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Keyword research should be the first step of every SEO strategy. Thinking about the words you want to rank for is really the first and foremost step you need to take. Still, keyword research can be quite daunting. So, which keyword research mistakes should you avoid at all times? In this post, I'll talk you through the most common keyword research mistakes people seem to be making. Avoiding these mistakes will help you to set up a successful keyword research strategy.

1. Not executing your keyword research correctly

Doing proper keyword research can be a tough job. Perhaps you think that you don't need to do it very extensively. You just know what your audience will search for, right? Do not make that mistake! Take some time to really dive into the language of your audience. Which words do they use? What terms do they search for?

The result of your keyword research should be an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Make sure to update your keyword research regularly. Your audience may change, as may your business focus and business needs. That could have implications for your keyword strategy as well.
Read more: 'Keyword research: the ultimate guide' "
2. Aiming at unrealistic keywords

Make sure to aim for realistic keywords. Some niches are very competitive. Ranking in competitive niches is hard if you're just starting your website or business. If you're just starting out, you shouldn't aim on the competitive 'head' keywords (yet). Instead, you should focus on long tail keywords (which are easier to rank for and have a higher chance to convert).

For instance, if you start a blog about fitness it will be too hard to start ranking for the term 'fitness'. Find out which aspects of your blog are unique and try ranking for those terms. Perhaps you are writing about fitness exercises for retired people. Aiming to rank for 'fitness for retired people' could be a good strategy. In that case, you should also aim for 'fitness for seniors', 'fitness for older adults' and so on.

If you have been around in your niche for a little longer and you're succeeding in ranking on long tail keywords, you could aim to rank for more head terms as well. Ranking for competitive keywords should be part of a long-term successful keyword research strategy.
Keep reading: 'Long tail keywords: why they deserve your focus' "
3. Using irrelevant keywords

The keywords you are aiming to rank for should be the same words your customers use. You should always use the language of your audience. Imagine yourself selling dresses for gala events. In your marketing, you refer to these dresses as gala dresses. However, people do not search for gala dresses. They search for 'gown' or 'evening dress'. You won't get much traffic for the search term 'gala dress' compared to the search terms 'gown' or 'evening dress'.

4. Focusing on singular instead of plural

Always check whether you should use the plural or the singular form of a specific keyword. Should you aim to rank for 'ballet shoe' or for 'ballet shoes'? Do people search for 'holiday home' or 'holiday homes'. Always check whether you should use singular or plural with Google Trends. Whether you should use a singular or a plural depends on your specific keyword.

5. Aiming for keywords without traffic

Long tail keywords are a great way to start your keyword strategy. These words gain less traffic, but you'll have a higher chance to convert your visitors into buyers or returning visitors. People that use specific terms to search for exactly that thing you're writing about are just a very good match. However, if your keyword is too specific and doesn't get any traffic, it won't help your SEO. So make sure to aim for those long tail keywords that actually have some traffic!

6. Forgetting to evaluate

If you're aiming to rank for certain terms, make sure to check whether you succeed. You need to evaluate regularly if people actually find your articles. In order to do so, you should definitely google your proposed focus keyword every now and then. Just check if your article turns up in the results. If you forget to evaluate, you don't know whether you could aim for more competitive keywords or you should focus on long tail variants.
Read on: 'Adapting your content SEO strategy' "
7. Focusing on only one keyword per post

If you write a decent blog post, you could aim to rank for more than one search term. If you're able to do that (without just stretching it), you should definitely do so. For this blog post about keyword research mistakes, for instance, I am aiming to rank for 'keyword research mistakes' and on 'successful keyword research strategy'. Our Yoast SEO premium plugin helps you to optimize your post for more than one focus keyword.

Conclusion: avoid these mistakes and have a successful keyword research strategy

Executing keyword research takes a lot of time. It's important that you take that time and really think about the terms you want to rank for. Read Keyword research: the ultimate guide for lots of practical tips that'll help you to set up a successful keyword research strategy.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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7 keyword research mistakes you should avoid * Yoast

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Keyword research should be the first step of every SEO strategy. Thinking about the words you want to rank for is really the first and foremost step you need to take. Still, keyword research can be quite daunting. So, which keyword research mistakes should you avoid at all times?

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If you start a new site, either a blog or an online shop, you won't rank immediately. So, what's the first step you need to take to boost your rankings? In our view, you should always start with keyword research. Take some time to think about the words you want to be found for: which words are your audience searching for? But how do you find that out? What tools are useful? And, when you've found those keywords, how do you determine which ones you should focus on first? The most competitive (head), or the less competitive (long tail) keywords? In this post we'll illustrate with a case study how to start your keyword research.

Focus on head or tail? Google it!

My cousin Sanne recently started her own online shop: Made by Mae. She's a graphic designer and designs really cute posters, postcards and milestone cards. She asked me about SEO: where should she start? "Did you do your keyword research?" I asked. She did. She wanted to rank for the Dutch translation of [personalized poster]. And she already figured that aiming for those high-end search terms like [postcard] en [poster] would be pretty useless.

But how do you know for sure? You should check the competition! Google the keywords that are the most competitive and analyze the results. Are these major companies? Companies with large marketing budgets? Then you'll probably have a hard time ranking for these head terms. Ask yourself what the probability is that you'd be able to rank for such a term. Then, try a term that is slightly less competitive, and see what comes up. Did the probability change much?

If you do this, starting from very competitive head terms to slightly longer and less used search terms, you'll get a pretty good idea of where your website should be able to fit in and rank. For Made by Mae, focusing on (the Dutch translation of) [postcards] and [posters] would be a bit too difficult to go after just now. [Trendy postcards] or [trendy posters] results in less competition. I would choose even less competitive search terms like [personalized trendy postcards].

Make a long list!

You should never focus on just one keyword. You should make a long, a very long list. My cousin should make a list of at least a hundred keywords. These could be variations of different keywords. As the menu of Made by Mae states she sells posters, personalized posters, postcards, milestone cards and printables. So my cousin should try to come up with keywords around these terms. For example: [cute milestone cards], [personalized milestone cards], [trendy milestone cards], [black-and-white milestone cards] and so on. Make sure to rate the competitiveness of each of your keywords.

Start writing content

Blogging is a great way of creating content. My cousin could write really awesome blog post related to her products. She recently gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and she should have lots of inspiration. However, a keyword is not a subject of a blog post just yet. You'll need a specific angle or topic for the keyword you would like to rank for.
Read more: '5 tips to find inspiration for your blog' "
Use Google trends!

If you have to choose between certain keywords you'd like to rank for, but you don't know which one to choose, you should use Google trends. Google trends will allow you to compare the search volume of a few terms. If you want to know whether it makes sense to write about trendy postcards or about personalized postcards, Google Trends will give you your answer:

Think about chances to convert

While doing your keyword research, you should already think about the chance to convert for people searching for a specific keyword. For instance: if people are specifically searching for [black-and-white milestone cards], they will be more prone to buying a set of cards than if people are searching for [milestone cards]. People searching for [black-and-white milestone cards] already know what they want, they know what they're searching for. Once they'll find the milestone cards on Made by Mae, they will be more eager to buy them.

People searching for long tail, specific keywords generally have a higher chance to buy something when they end up on your website. So, perhaps, you'll generate less traffic with a post optimized for [black-and-white milestone cards], than with a post optimized for [milestone cards], but you'll end up with more sales nevertheless.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a very important first step in SEO. And after that, you'll have to start writing. A lot. Writing will not instantly result in higher rankings. It'll take time. It's a longterm SEO strategy. But it will pay off eventually!
Keep reading: 'Keyword research: the ultimate guide' "

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How to start your keyword research: a case study * Yoast

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If you start a new site, either a blog or an online shop, you won't rank immediately. So, what's the first step you need to take to boost your rankings? In our view, you should always start with keyword research.

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Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when they're linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, which enables you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, pages. So using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO!
Did you know our Site structure training can help you figure out how to build the best possible structure for your site? You'll learn all about cornerstone content, taxonomies, internal linking and much more. Try it out, you'll love it!
Why are links important to Google?

Googles uses links to find out what content on your site is related and what the value of that content is.

Relationships between content

Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Google bot. This bot arrives at the homepage of a website, starts to render the page and follows the first link. By following links Google determines the relationship between the various pages, posts and other content. This way Google finds out which pages on your site cover similar subject matter.

In the sidebar of this post, for example, you'll see links to the category 'Content SEO' and to the 'Internal linking' and 'Site structure' tags. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.

Link value

In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a website. Often, the homepage of a website has the greatest link value because it has the most backlinks. This link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. Link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on.

Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage, instead of only on the category page. And Google will find new posts quicker if they're linked to from the homepage.

If you understand that links pass link value on, you'll understand that more links to a post mean more value. Because Google deems a page that gets lots of valuable links as more important, you'll increase the chance of that page ranking.

Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! " Info

Setting up an internal linking strategy

It's crucial for your SEO to evaluate and improve internal linking strategy on a regular basis. By adding the right internal links you make sure Google understands the relevance of pages, the relationship between pages and the value of pages.

The ideal structure

We always advise website owners to imagine their website to be a pyramid with the most important content on top. We call those articles cornerstone content. There should be lots of links to that most essential content from topically-related pages in the pyramid, which passes most link value on to those pages. However, you should also link from those top pages to subpages about related topics. Linking internally to related content shows Google what pages hold information about similar topics.

