and also you point out it solely as soon as, Google may understand your content material as incomplete. Alternatively, stuffing your article with the time period ‘content material technique’ greater than obligatory gained’t outperform your opponents and will probably result in your website being flagged as spam.

Use the goal key phrase in hyperlink anchor textual content and/or surrounding textual content

The anchor textual content or hyperlink textual content is the clickable textual content of an HTML hyperlink.

Google makes use of anchors to grasp the web page’s context. There even appears to be a consensus that anchor text is a ranking factor, though, in keeping with our research, it’s seemingly a weak one.

In conditions like these, it’s simply finest to stay with Google’s recommendation:

Good anchor textual content is descriptive, moderately concise, and related to the web page that it’s on and to the web page it hyperlinks to. It gives context for the hyperlink, and units the expectation to your readers. (…)

Bear in mind to offer context to your hyperlinks: the phrases earlier than and after hyperlinks matter, so take note of the sentence as a complete.

So use the goal key phrase within the anchor textual content and or surrounding textual content however maintain it pure — add solely on pages which can be associated to the web page you’re linking to and use textual content that can assist the readers perceive the place and why you’re linking.

For instance, on this web page about “content material optimization” there’s a hyperlink together with “featured snippets” within the anchor, which can also be the goal key phrase of the web page linked to.

Rank monitoring refers to monitoring the positions of an internet site’s pages in search engine outcomes for particular key phrases.

It’s just about an automatic course of; all the things might be dealt with by a instrument like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. No need to check rankings manually and note them down in a spreadsheet.

If you have a keyword list ready, all you need to do is add that list to Rank Tracker.

Adding keywords to a rank tracking list.

The keywords will appear in Rank Tracker’s Overview report.

Another way to add keywords is to hit Add keywords in the top right corner (best for adding single keywords or importing a list from a document).

Adding single keywords or keywords from a list.

Now to compare your performance against competitors, just go to the Competitors report. The metric I recommend tracking is SOV (Share of Voice). It shows how many clicks go to your pages compared to competitors.

One of the key advantages of SOV is that it accounts for fluctuations in search volume trends. Therefore, if you notice a decrease in traffic but maintain a high SOV, it indicates that the drop is due to a decrease in the overall popularity of the keywords, not a decline in your SEO effectiveness.

But not only can you track your competitors’ keywords, you can also monitor them. Use a tool like Ahrefs Alerts to get notifications whenever your competitors started working for a new keyword.

Just to go Alerts tool in Ahrefs and fill in the details.

There’s much more you are able to do with key phrases and a bit extra it is best to know to keep away from some frequent errors.

1. Use key phrases to seek out visitor running a blog alternatives

Visitor running a blog is the follow of writing and publishing a weblog submit on one other particular person or firm’s web site.

It’s some of the common link building tactics with a few other benefits like exposure to a new, targeted audience.

Here’s how to find relevant, high-quality sites to pitch:

Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer.
Enter a broad keyword or phrase related to your niche.
Select In title from the drop-down menu.
Run the search.

Finding guest post opportunities using Ahrefs' Content Explorer

Next, refine the list by applying these filters:

Domain Rating (DR) from 30 to 60.
Click the One page per domain filter.
Click the Exclude homepages filter.
Click the Exclude subdomains filter.

Narrowing down Content Explorer's results using filters

Finally, click on the Websites tab to see potential websites you could guest blog for.

Using the "Websites" tab to find the best guest blogging opportunities.

2. Use keywords to find internal link opportunities

Internal links take visitors from one page to another on your website. Their main purpose is to help visitors easily navigate your website, but they can also help boost SEO by aiding the flow of link equity.

Finding new internal link opportunities is also a time-consuming process if done manually, but you can identify them in bulk using Ahrefs’ Site Audit. The tool takes the top 10 keywords (by traffic) for each crawled page, then looks for mentions of those on your other crawled pages.

Click on the Internal link opportunities report in Site Audit.

Internal link opportunities tool in Ahrefs.

You’ll see a bunch of suggestions on how to improve your internal linking using new links. The tool even suggests exactly where to place the internal link.

Ahrefs' Site Audit showing where to add internal link

3. Use keywords to find link building opportunities

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. Its purpose is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of Google and help your pages rank.

A good place to start is to pull up the top-ranking pages for your target keyword and research where they got their links from.

Put your keyword into Keywords Explorer and scroll down to the SERP overview. You’ll see the top-ranking pages and their number of backlinks (and linking domains).