What Are Keywords & Why Are They Important for SEO? (2024)

Keywords help you understand what people are searching for. They give you direction on how to connect you with your audience. And, if implemented correctly, you can use keyword optimized content to connect with your audience when they are ready to make a purchase. This is where the money is made. Many more advanced SEO and digital marketing strategies start from the humble beginnings of generating, grouping and clustering keywords and using these to create the right content to appeal to, and hopefully attract, your ideal audience.

If your goal is to drive organic traffic to your site, the keywords you choose to target (meaning the keywords you create content about and optimize your pages for) will determine how people find you through search. If you own a golf shop, for example, you might want to rank for "fancy new clubs" — but if you're not careful, you might end up attracting traffic that's interested in finding a new place to dance after dark. That is why identifying and effectively targeting your primary keywords is the foundation of a good SEO strategy designed to drive more organic traffic to your site.

Keywords are as much about your audience as your content. You might describe what you offer in a slightly different way than how your audience actually searches for it. This could lead to missing traffic due to content gaps, or draining resources by focusing on the wrong keywords. To create content that ranks well organically and drives visitors to your site, you need to understand the needs of your audience — the language they use and the type of content they seek.

Keyword placement is where the work of SEOs and content creators converge. This is a key part of on-page SEO and is one of the core three categories of SEO as a practice, the other two being off-page SEO and technical SEO. There are some basic keyword usage rules you should follow to get started. Unique keywords should be employed on each page of your site in the areas that bots and humans normally look to reassure them that you have what they're after.

The key areas that you should place your keywords on your page include:

1. URL - A URL is the web address for your page and will show up in the search results, it is used to create links and is displayed in the address bar. URLs should be created so they are easy to read and include your target keywords. Engage in a simple and understandable URL structure from the beginning to avoid making changes down the line.

2. Title tags - Title tags show up in the search results and the browser tab. They should be written for humans and optimized for robots, which is a tricky balance to strike! As this is prime real estate, all your skills in brevity and encouraging clicks will be put to the test. This leads to an important point: the pitfalls of clickbait. You may believe you're enticing more clicks by offering tantalizingly vague titles for your content, but by disguising what the page is actually about, you're masking the true intent of the page, and opting out of some of the power of keywords.

3. Meta description - Meta descriptions are displayed in the search results, are known to impact user behavior and in some cases can be rewritten by Google. Include a unique meta description for each page and don’t forget to include your target keywords.

4. Page title (H1) - H1 tags show on your page content and can help format your content so it’s consumable by humans and demonstrates topic relevance to robots.

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5. Subheadings (H2) - Heading are an important part of CMS and content design and management. It's important to format your page for your visitors so they can navigate your content, and so that search engines can understand what your content is about.

6. Body of your content - The body of your content should naturally include the keywords you’re targeting. It's no good just throwing keywords on your page. Your goal should be to create compelling content that provides real value for the user. Writing relevant content that is high quality, accurate, unique, and engaging for human visitors that sends strong signals to our robot friends at Google is often the most time-consuming and rewarding part of optimizing your content for target keywords.

7. Image Alt attributes - Image Alt text is often overlooked by site owners, provides value to visitors unable to view images, and can have the additional benefit through providing robots context for your images.

1. Do keyword research to better understand your audience and gather industry-relevant keywords.

2. Match your keywords with user intent.

3. Use your primary keywords in title tags, on-page content, H1 tags, and when you can in the page URL, meta description, and alt attributes - of course only where it makes sense, don’t stuff keywords in where they don’t make sense!

4. Perform keyword research regularly to stay on top of trends.

While you can often start with a keyword and create a piece of content around that term, sometimes your content already exists, and you need to figure out how to match it to keywords. To do this, create what's known as a "content to keyword map." Creating this map can help you understand the impact of your existing content and identify weak links or gaps that need filling.

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 to start a spreadsheet (your "content to keyword map") and identify your primary keyword for each article. You can then build your sheet to your own requirements, add keyword search volume, organic traffic, Page Authority, and any other metrics that are important to your business.

Ideally, you want each page on your site to target a unique primary keyword. Generally speaking, your homepage will target a very broad industry term and as you create category pages, product pages, and articles, they will drill down into your niche and target more specific needs.

“So, when it comes to using product synonyms to scale your SEO strategy, the key is to align user search intent with a product use case that helps them.”

Adriana Stein - on the Moz Blog

What makes a good keyword?

A good keyword depends on a combination of metrics like Search Volume, Difficulty, Organic CTR. You’re looking for keywords with higher volume, but lower level of difficulty so you can drive more traffic to your site, ideally the kind of traffic that converts. Don’t forget to assess for relevancy and intent and create content that satisfies your target audience. You’re trying to capture the audience you want that also wants you, which is what SEO and keyword research is all about.

How do I discover popular keywords?

You can discover popular keywords by looking at competitors in your industry, as well as understanding the keywords that your customers are searching. A great way to discover popular keywords is to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool. You simply input a keyword to do with your primary topic, and the tool will then show you other related keywords, along with a search volume metric. You can then filter to see those keywords with the highest search volume. But be careful, as highly searched-for terms, may not always be the best keywords to use!

What is a keyword strategy?

A keyword strategy is a plan you create upon the findings of your keyword research. This involves the target keywords you have chosen, and where and how you choose to place them on your page. Your keyword strategy supports your larger SEO strategy. Strategies involve setting goals and doing the work to achieve those goals, they help you to benchmark the success of your hard work. You can learn more creating a profitable keyword strategy with the Moz Keyword Research Certification.

How many types of keywords are there?

Keyword types can be defined in many different ways.

The search demand curve defines three main keyword types: head, long-tail, and middle keywords. Where the long-tail is the many different ways people search a combination of words and phrases around a defined niche (typically has lower search volume and lower competition, but when grouped could be a more appealing prospect than the head), the head being the simple and popular industry term (typically has higher search volume and more competition) and the middle is somewhere in between.

There are also branded and non-branded keywords. Helpful to understand when you’re talking to a client about their current rankings and presenting a strategy for broadening their visibility.

Location-based keywords, or geo-modified keywords are search phrases that typically include a city or neighborhood name or a zip code (i.e. ‘best coffee spot in Seattle.’). They are critical for brick-and-mortar or service area businesses.

There are also intent-based keywords. The four commonly-recognized intents are: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Keywords can be broadly grouped into these four intents and applying this to your strategy helps you tailor content to your audience's immediate needs.