Linking your cornerstone content: an example

On our website we have a cornerstone content article called ' The ultimate guide to keyword research'. We want this post to rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results. By adding internal links from other relevant articles, such as ' How to start with keyword research' and ' 7 keyword research mistakes to avoid ' to the main article, Google will understand that the cornerstone content article contains most information about this particular keyword. So ultimately, Google will rank the cornerstone content above other, smaller posts about keyword research.

Don't forget to link from the top too

Besides linking from topically related posts and pages, it's possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. This will give the most important posts or pages a lot of link value and makes them stronger in Google's eyes.

Linking to taxonomies

If you run a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google to understand the structure of your blog and helps visitors to more easily navigate to related posts. At Yoast we always link to the matching categories and tags in the sidebar of each post:

Linking to related posts

We've already seen that linking to related posts helps Google to understand your site structure, but it also helps to link to one or more related posts at the end of your article. There are many available plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use one we recommend testing whether the related posts are actually the best related posts. If you're not sure, linking to posts manually (or using our internal linking tool - more on that later) is probably best. That's what we do on Yoast.com - we select a related post manually (with a little help from Yoast SEO Premium) and place a link to that post at the bottom of the article:

Michiel explains this fully in this post about linking to related posts.

Linking to popular or recent posts

The last option to mention is creating internal links to the most popular or newest posts on your website. This section could be added to the sidebar of your blog or the footer of your website to show it on all pages and posts.

Creating a popular or recent posts section benefits you because link value passes to the linked posts from many different pages and posts. Also, the posts will be easier for visitors to access, which will increase traffic - and more traffic is a positive sign to Google too.

More on internal links

No-follow links

You also probably have links that aren't important for SEO on your website. If you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, for example, you don't want to leak link value to your login page - that page doesn't need to rank high in the search results.

You used to be able to prevent losing link value to unimportant links by giving them a 'no-follow' tag. A 'no-follow' tag asks Google not to follow the link: so no link value is lost. Now you might think: "I'm going to 'no-follow' less important links to give the most important links more link value." While this worked in the past, Google has become smarter. Now it seems that the link value for the whole page completely disappears when you add a 'no-follow' tag to a link on it. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of 'no-following' some of the links.

Please note that adding a 'no-follow' tag doesn't mean that those target pages can't be found in Google's search results. If you don't want pages or posts to show up in the search results you should give them a 'no-index' tag as well. The 'no-index' tag means that Google shouldn't render the page and shouldn't give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.

Anchor texts

Once you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, it's important to use the right anchor text. The anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. For example, the anchor text of the two internal links in the example below are 'link schemes' and 'paid links':

If you over-optimize anchor text you might hurt your website. And by over-optimizing, we mean keyword stuffing. Previously, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword and Google made your website rank higher for that keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text says more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So make sure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: it's fine to use keywords but don't add the exact same keywords to each and every one of your anchor texts.
Read more: 'The context of internal links' "
Easy internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium

Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin helps improve your internal link structure with its internal linking suggestion tool, which helps you to find related posts to link to. When you're writing a post, you can immediately link to a related post by dragging the link into the editor. The plugin also includes an option to mark your most important articles as cornerstone content, which allows the suggestion tool to show those cornerstone content articles at the top of the list, so you'll never forget to link to them! Read more about using the Yoast SEO internal linking tool.

In the free version of Yoast SEO, you'll also find a handy tool called the text link counter. This tool counts the internal links in a post and the internal links pointing to a post. This visualizes which posts could use a few more links or which ones should receive more links. This will all help you work purposely on your site structure.

Too make it even easier to find posts that aren't linked to, Yoast SEO premium has the orphaned content filter. This feature allows you to see which posts and pages aren't linked to at all, by other posts and pages on your website. Using the filter, finding important posts that need more incoming internal links is a piece of cake!

Go link your content

Without links, your content can't rank! With a solid internal linking strategy, you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and your users will understand your site better, which will in turn increase your chance of ranking.
Keep reading: 'Site structure: the ultimate guide' "

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Internal linking for SEO: why and how * Yoast

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Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when they're linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website.

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If you write an amazing blog post, you'd like it to help in the ranking of your site, right? If you create awesome content, you'd like people to read it now and be able to find it and read it later. Also, you want new visitors on your site to read some of your older blog posts, right? You want to convert them to loyal readers of your blog. Why are older posts on blogs almost always hidden away in some kind of archive?

Your content is created with much effort and care. It doesn't have to be thrown away after just one read from your audience. It should stay alive at your site, be read by new visitors and re-read by your most loyal visitors. At the same time, it should help your blog rank in Google. In this post, I will tell you about the importance of categories on your blog for both usability reasons and SEO.

No categories

Most blogging sites seem to be creating content and then putting it away, making it hard or nearly impossible for new visitors to find your content. Posts seem to be written just to be read only once. There are no categories, no tags, no linking from one post to the other. For a new visitor on such a site, who wants to browse a bit, it is only possible to scroll through the archives.

We are currently doing research for a new eBook called SEO for WordPress. For that purpose, I looked at a lot of blogs last week. Mom blogs, food blogs, blogs about blogging. And they all seem to make the same mistake. A quick check with my colleagues from the site review team confirmed my ideas: lots of blogs don't have any categories of the topics they blog about.

I found a few mom blogs I really liked. One of the blogging moms had a child with special needs. Some of her posts were about this kid, others were not. The only way I could find the posts about that special child was to scroll through the archives and guess (based on the title of the post) whether or not it was a post I was interested in. It annoyed me quite a bit. Why wasn't there any structure?

Of course, every blog should create new content on a very regular basis. That's a given. But that doesn't mean your old(er) content is worthless. This very post will be read by our audience now, but will be just as useful for new audiences. Also, people might remember this post and talk about it with their friends. Therefore people should be able to find older posts on your blog rather quickly.

Blog categories because of usability

Make sure people can easily navigate through your blog. You need clear, easy to find category pages of the topics you blog about most. New audiences will instantly grasp what your blog is about and will be able to find posts on a specific topic easily. Your own audience will be able to re-read older content if they would like to do so. Take a look at the way Sugarrae has made blog categories. That's the way to do it!

Blog categories because of SEO

Adding categories and structure to your blog also benefits SEO. If you are blogging, you are probably addressing similar topics in different posts. Perhaps you are optimizing (unknowingly) for the same keywords. This means you're actually competing with your own content for the ranking in Google. That's not good! If you create category pages and link your posts on similar topics to that category, it will allow that category page to rank higher in Google. Read about it in one of our older posts about the importance of category pages for SEO, or in our eBook about Content SEO.

Make your blog content last!

If you write amazing content, make sure it lasts. Add categories to your blog posts. And make sure these blog categories are easy to find on your site. Add tags for smaller topics. Link to related posts and give your audience suggestions where on your blog they can read more about a specific topic. All these things make your blog much more usable for your audience. And, on top of that, all these things make your blog rank higher in search engines.
Read more: make people stay and read your post! "

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Blog SEO: add categories to your blog! * Yoast

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If you write an amazing blog post, you'd like it to help in the ranking of your site, right? If you create awesome content, you'd like people to read it now and be able to find it and read it later. Also, you want new visitors on your site to read some of your older blog posts, right?

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It is never easy to set up a new blog. It can take quite some time to get picked up by the search engines. Nevertheless, as your blog starts to grow, you'll probably face new SEO problems. In the upcoming weeks, I'll discuss some of the difficulties you might encounter as your blog really starts to grow. How do you come up with new content? Should your keyword strategy be adapted as your blog gets bigger? How do you manage different authors? And how will you keep the structure of your blog in shape? In this post, I'll discuss some techniques to improve the structure of a growing blog.

Why is structure important for SEO?

Maintaining a solid structure of your website should be an important part of your SEO strategy (read our post about site structure and about cleaning up your site structure for more info). A decent site structure helps Google understand your site and makes sure you don't compete with your own content when trying to rank in search engines. The structure of your blog will be fairly easy to maintain as long as your blog is small. As your blog gets bigger, you'll need to do more in order to keep the structure of your blog optimal.

1. Evaluate your categories

As your blog is growing, it could well be that you're blogging about one thing far more than other things. That's just the way blogging goes. You should therefore critically evaluate your categories every few months, asking yourself whether or not one category is growing much faster than another category. If some parts of your blog are growing much faster than other parts, you could divide such a category in two separate categories.

Imagine yourself having an Italian food blog for example with the categories pasta, salads, meat dishes and desserts. You should critically evaluate these categories every now and then. It could well be that the category pasta becomes a really large category, because you love spaghetti so much. Perhaps you could make a separate spaghetti category, if you tend to write a lot of spaghetti posts. You would then have five categories: pasta, spaghetti, meat dishes and desserts.

2. Add sub categories and tags

If you have lots and lots of posts, it becomes harder to make sure you link to (all) similar content. There will be too many posts to choose from. As a result of that, a lot of blog posts will 'get lost' in a structure that is too flat. There will be few links to these posts, making it hard to be found by both your audience and Google!

By making subcategories, you create an extra layer and a more hierarchical structure. This will make your site easier to be understood by Google. Moreover, there will be fewer posts within each group. In a relatively small group of posts, it will be more likely that every post will receive a link from a new blogpost once in a while, making sure that post won't get lost.

Tags could also make sure a post gets enough links. Don't create too many tags, though. Each tag group should have at least three posts. Evaluate your tag structure on a regular basis and make sure you add new tags if you're blogging about new topics.

3. Add pagination

People don't want to click through an endless collection of posts. Suppose your blog has 1,000 articles and you're listing 10 articles per page: that would give you a hundred archive pages. If you would link these pages just by adding an Older (Previous) posts link and a Newer (Next) posts link, that would mean you would have to click 99 times to get to the last page. There is no need to make it that hard.

By adding a numbered pagination, linking for instance the first, second, third, tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, up to the ninetieth and last page, you reduce the number of clicks. Jumping every 20 pages will already lower that number to 10, of course. Pagination will allow your users to click through your archive in a rather simple way.

4. Get rid of outdated content

If articles aren't up to date anymore and are hardly read by anyone, you could decide to delete them all together. This will clean up your site nicely! Be careful though, because deleting pages could lead to a lot of 404's. Read Joost's post about properly deleting a post, before you clean up your old content!

Conclusion: stay on top!

If your blog is growing, you have to analyze the structure of your blog on a very regular basis. Make sure your categories, subcategories and tags are well organized. As your blog is growing, the structure will change and evolve. As long as you stay on top, that structure will remain SEO-friendly!
Read more: 'Blogging: the ultimate guide' "

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The site structure of a growing blog * Yoast

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It is never easy to set up a new blog. It can take quite some time to get picked up by the search engines. Nevertheless, as your blog starts to grow, you'll probably face new SEO problems. In the upcoming weeks, I'll discuss some of the difficulties you might encounter as your blog really starts to grow.

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At Yoast, we often see that a site's category/tag structure is completely unmanaged. Even large news sites suffer from over-usage of tags and categories. Tags and categories are both examples of a taxonomy system. By default, a WordPress site has these two, but you can add more. When used correctly, a good taxonomy system can boost your site's SEO. The opposite is also true: when used wrong, it'll break things. This article dives into why those pages are so important and how to use them. We will use category archives as our prime example.

Category archives are landing pages

Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts. This is true regardless of whether your site is a blog, an e-commerce site or something else. Those archives should be the first result in the search engines. That means those archives are your most important landing pages. They should therefore also provide the best user experience.

Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! " Info

The more likely your individual pages are to expire, the more this is true. If your site is a shop and your products change, your categories are more important. If your site is a job listing site where jobs expire, your categories are more important. Otherwise, you'd be optimizing pages that are going to be gone a few weeks/months later.

Categories prevent individual pages from competing

If you sell bathing suits and you optimize every product page, all those pages will compete for the term "bathing suit". You should optimize them for their specific brand, make & model and link them all to the "bathing suit" category page. That way the category page can rank for "bathing suit", while the product page can rank for the more specific terms. This way, the category page prevents the individual pages from competing.

This is also true regardless of your type of site. If your site is a blog and you write several articles about a topic, your category for that topic should be #1 in the search results.

Breadcrumbs and category archives

Breadcrumbs play an important role in this type of setup. Each individual item should link back to the nearest category. This shows Google the structure of your site but it also enforces the authority of the category page for the topic.

Google recently announced some mobile URL changes. Because of these changes, it's also useful if your site's URL structure contains the category. But beware: don't change your URL structure if you have an existing site. The "cost" of redirecting all those URLs outweighs the benefits of changing the structure. It's far wiser to just use the breadcrumbs functionality that our Yoast SEO plugin offers.

How to make awesome category pages

Even though it's clear that taxonomy archives are very important, they usually don't get the love they deserve. To make your category pages awesome, you often don't even have to do that much. Just add a bit of introductory content. Add some links to that introductory content pointing to the best articles/products in that category. This will go a long way to making sure that when a user lands on such a page, he/she doesn't bounce. A good archive page should make me want to read/see more, not less of your site.

This does mean that every category and tag needs to have some custom written text. That's not hard, but it can be a lot of work. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

Our Yoast SEO plugin helps you with optimizing your category pages: it analyzes your category page content. Moreover, it allows you to change the social details for category pages and provides you a snippet preview.

Duplicate tags and categories

A related issue we often see, are sites that have duplicate tags and categories. When you have a category "SEO", like we do here on yoast.com, you shouldn't have a tag page "SEO" too. If you do, which one should Google rank first?

The same goes for single or plural, an article shouldn't be in the categories "shirt" and "shirts". Or a post with the tags "WordPress plugin" and "WordPress plugins". One of those shouldn't exist. Pick single or plural and stick with it for all your category and tag terms.
Read more: 'What is the difference between tags and categories?' "
Need more help optimizing your content structure?

We cover a lot of topics around Content SEO in our eBook, aptly named " Content SEO". If you really want to teach yourself how to optimize every aspect of your website, our Basic SEO training is a great product.
We also have some other posts worth exploring:

I found both of these posts by going to our Site Structure tag page. Which, admittedly, I just gave an intro today. If you have nice examples of great looking category pages, I'd love to see them in the comments.
Keep reading: 'Site structure: the ultimate guide' "

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Using category and tag pages for SEO * Yoast

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At Yoast, we often see that a site's category/tag structure is completely unmanaged. Even large news sites suffer from over-usage of tags and categories. Tags and categories are both examples of a taxonomy system. By default, a WordPress site has these two, but you can add more.

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Tags and categories help us structure our content. You can often find these in the visual metadata at for instance blog posts, or in a list of clickable links in the sidebar of a website. Tags are sometimes represented as a tag cloud, although most websites refrain from using that element these days. There is ...

Read: "What is the difference between tags and categories?"

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Site structure creation & optimization * Yoast

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Tags and categories help us structure our content. You can often find these in the visual metadata at for instance blog posts, or in a list of clickable links in the sidebar of a website. Tags are sometimes represented as a tag cloud, although most websites refrain from using that element these days.

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Long tail keywords are keywords or key phrases that are more specific - and usually longer - than more commonly searched for keywords. Long tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific.

In order to really profit from a keyword strategy focusing on long tail keyword, you should have a clear vision of your company, your product and your website. In this post, I would like to help you understand the importance of understanding your own product and the effort you should make to rank for long tail keywords.

The Long Tail

While preparing this blog post, my husband encouraged me to read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. The Long Tail discusses the emergence of markets (specifically markets on the internet) with unlimited supplies. Chris Anderson discovered that the true shape of demand, not filtered by the economics of scarcity shows a very long tail (see picture above). This means that demand exists for virtually every niche, although this demand can become very small. A nice example could be a jukebox with 10.000 songs. A very small amount of songs will be played very regularly, while a very large amount of songs will be played very few times. However, research shows that virtually all songs (about 98 %) are played at some point. The demand for these songs (which are large in number) is very small, but it does exist. Almost every song will be played at some point. With the emergence of the internet, possible target audiences became quite large, even if the product is only wanted by a very small percentage of the people. The wideness of the internet thus makes your niche product profitable and the ranking on long tail keywords important.

Read more: 'Befriend the long tail' "
What is your mission?

If you want to sell something, you should simply have a damn good product! And you should be well aware of what your product or your website offers to your audience... what makes it special. If you know and understand this, it will be much easier to make your audience like and buy your stuff. You should thus take some time to think about the uniqueness of your product and write that down. Perhaps you sell cruises to Hawaii. You offer great facilities for children, making the cruises especially suitable for young parents or single moms. Offering great cruises to Hawaii for single moms could be the uniqueness of your service. This is your mission, your niche, this is what you have to offer to your audience! Do make sure you write down your mission in words that are used and understood by your audience.
Keep reading: 'What is your mission' "
Competitiveness of the market

In some markets, it is really hard to rank. Some markets are just highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. These companies have a very large budget to spend on marketing in general and SEO specifically. Ranking in these markets is hard. You will be unable to compete on a small budget in a market like the travel industry using search terms as Vacation Hawaii.

However, if you have your mission clear, you should be able to define what makes your product or website stand out from this market. You should be able to find your niche. And you should use YOUR mission in order to start ranking! Taking my example of cruises for single moms to Hawaii would mean that you should focus on the less competitive term [single mom cruises Hawaii]. Again, use words that are used by your target audience (and avoid difficult terminologies).

Long tail keywords and ranking

It is much easier to rank for long tail keywords than for more common keywords. Another benefit of focussing on long tail keywords is that, although these keywords are used less in search, the visitor that finds your website using them is more likely to buy your service or product.

The longer and more specific the search terms are, the higher the chances of conversion are. I am currently looking for a cottage in France to spend our next summer vacation. I started my search with the term 'vacation France'. After some searching, I quickly discovered I wanted to go to the Dordogne and preferred a house in the countryside. My search still continues, but now I use terms like [vacation house countryside Dordogne]. A long tail keyword. Using this keyword, I found new sites, which more closely resembled my vacation wishes. Chances for me to book my vacation largely increased.

Use your mission to define long tail keywords

The definition of your mission, in which you make crystal clear what the awesomeness of your product, site or blog is, should be central in choosing the long tail keywords you want to rank for. Trying to make your website rank for a specific term can be quite profitable, as long as this specific term closely resembles the product you're selling. The terms you have used to describe your mission can be nicely used to focus on in your SEO strategy. These words should be central in the long tail keywords you aim your website to rank for. People using the terms of your mission and finding your website will be relatively small in volume, but these people do have the highest chances to buy your product or to become regular visitors.

The next step: awesome content

After you have done your keyword research and you know which keywords you would like to rank for, you'll have to start creating content. Creating content can be quite challenging. Read all about creating quality content in SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide.

If you'd like to learn more about long tail keywords, you should check out our eBook: Content SEO! And if you would like to really learn how to do keyword research, you should look into our SEO courses.
Read on: 'Keyword research: the ultimate guide' "

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Long tail keywords are keywords or key phrases that are more specific - and usually longer - than more commonly searched for keywords. Long tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific.

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Regularly adding quality content to your website in a blog is a good SEO strategy. Google sees that your website is active because new information is added and you increase the volume of your content. If you have crafted your keyword strategy properly and your content is nicely optimized for the right keywords, adding content will increase your findability. But how do you choose the perfect focus keyword?

Especially when you're blogging and focusing on long tail keywords, it can be difficult to decide which keywords to optimize for. In our view, there are at least three things you should do to determine which keywords you should optimize your blog posts for! Read about them here.

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Did you know you can optimize for multiple focus keywords with Yoast SEO Premium?
What is the focus keyword?

The focus keyword is the search term that you most want your page to rank for, so when people search for that keyword or phrase, they should find you. Yoast SEO it has its own input field for this. The plugin evaluates the page's content and provides feedback on how to improve the content for that focus keyword.

Choose a focus keyword that is used in search engines

Your keyword strategy should have given you some idea of what you want to write about. Please read our ultimate guide to keyword research if you need help find your perfect keywords. For blog posts, you will usually aim for a long tail keyword (containing multiple words) as explained in this guide on content SEO.

Our Yoast SEO plugin helps you to optimize your post for your chosen keyword. One of the tools you can use to find - related - keywords is our Yoast Suggest tool. This tool uses the same data as Google Suggest to find the first ten keywords and then expands on that. This is the same as what you'd see when you type the search term into a Google search box. For additional tools, see this post by Marieke about keyword research tools.

The terms you will find in Suggest are terms and combinations of words that are logical and used by actual people to search on the web. This tool can be beneficial in giving you some first ideas about the search behavior of people in the area you want to write about. Use Answer the Public to find which questions people have about a particular topic. This'll give you loads of new insights and inspiration for new posts.

Remember that these search suggestions change all the time. The suggestions will often be tuned to what you've been searching before. When we searched for the term "focus keyword" sometime last year, this was the suggest output:

Right now, the output shows this:

Suggest changes based on the problems people have, so monitoring it for important keywords makes sense. This particular new result gave us some extra input for this post.

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Research the search volume for your keyword

Once you have found a long tail search term you want to rank for, you should put some effort into discovering whether or not there are many searches for that keyword or phrase - the search volume. We will be the first to admit; Google has made this really hard. The only way to know for sure how often a search term is used is to have an active AdWords account and bid on the search term of your choice. We understand this is a bit too difficult and expensive for most of you (we hardly ever do this ourselves).

Not to worry, using Google Trends should give you at least some idea, in a creative way, about search volume. Google Trends allows you to compare the search volume between two search terms over a certain time. This will give some insight into the volume of the search terms people use, relative to other terms.

Check posts that already rank

If you already have some (blog) posts that rank well for good terms, you will know how many visitors these posts attract. Using Google Trends to compare the focus keywords of older posts (which you can view the statistics for) with the focus keyword you have in mind for your new post, could give you some idea about the potential traffic this new focus keyword could bring. Make sure to choose older posts that are most similar to the post you're planning to write: if you're planning to choose a long tail keyword, compare posts with long tail focus keywords as well.

For instance, this post about focus keywords could be compared with a post about snippet previews, a related feature of the WordPress SEO plugin we already wrote about:

As you can see the traffic is comparable, we know the search traffic to our snippet preview post is reasonably good, so we know it's worth optimizing for.

Using Google Trends to compare your old focus keywords and the one you want to use will give you some insights about the prospects for your focus keyword.

Another good way to use Google Trends is when you are considering a number of (long tail) focus keywords. Google Trends will easily show you which search term will have the highest search volume compared to another. Google Trends will help you decide which long tail keyword is most commonly used in search.

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Google your proposed focus keyword!

Apart from knowing which search terms are actually used by people, you need to know whether or not your idea for your post or page fits the needs and expectations of the people who use these search terms. The best way to find out whether or not your content meets their needs is to Google your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself.

Take the time to look at the first two result pages. Are the articles in the Google results of similar character to your article? Could your article fit the results shown in these search pages? If you decide to write your blog post or page, while optimizing for this exact focus keyword, you are aiming to get your post amongst these results.

For instance, when we wrote this post and Googled our chosen focus keyword, we saw we'd be competing with ourselves:

We also saw lots of questions on the WordPress forums, giving us all the more reason to write this post.

Note that we looked at the old post and decided it wasn't good and complete enough, so we decided we would delete it and replace it with this one.

Be sure to use the content of the result pages as an inspiration for your blog post. Are there any useful ideas? We are NOT encouraging you to copy content, merely to see whether you perhaps missed some information or arguments for your own blog post. But more importantly: how can you make sure your post will stand out? In what way could your post be better, funnier, more original than the post presently displayed in the result pages? Try to come up with content that will make the audience click and share!

Should every page have a focus keyword?

People often ask us whether their about page or contact page should have a focus keyword, and, if so, what should it be?

The answer is easy: not every page needs a focus keyword. Your contact page should be easily reachable, it might, for instance, need to rank for "<company name> address." That probably doesn't make sense as a focus keyword though, and it's perfectly fine to leave it empty.

Conclusion: picking a focus keyword is not easy

Choosing a perfect focus keyword is not an exact science. You should aim for a combination of words that are actually used by a search audience. Aim for a focus keyword that is relatively high in volume and one that will suit your audience.

Want to find out more?

We have lots more articles on this subject: you can read about keyword research, content writing and improving your site structure. We've also combined all of these different topics into an SEO copywriting course. If you want a specific post, your best choice is Marieke's post:

Read more: 'SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide' "

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The perfect focus keyword for your post or page

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Regularly adding quality content to your website in a blog is a good SEO strategy. Google sees that your website is active because new information is added and you increase the volume of your content. If you have crafted your keyword strategy properly and your content is nicely optimized for the right keywords, adding content will increase your findability.

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Does it pay off to write a text that is nice and easy to read? Will readable content lead to higher rankings and more traffic? Is readability a 'ranking factor'? At Yoast, we are strong believers in writing texts that are nice and easy to read. We've developed an entire tool to help people write readable texts. We truly believe that readability ranks. Writing readable texts will lead to higher rankings and more traffic.

Learn how to write engaging copy and how to organize it well on your site: Combine our SEO copywriting and Site structure training. " Info

So why is readability becoming more important? I'll discuss two reasons why we believe readability is of increasing importance for SEO. In our view, it'll become essential for every copywriter. The first reason why readability will gain importance is because of the growth of and focus on voice search. The second reason is because of the fact the algorithm of Google is getting better and more 'human-like'.

Voice search becomes more dominant

Although few people use voice search, Google (and other search engines) are focused on voice. They present their results in a voice-like matter; they rank their results in a voice-like matter. The very fact that search engines want voice search to be the next big thing, makes readability so important. To understand the importance for readability in voice search, look at this video:

People searching for information with voice search could end up listening to a rather long piece of information. In the example in the video above, the search result consists of an entire paragraph. Imagine such a paragraph consisting of long sentences and containing lots of difficult words. The voice result will become impossible to understand. Google will never rank such an impossible result. Neither in the voice results, nor in the normal results.

Google will prefer understandable content, because Google is focused on voice search. Google wants voice search to become the next big thing. Whether that will happen or not, doesn't matter for the importance of understandable, readable content. Google simply dictates the search results and the algorithm. We just have to go with it. And in this case, it's a good thing. Writing readable content is a blessing for the reader.
Read more: 'How to prepare for voice search' "
Google's algorithm becomes more human-like

Google has become much better at predicting what people want to read. The algorithm of Google is mimicking a human. It tries to read texts like a human being. As Google becomes more capable of understanding and scanning texts in a human-like way, the demands on the readability of texts also rise.

Google will, increasingly, assess the topic of a text the way humans assess the topic of a text. People scan through texts, read subheadings and the first sentences of paragraphs. People look for transition words in order to quickly abstract what the main conclusion of an article will be. All the things humans do while reading a text, are things Google will do. That means that the structure of your text, the way you write your paragraphs, will become increasingly important. Core sentences (the first sentence of every paragraph) will gain importance. Having a clear and logical structure in your text will be invaluable.

What will be the demands on readable content?

Understandable, readable content contains These will be demands copywriters will have to deal with. It might sound scary, but if you simply write a good text, you'll please your readers lots of transition words, as these words help people understand the connection between sentences. Content that's easy to understand has short sentences and few difficult and long words. The structure of a text is very important. Core sentences will be the most important sentences in assessing the topic of an article or blog post. and Google.
Keep reading: 'The ultimate guide to content SEO' "

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Does it pay off to write a text that is nice and easy to read? Will readable content lead to higher rankings and more traffic? Is readability a 'ranking factor'? At Yoast, we are strong believers in writing texts that are nice and easy to read.

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If you've been using the readability analysis of Yoast SEO, you've probably noticed our check on the use of transition words. You might have been wondering: What are transition words exactly? Why did we include that check in our analysis? Or, to what extent are those words important for SEO? Here, I'll explain everything about the relationship between transition words and SEO.

What are transition words?

Transition words are words like ' most importantly', ' because', ' therefore', or ' besides that '. Using transition words well makes your text much more readable, as these words give direction to your readers. Using them is like pouring cement between your sentences: the relation between two sentences becomes apparent by the use of transition words. They send a signal to your readers that something is coming up, and prepare them for the next sentence.
Using transition words to create readable text is just one aspect of SEO copywriting. If you want to master all facets, take a look at our SEO copywriting training.
If you're summarizing a discourse, you probably use words like first, second, third, etc. Your readers will understand you're summing up things if you use these words. If you want to compare certain matters, you could use words like same, less, rather, while or either. And if you want to conclude your story, you might use words as hence, consequently or therefore.
Tabel 1: Examples of transition words

Enumeration

first of all, also, another, furthermore, finally

Cause

because, so, due to, for the reason that

Comparison/contrast

similarly, likewise, rather, while, in contrast

Conclusion

as a result, hence, consequently, therefore

Fuzzy signals

seems like, maybe, probably, almost

Emphasis

above all, most noteworthy, certainly, even more

Using transition words probably is something you'll do automatically. Everybody uses them. You just need these words to tell your story. However, we noticed that lots of people use too little transition words in their copy. That'll make a text hard to read, especially if your audience is reading from a screen, which is hard anyway. That's why we inserted the transition words check into our readability analysis.

Importance of transition words for SEO

So what's the connection between transition words and SEO? Using more transition words in your copy won't make your article reach a higher position in the search engines directly. It isn't that simple. So, sorry about that. That being said, transition words do contribute to SEO in the long run, because they improve the readability and the structure of a text.

Transition words are of great significance for the readability of your text. If you use sufficient transition words, your text will become easier to read. And readability affects your SEO! Read all about that in our post about ranking and readability.

Transition words play a crucial role in structuring your text. This leads to better understanding of your text by your readers. Well-structured text helps to attract readers to your blog and contributes to SEO! Read more about that in our post about ranking and text structure.

Conclusion

You should write original articles: content that people actually like to read! And, on top of that, write readable articles! Always make sure that your articles are nice and easy to read. That's why transition words are important: to make sure that your articles are a great read. When you've managed to do that, start optimizing your post to make it findable as well, without making any concessions to either the originality of your content, or the readability of your post. Good luck!
Read more: 'SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide' "

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If you've been using the readability analysis of Yoast SEO, you've probably noticed our check on the use of transition words. You might have been wondering: What are transition words exactly? Why did we include that check in our analysis? Or, to what extent are those words important for SEO?

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Keyword research is your first step in optimizing your website for certain keywords. Without keyword research, you might find yourself lost in your own lingo and battling giants in your industry that can't be beaten in the search result pages just like that. There is a variety of factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy. In this article, we'll discuss your mission, your audience, and your competition.

What makes your company unique?

Before you do anything, and this is key, you need to know what makes your company unique. You need to have a clear concept of the mission of your company. You need to determine exactly what you have to offer because that's what's going to make you rank. It's that simple. SEO is just like regular business. If you're doing everything on the same or inferior level as your competition, you're not going to stand out. If you're not the best result, why should people want to find you? Why should Google rank you? This seems simple, but this factor is often forgotten.

Meaningful keywords

We often hear people say: we can't come up with meaningful keywords. If you struggle with that too, take a step back and look at your business at large:

What do you have to offer?

What is your mission?

What are your core values and strengths?

How can you branch out from your core selling points to very specific bits of information or service? Use these to stand out from the crowd.

You don't have to be better than your competition at everything, as long as you identify enough things to build a keyword strategy around. For smaller companies, this means that you probably have to be better at the things bigger fish haven't thought of. Or at the things, these companies aren't actively looking to do. If you can't come up with anything, you have a bigger problem than just coming up with keywords...

The role of your audience in your keyword research

Once you've determined what you have to offer, it's time to consider your audience. In the end, SEO is all about making sure your users are able to find you. So the first thing you have to do is find out what words your potential audience uses to find the information they're looking for.

Let's consider an example. At Yoast, we think of our courses platform as "Yoast Academy." So at first sight, it seems very logical for us to optimize for the keyword "Yoast Academy." However, when we analyze traffic data, it turns out that our audience uses "Yoast courses" way more. So it makes much more sense to optimize for that term instead. Every company has its internal vocabulary, which often doesn't match the vocabulary of its audience. Therefore, you should always choose your keywords from the perspective of your audience. You can use Google Trends to research how often search terms are used compared to other terms.

What about your competition?

Lastly, you simply can't devise a proper keyword research strategy without taking your competition into account. Too often, websites optimize for terms they have absolutely no chance ranking for. So you need to research your competition.

You can go all overboard and make a thorough analysis of all the competitors in your field, and that can certainly be worthwhile. But let's stick to the basics for now. It's actually quite easy to get a general idea of your SEO competition. Just google some search terms you would like to rank for! See what companies show up and where you rank. How big are the companies you are competing with for top three rankings? Would your company fit between these results? This is all quite easy to determine using just the Google search results.

But be wary! You can't just trust the search results because Google tailors them to your search history. So logically, your site is going to come up higher for you than for others that perform the same search. You can use an incognito screen to circumvent this, although there's still a local search component even in an incognito screen. If that is a problem for you, you should consider using VPNs to mask your location.

Expanding your strategy step-by-step

Big sites can rank for the most general terms. Smaller sites within a very specific niche can do the same. Of course, it's also easier if you're writing in a language that is not spoken all over the world. For most smaller sites that are writing in English, however, the general rule of thumb is this: start with a big set of long tail keywords which have little traffic, but you can rank for more easily. Then, work yourself up to the rankings step-by-step. Once you've gained some SEO authority, start optimizing for more general keywords. And in the end, maybe you will even be able to rank for your head keywords!
Read more: 'Keyword research: the ultimate guide' "

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What is keyword research? * SEO for beginners * Yoast

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Keyword research is the first step in optimizing your website for certain keywords. There is a variety of factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy. Learn SEO basics on keyword research!

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Keyword research is the first step in the SEO copywriting process and an essential part of any SEO strategy. Before you write your website content you need to think about which search terms you want to be found for and this means getting inside people's heads to find out which words they use when searching. Then you can use these exact terms in your content so that you start ranking for them. This is keyword research and this ultimate guide will take you through the many steps involved.

What is keyword research?

Before we start explaining the process of keyword research, let's look at the most important concepts behind it.

Keyword research can be defined as the work you do to come up with an extensive list of keywords you want to rank for.

Keyword strategy is about the decisions you make on the basis of that keyword research.

Key phrases are keywords containing multiple words. We tend to use the word keyword all the time, but we don't necessarily mean it's only one word. 'WordPress SEO' is a keyword, as is 'Google Analytics plugin'. Keywords usually consist of multiple words! So, in this guide, when we talk about keywords, we usually mean a phrase, rather than a single word.

Long tail keywords are more specific and less common because they focus more on a niche. The longer (and more specific) search terms are, the easier it will be to rank for the term. Keywords that are more specific (and often longer) are usually referred to as long tail keywords.

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Focus keyword is the keyword or the key phrase you most want your page to be found for. You should put your focus keyword into the meta box of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Search intent is all about discovering what a searcher actually wants. These are not just keywords, but the underlying goals of what a searcher wants to know, do or buy.
Read more: 'What is keyword research?' "
Why is keyword research important?

Proper keyword research is important because it will make clear which search terms your audience uses. At Yoast, we frequently come across clients who use one set of words when describing their products, while their target audience uses a completely different set of words. These sites aren't found by their potential customers because of a mismatch in word use.

It doesn't make any sense to optimize for words that people don't use. Good keyword research makes sure that you use the same words as your target audience and this makes the whole effort of optimizing your website far more worthwhile. In addition, by looking at search intent, you find out which questions your customer has. Those questions should get an answer in the form of quality content.
Keep reading: 'The basis of keyword research' "
Doing keyword research for SEO

For us, there are three steps to keyword research. First, you write down the mission of your business. Next, you make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for. Finally, you create landing pages for each of those keywords. This ultimate guide takes you through these three steps in much more detail.

Step by step we'll guide you through the entire keyword research process, and we'll give you practical tips to easily start your own keyword research.

Step 1: What is your mission?

Before starting anything, think about your mission. Think about questions like: Who are you? What is your website about? What makes you special? And what promises do you make on your website?
Read on: ' What is the mission of your website' "
A lot of people can't effectively answer these questions at first. You have to figure out what makes you stand out from the crowd. So take your time and literally write down your mission on a piece of paper, a computer or an iPad - anything will do, as long as you do it. Once you're able to answer these questions in detail, you will have taken the first and most important step in your keyword strategy.

Things to consider: How competitive is your market?

The market you're in determines whether your mission will prove genius enough to sell your products to people. Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. These companies have huge budgets for marketing in general and SEO in particular. Competing in these markets is tough, so ranking in these markets is also going to be tough.

Perhaps you sell cruises to Hawaii. You offer great facilities for children, making the cruises especially suitable for young or single parents. Offering great cruises to Hawaii for young parents could very well be what makes your service unique. Look for the thing that makes your product stand out from the competition. This should be your mission, your niche - and this is what you have to offer your audience.

If you're launching into in a competitive market, you're probably best to start out small. Once you 'own' a small part of that niche and become a big name in the business of cruises to Hawaii, you could try to go one level up and sell your cruises to a larger (more general) audience. Your mission will then become much more general as well.

Step 2: Make a list of keywords

The second step of keyword research is creating a list of your keywords. With your mission in mind, try to get into the heads of your potential buyers. What will these people be looking for? What kind of search terms could they be using while looking for your amazing service or product? Ask yourself these questions and write down as many answers as possible.

If your mission is clear, you will have a pretty clear image of your niche and your unique selling points (the things that set your business apart from others). These are the terms you want to be found for.

To consider: Make sure the keywords fit your site

Be aware that you should be found for terms that match your site. If we went crazy and did our very best to make yoast.com rank for ballet shoes, people would be rather disappointed to find our site. They would probably instantly go back to Google. If we ranked for ballet shoes, we would have a massive bounce rate. And a high bounce rate tells Google that people are not finding what they are looking for based on their search term. This would inevitably lead to a lower ranking on ballet shoes for our site - and that would be completely justified because we know nothing about ballet, nor about shoes for that matter.

Tools you can use

Making a list of possible search terms is hard. Up until a few years ago you could just check Google Analytics and see the terms people used to find your website, but unfortunately, that's no longer possible. So you have pretty much no idea which terms people use in search engines to end up at your website. Luckily, there are still some other tools which make your keyword research a bit easier. Read our post about tools you can use in your keyword research for more tips and tricks.

Step 3: Look at search intent

Much of today's SEO strategy should revolve around answering the questions people have. Whenever someone enters a search query into a search engine, they are on a quest for something. Every type of question needs a specific answer. In my SEO basics article on search intent, I said:

"Search intent has to do with the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? Are they searching because they have a question and want an answer to that question? Are they searching for a specific website? Or, are they searching because they want to buy something?"

When planning your content, always ask yourself these questions. There are four types of intents:

Informational intent: Just like it says on the tin, people are trying to find information on a specific topic.

Navigational intent: People want to access a specific website by entering the term in a search engine.

Commercial intent: People want to buy something sometime soon and are doing research before making a purchase.

Transactional intent: People are looking to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.

Find out which intents apply to you and try to answer these search intents by literally giving people what they want.

Step 4: Construct landing pages

The next step towards a long-term keyword strategy is to create awesome landing pages. In the past, every one of the keywords you want to be found for got its own landing page. Today, however, search engines are so smart that they mostly use search intent to give searchers the best answer to their questions. The page that answers those questions best will rank on top. Search engines also understand subtle differences between keywords so you don't have to do your utmost best to distinguish singular and plural terms, for instance. So you can optimize a page for multiple keywords.

We would advise you to build your page structure in a well-structured way - using a spreadsheet programme like Excel or Google Docs/Sheets is a great way to do this. Create a table then add your list of keywords. Using a table forces you to set up a structure and to make relevant landing pages. Put the search terms in the first column and add columns for the different levels of your site's structure.

Then you'll need to build a landing page for your search terms, but you don't have to create all these pages immediately - it can be a long-term thing. The more specific your search term is, the further down into your site structure the term's landing page belongs. The most important keywords will lead to your cornerstone content articles. These are the keywords you definitely want to rank for. To do this, you create the best possible content about that keyword - authoritative and all-encompassing, just like the ultimate guide you are reading right now. All your supporting articles will link to this cornerstone content. This should be part of your internal linking strategy, which Yoast SEO Premium can help you implement.

After completing your keyword research for SEO, you should have a clear overview of the terms people use and the terms you want the pages on your site to be found for. This overview should guide you in writing content for your website.

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Long-term keyword strategy

No website should rely on one single keyword or one keyphrase for its traffic. You should use your mission as a starting point, then take our three steps in carrying out proper keyword research and work towards a solid base: a keyword strategy. This section of our ultimate guide explains why it's important to have a long-term keyword strategy.

How many keywords?

We can't tell you the exact number of keywords you should have, but we can tell you that you need a lot of them - as many as you can think of. However, more than 1000 keywords is probably too many!

Even if you're a reasonably small business, you'll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords. But there's no need to create pages for all of these straight away. The great thing about having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can add content bit by bit. Think about what keywords you want to rank for now, and which ones aren't immediately so important. Understand your priorities and plan the creation of your content.
Read more: 'Managing a growing blog: content planning' "
Ad hoc keyword research strategies

In an ideal world, you would do your keyword research, make a beautiful table and create landing pages for each one. Your site structure would be flawless and you would blog and write every day making your site rank higher and higher in Google. Unfortunately, we live in the real world.

Of course, your keyword research will not always be as extensive. And some posts or articles aren't written as part of an awesome strategy, but just because the topic was in the news or something inspired you to write it. That's just how these things work. But this doesn't have to be a problem.

If you're writing something that doesn't exactly fit your strategy, this doesn't mean you shouldn't try to make that content rank. You could still use it to rank for something related to the terms in the list of your keyword strategy. Use tools like Google Trends to choose which keyword you'd like to rank for. At least take some time to think about how to make your article or blog fit your strategy. After all, if you are writing valuable content, you might as well make it rank!

Learn how to write engaging copy and how to organize it well on your site: Combine our SEO copywriting and Site structure training. " Info

The importance of long tail keyword strategy

Focusing on long tail keywords should be an important part of a long-term keyword research strategy. Long tail keywords are keywords or key phrases that are more specific (and usually longer) than more common keywords, often called "head" keywords. Long tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they focus more on a specific product or topic. Read our post about the importance of long tail keywords if you want to know why you should focus on long tail keywords when optimizing your site.
Keep reading: 'Make friends with the long tail' "
Multiple focus keywords

Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin allows you to optimize your content for multiple keywords - up to five per article in fact. Our post about multiple focus keywords explains why it's important to use the multiple focus keyword functionality while optimizing your text. We've also written a post about why you shouldn't use your focus keyword more than once.
Read on: 'How to choose the perfect focus keyword' "
Conclusion on keyword research for SEO

Keyword research should be the start of any sustainable SEO strategy. The result will be a long list of keywords for which you'd like to be found. But the hardest part is still ahead: writing all that content. You should write articles and blog posts on every single keyword you would like to be found for. That's quite a challenge!
Read more: 'SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide' "

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Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide * Yoast

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Keyword research is the first step in the SEO copywriting process and an essential part of any SEO strategy. Before you write your website content you need to think about which search terms you want to be found for and this means getting inside people's heads to find out which words they use when searching.

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Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it is impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It is therefore crucial to write and structure quality content! This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO.

Free course! Learn what makes your site rank with our SEO for beginners training " Info

What is content SEO?

Content SEO includes everything to do with the writing and structuring of content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider to produce content that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting.

Content SEO is important because search engines, such as Google, read your website, so the words you use on your site determine whether or not your site will rank in their results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed, with a great user interface, but all the technical stuff that makes your site rank in Google should also be covered. Without good quality content, your site does not stand a chance in the search engines.

Keyword research

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is basically the steps you take to create an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Every content SEO strategy should begin with keyword research, because you have to know what your audience is searching for if you want to generate traffic. Keyword research helps you to discover the terms you should be aiming to rank for.

Keyword research has three steps:

First, you write down the mission of your business;

Next, you make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for;

Finally, you create landing pages for all these keywords.

This section takes you through these three steps in much more detail.

If you do your keyword research right, you should have a clear overview of the terms people use and the terms for which you want the pages on your site to be found. This overview will serve as a guide for writing content on your website.
Read more: 'Keyword research: the ultimate guide' "
Why is keyword research so important for content SEO?

Proper keyword research will make clear which search terms your audience uses. This is crucial. At Yoast, we regularly encounter clients who use particular words when talking about their products, while their customers use entirely different words. Optimizing content for words that people do not use doesn't make any sense. Doing proper keyword research makes sure that you are using the same words as your target audience and therefore makes the whole effort of optimizing your website worthwhile.

Some terms we use in keyword research

Keywords and keyphrases

We tend to use the word 'keyword' all the time, but we don't necessarily mean it has to be just one word. 'WordPress SEO' is a keyword, as is 'Google Analytics plugin.' So you can have keywords containing multiple words!

Long tail keywords

The longer (and more specific) a search term is, the easier it will be to rank for that term. Keywords that are more specific (and usually longer) are usually referred to as long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are more specific and focus more on a niche.

How many keywords?

It is very hard to give an exact number of keywords you should focus on. And then again, it's very simple: You just need to have a lot - as many as you can come up with. More than 1,000 keywords is probably too many though!

Even if you're a reasonably small business, you'll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don't have to create pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can gradually add content. Think about what keywords you would like to rank for right away, and which ones aren't immediately important. Determine what your priorities are and plan the creation of your content.

Head or tail?

Classifying your keywords is essential. Some keywords are very common and competitive (head), while others are long-tail. Decide which are your most critical, high-level keywords - the ones that generate sufficient traffic for your website and best fit your business. You will probably only have a few of these general keywords for your business, the rest of them will be more down the tail. In the next section, we will give more in-depth information on long tail keywords (and the importance of these keywords).

Content focusing on the most common keywords should be on the top level pages on your website (homepage and the pages one level beneath your homepage), whereas content focusing on long tail keywords should be more on the tail end of your site.

Tools you can use

There are multiple free tools available to help you with your keyword research. Check out our article about keyword research tools if you want to find out more about practical tools.

Adapting your keyword strategy

Your keyword strategy isn't static. It should change and evolve alongside your company and your website. It should evolve and grow with you. If it doesn't, you're doing it wrong.

You should be on top of the changes in your company and adapt your strategy simultaneously. If your online shop starts selling new products, extend your list with more keywords. If you're aiming for new markets, it's vital that your keywords are aimed at these new markets as well.

There are several keyword strategies to adopt. One of them is to start off trying to rank for long tail keywords and then aim at more general keywords afterwards, but you could also start by focusing on general ones then aim for more long tail keywords after. You can zoom in and pursue more niche activities, broaden your approach, adding more content on different things, or you can do both simultaneously.

Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! " Info

Site structure

The second important aspect of Content SEO is the structure of your site. First I will explain why site structure is critical, then I'll show you what an ideal site structure looks like. I will also give tips on how to (quickly) improve your site structure without completely disrupting the core of your website.

Why is site structure important for content SEO?

There are two main reasons why site structure is an important ranking factor:

1 Good structure helps Google to 'understand' your site

The way your site is structured gives Google significant clues about where to find the most important content. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent. A good site structure will, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

By creating such a structure, you can use existing content that has attracted links from others to help other pages rank as well. Your site's structure will help spread some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, that means that you can use quality content you've written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.

2 Good structure makes sure you are not competing with your own content

On your website, you will probably have multiple articles about similar topics. At Yoast, for example, we write about SEO. If we wrote eight articles about SEO, Google wouldn't know which of these is most important. If we didn't clarify this with our site structure, we'd be competing with our own articles for Google's top spot. So, solving problems like this using a sound internal linking structure will result in higher rankings overall.

The ideal structure of a site

Ideally, you should structure your site like a pyramid. On top of the pyramid is your homepage and on the homepage are links to some other pages (such as category pages). These pages, in turn, link to even more pages.

In an effective content SEO strategy, your keyword strategy and the way you structure your site work together. In a proper keyword strategy, you'll have thought about common, competitive keywords as well as more long tail niche search terms. You should make a similar dichotomy in your site structure. Pages focusing on more common search terms should appear high in your pyramid, while pages optimized for more long tail keywords should appear in a lower part of your site structure. These long tail pages at the bottom of the pyramid must link correctly to the pages higher in the pyramid.
Keep reading: 'The ultimate guide to site structure' "
Practical tips on improving your site structure

If you're serious about content SEO, you'll most likely already have a live website. So it may be a bit late to set up your site's structure in an ideal pyramid-like way. Don't despair - there are still plenty of things you can do to improve your site's structure and your content SEO.

Decide upon Cornerstone content

You should focus your efforts on cornerstone articles. These are the articles you're most proud of, that fit the mission of your website best. This ultimate guide is, in fact, one of our cornerstones. You want to rank for these articles the most. If you haven't decided which of your articles are the most important yet, start thinking about that now. Make these articles the best ones on your site. Give them extra TLC and update them regularly.
Read on: 'What is cornerstone content' "
Link from tail to head

Once you've decided upon your precious cornerstones, make sure you link from all your 'tail' articles to those cornerstones. That way, Google will know which articles to rank highest. Read all about this in our article about incorporating cornerstones into your site structure.

Use tags (but not too many)

Your site will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure - or at least, Google will understand it better. They group your articles about similar topics. Don't overdo it, though. Some people have more tags than articles. Using too many tags will lead to a confusing, poorly-structured website.

Avoid duplicate content

The same content can turn up at multiple places on your site. As a reader, you don't mind: you still get the content you came for. But a search engine has to choose something to show in the search results, as it doesn't want to show the same content twice.

Moreover, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, while others link to the second URL. But if these duplicates all link to the same URL, your chance of ranking top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. Canonicalization is the solution to duplicate content. You can configure the canonical URL in the advanced tab of Yoast SEO.

Remove old content

If the content on a page is outdated, remove it! However, you may have had some valuable links to that page. You want to make sure you still benefit from these links, even though the page doesn't exist any longer, so you should redirect the URL.

Redirecting pages is not difficult if you have our Yoast SEO Premium plugin, which can help you to take care of redirects. Preferably, you redirect the old URL (301) to the page or product that replaced the old page or product, or a related page if there is no replacement. That could be the category page of the specific product, or, as a very last resort, your homepage. This way the (outdated) page won't interfere with your site structure anymore.

Deal with orphaned content

The term 'orphaned content' refers to articles that don't have any links from your other articles or posts. Because of that, these articles are hard to find, both by Google and by users of your site. Google will consider this type of content less important. So, if an article is important to you, make that clear to Google (and your visitors) by linking to that particular article from other (related) content. Read more about solving the problem of orphaned articles in our article about orphaned content.

Check out our article on how to improve your site structure in 4 simple steps for more tips and practical input.

Learn how to write engaging copy and how to organize it well on your site: Combine our SEO copywriting and Site structure training. " Info

Copywriting

The third and final aspect of a successful content SEO strategy is copywriting. You should write articles that are attractive to read and that make your audience want to stay on your website. At the same time, you want to make your content attractive for Google. But some people go too far and optimize their content so overtly that they become terrible to read. At Yoast, we suggest optimizing your text for search without adversely affecting the originality of your idea or the readability of your text.
Read more: 'The ultimate guide to SEO copywriting' "
Copywriting starts with an original idea

The first requirement for high-quality copywriting is to write original content. Your blog post or your article should be 'fresh,' new and original. It has to be different from all the other blog posts and articles that are already on the internet. It should be content that people will want to read.

If you did your keyword research well, you ended up with a long list of terms you want to be found for. This list can be a guide for you to choose from. A keyword is not yet a topic, though. You should make sure to come up with an original idea for your blog post - an idea in which the desired focus keyword has a prominent place.

Original content doesn't necessarily mean brand new content. Of course, if your story is completely new, that'll automatically mean it's original. However, giving your (professional) opinion on a particular topic also counts as original content. Your own personal angle to a story will make your content unique and original.

Think about your audience

If you want to write original content, you should think about your audience and who they are. Also, ask yourself:

What do you want to tell your audience?

What will be the main message of your article?

What is the purpose of your article?

What do you want your audience to do after they've read your article? (Do you want them to engage, to buy your stuff, to read more posts?)

Thinking about these questions will help you to come up with an original idea for your post or article.

Copywriting requires readable content

A key requirement for writing high-quality content is to write content that's easily readable. Readability is important both for your audience and for Google. After all, not only do people read your articles, but Google does too.

If your text is well structured and clearly written, readers will understand your message, but perhaps, more importantly, it will also help Google understand better too. If your main message is clearer to Google, your post is far more likely to rank well in the search engines.

Readability is about many factors, including text structure, sentence length and writing clear paragraphs. Read all about the importance of readability in this post. For more tips on readability, you can read our post on how to make an article more readable.

Content should be optimized for search engines

The final requirement for writing high-quality content is to make sure the content is optimized for search engines. You want your content to be easily found. Findability has to do with increasing the likelihood Google will pick up your content for the result pages. It's important that you take this final step after you've written an original and readable post.

Yoast SEO helps you tweak your text just a little bit more. If you've written your article, focused on that original idea, and optimized the readability of your post, you should take a look at the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO.

Red and orange bullets indicate which aspects of your findability need a little bit more attention. The plugin could suggest using your focus keyword a little bit more often. Maybe you should put it in the first paragraph or one of the headings. Yoast SEO will help you to optimize your snippet preview as well. These tweaks can vastly improve your chances to be picked up by the search engines. Read more about optimizing your post in our article on how to use the content and SEO analysis.

Conclusion on Content SEO

Content SEO is such a huge part of SEO. It encompasses all the aspects of writing and structuring content on your website. Content SEO is essential. Google reads and scans your website text. Google's algorithm decides the ranking of your site largely based on the content you publish. And we all know content is king. So, you need to write awesome content, focus on the right keywords and structure your website in such a way Google understands it. It's a lot of work, but it will pay off in the long run.
Keep reading: 'Blogging: the ultimate guide' "

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The ultimate guide to content SEO * Yoast

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Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it is impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It is therefore crucial to write and structure quality content! This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO. Free course!

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The structure of the texts on your site is important for SEO. If your content is clearly structured, your chance to rank well in Google will be higher. In this blog post, I'll tell you why text structure is so important.

How do people scan a text?

Before deciding whether or not to read something, people tend to scan a text. They want to know what your text is about, before starting to read it all the way through.

There are some parts that people look at or read specifically when scanning a text. Headings and subheadings are really important, as is the first paragraph of a text. But also the first sentences of every new paragraph catch the eye of scanners.

How does Google "scan" a text?

Just like people scan texts in a certain way, so does Google. Let me give you three examples of how Google uses text structure for it's ranking:

1. Google defined, in some of its patents, ranking signals such as semantic closeness. Semantic closeness refers to the proximity of related words in a text, while taking into account the formatting of that text. To be able to understand semantic closeness of words, your text's structure must be clear.

2. In another Google patent, "the reasonable surfer" Google explicitly talks about headings. Headings containing certain keywords are important for the topic of a given page.

3. With the Hummingbird update, Google became a lot better at recognizing synonyms.

There are more patents that hint at using a text's structure to understand the text. Google, over time, has become much better at analyzing content. The better you write, the easier it becomes for Google to understand your content and therefore to rank it.

Setting up articles with clear structure has a positive effect on the ranking for another reason as well. Well-structured texts have lower bounce rates and higher chances to receive social media attention. This, in itself, leads to higher rankings.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium " Info

Tips on improving the structure of your text

If you want to improve the structure of your text, you need to pay attention to: 1. the first paragraph of your text; 2. your headings and 3. the first sentences of every new paragraph. Some time ago, I wrote an article on how to set up the structure of a blog post. Make sure to read that article if you have trouble setting up the structure for a text.

First paragraph

You should clearly formulate what your post is about in the first paragraph. In printed texts, a writer usually starts off with some kind of teaser, but there is no time for that if you are writing for the web. You only have seconds to draw you reader's attention. Make sure the first paragraph tells the main message of your post. That way, you make it easy for your reader to figure out what your post is about and: you tell Google what your post is about. Don't forget to put your focus keyword in that first paragraph!

Headings

Headings should be attractive and should clearly state the content of the paragraph below it. Headings allow your readers to quickly scan through your text and to decide whether or not they would like to read your article (or which parts). We would advise you to put a header above every long paragraph (or above a group of paragraphs which are thematically similar).

In our Yoast SEO plugin we check whether you use your focus keyword in your headings. It's helpful to search engines if a heading defines what a piece of text is going to be about. Whether they're a ranking factor or not (and SEOs do quarrel about that), headings are of great importance to the structure of your text. Google will therefore probably use them to determine what the text is about.

Core sentences

Make sure the first sentence of a paragraph is the most important, the core sentence, of that paragraph. After all, people tend to read the first sentence of every new paragraph as they're scanning through content. The other sentences in a paragraph elaborate upon that first core sentence. Chances are Google will pay extra attention to these sentences, in order to determine the topic of a text. They are great places to use your keyword, if possible. If you're writing a well-structured article and staying on-topic, your keyword will come up naturally in many core sentences.

Conclusion

Text structure is important to attract readers to your blog, as well as for SEO reasons. Writing well-structured and well-written texts isn't easy, though. At Yoast, we are strong believers in the importance of quality content. Currently, we're thinking about ways to help our clients write quality content. That's why we've hired our very own linguist, Irene. Irene is investigating on how to improve the content analysis of Yoast SEO. She is developing checks which will help our customers to make their blog posts more readable. We're also setting up an SEO copywriting course together, in which we learn people to write quality content.

Read more: 'Writing a blog: creating a clear blog post structure' "

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Why text structure is important for SEO * Yoast

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The structure of the texts on your site is important for SEO. If your content is clearly structured, your chance to rank well in Google will be higher. In this blog post, I'll tell you why text structure is so important. How do people scan a text?

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When blogging, it pays dividends to lay out the structure of your piece before you begin writing. The structure is the skeleton of your text and preparing it has multiple benefits. Firstly, it's easier to write a text when your structure is already there. Secondly, a clear structure helps the reader to easily read your post and grasp the core message. Here, we'll give you practical tips on how to structure your blog post.

Why is text structure important for SEO?

Structuring a text well improves readability and, thereby, helps your readers to understand your text. If readers better understand the information you provide, it's more likely they'll find the answer to the question they have. When Google notices, by so-called user signals, you're giving valuable answers to certain queries, chances are you'll climb the rankings.

Read more: Why text structure is important for SEO "
Creating a clear text structure is just one aspect of SEO copywriting. If you want to master all facets, take a look at our SEO copywriting training, which is part of our online SEO training subscription.
How to structure a blog post?

Think before you start writing. Get a pen and paper and write down what you want to write about. That could include a bit of keyword research, but ideally, you've already done that. Check out our ultimate guide to keyword research for more on this. Next, set up a text structure and keep it close to hand while writing your blog post. One way of setting up a structure for your text is by following these three steps:

1. Create a list of topics
Once you've gathered all the information you want to use in your post or article, you can begin structuring, so make a list of everything you want your article to cover. For instance, for this post this could be:

2. Bundle topics together
When you have a clear overview of all the topics you want to discuss in your article, you can start bundling topics. Similar topics should, of course, be discussed together. For this post, this could look like this:

3. Order your topics
When you're done bundling, you should decide on the order of the topics in your article. In most cases, you can decide to order thematically. For instance, if you want to discuss various aspects or angles of the main topic of your blog post. But you can also order your text chronologically or didactically, as you can see in the order types table below. In the example we're discussing, ordering topics thematically makes the most sense:

4. Write a few words about every sub topic
After you've ordered the topics you want to address in your article, you should make a new list. This list essentially is a summary of the article you're about to write. Write a short sentence or a few words for every paragraph you plan to write. This list serves as the skeleton of your article, and you should keep it close to refer to during the rest of the writing process.

Text order types

Apart from arranging the order of topics according to a theme; you could also order them chronologically or by explaining the basics first and going on to more difficult aspects - known as a didactic order. This is a good idea when you are trying to explain a complicated subject:

Another way to order your articles is the inverted pyramid style, a method that's been used by journalists for ages. It means you start out with the most crucial element in the beginning and later add details and more background information. Especially in news articles, this works well.

Guide users through your text

So, now you've got a skeleton/summary of the text you're about to write. When you start writing keep the following best practices in mind to make sure the reader will easily flow through your well-crafted blog post structure!

1. Create paragraphs

You have bundled topics together in the text structure you have set up, so now you can start to write your paragraphs. But what makes a good paragraph? A paragraph can be defined by three things. Remember these things while writing!

1. A paragraph should form a thematic unit.

2. A paragraph contains one core sentence and an elaboration of this core sentence.

3. Info should be made more visible by using whitespace.

Lots of people make mistakes while creating paragraphs. Some writers just put whitespace in their text in random places for aesthetic purposes but don't think about the coherence and structure of the text. In many cases, the coherence within paragraphs and between paragraphs remains unclear. These kinds of mistakes can mess up the structure of your articles.

Paragraphs can be short or long. The length of a paragraph is decided by the theme you are discussing, so it could be anywhere between two and fifteen sentences. However, for writing on websites, we would advise creating short paragraphs (keep it to less than 6 or 7 sentences). Because reading from a screen is hard.

For text on websites, we'd advise you to start your paragraph with the most important sentence, then explain or elaborate on it. A reader will be able to grasp the most important concepts from your article, just by reading the first sentences of your paragraphs. You can conclude longer paragraphs with a summarizing sentence to clarify your point.

2. Use transition words

To guide your reader, you should use plenty of transition words. Transition words give direction to your readers. These words show the reader that you're summarizing (e.g. and, too), comparing (e.g. less than, rather) or concluding something (e.g. thus, consequently, hence).

Type of relation

Examples of transition words

enumerate

and, first of all, also, another, furthermore, finally, in addition

cause

because, so, due to, while, since, therefore

compare/contrast

same, less, rather, while, yet, opposite, much as, either

conclude

as a result, hence, consequently, therefore, in conclusion

ambiguity

seems like, maybe, probably, almost

emphasize

most of all, most noteworthy, especially relevant

Using transition words is like putting cement between your sentences - they show your readers the connection between sentences and paragraphs.

If you're not used to using transition words, it can be hard to correct content you have already written. Be sure to use transition words whenever you are summarizing or enumerating. Also, using signal words in your conclusion helps people to grasp your core message.

3. Use headings to help your reader

In the first place, headings are of great importance for your readers. Headings allow your readers to quickly scan through your text and decide whether or not (or which parts of) they want to read your article. Therefore headings should be attractive and should cover the content of the paragraphs below. Whether headings play a direct role in SEO is debatable, but if readers easily grasp the message of your content, that surely helps your SEO.

You should put a heading above each paragraph, or above a series of paragraphs which contain similar topics. The headings should reflect the structure of your text. We advise you to put a heading above very long paragraphs, or above several shorter paragraphs which are thematically similar. Here's a detailed guide on how to implement headings in your post and on your site.

4. Add a table of contents

Landing on a page and not having a clue what to find there can make people hesitant to read on. Just seeing a long piece of text might even scare people away. Most people don't take the time to read your entire post, so to help them check whether this post offers them what they are looking for you can add a table of contents in the beginning. Especially, if you've written an extensive post or page, a table of contents give the readers a sense of control, and the possibility to scan which topics you deal with in post.

If you followed the steps above, your post will have a decent structure and headings already, which means this advice is easy to implement! The old-fashioned way to implement a table of contents is adding anchor tags to all your headings and adding a [TOC] shortcode at the beginning of your post. But if you're using the WordPress block editor together with Yoast SEO premium it's even easier! We've now added a TOC block to the Yoast SEO blocks. This means you'll just have to look for the right block, add it to your post, and you're done:

A better structure leads to better copy

Setting up a coherent structure for your blog post is an essential step of SEO copywriting. It will result in a better understanding of the message of your blog posts. If people understand your message, they will be much more likely to share your post on social media or buy what you are selling.

Taking time to think about a clear text structure before you start writing is worth your while. As you're writing, think about the structure of your paragraphs, your use of transition words and the headings in your post. If you follow these 'rules' your blog post will be far more understandable and readable to your audience.

Want to dive deeper into the subject of copywriting? Sign up for our SEO copywriting course for more writing tips!

Keep reading: The ultimate guide to Content SEO "

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Blog post structure: How to set up an easy-to-read text

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Readers - and Google - will understand a text better if it is structured well. Read how to create a winning blog post structure!