Did you know that 95% of users only look at the first page of the search results? If you want your content to appear among the top-ranking websites, you’ll have to learn how to strategically implement keywords. 

When it comes to your website’s ranking and traffic, keywords play a major role. Researching relevant keywords and employing them in your content pieces are essential to boost traffic and rank well. 

It’s paramount to use relevant keywords and follow a strategic approach if you want to enhance the performance of your content marketing strategy. If you’re looking to kickstart your SEO journey, this article is a great start. Together, we will take a look at the top six ways you can use keywords in your content efforts. 

1. Use Primary Keywords as a Reference

Making sure that your content pieces are built around relevant keywords is the first step to enhancing your content marketing strategy. 

When it comes to content creation, keyword research is paramount. You cannot create relevant, informative, and user-oriented content pieces if you haven’t done the keyword research first. 

Keyword research helps content creators to come up with relevant article ideas that they know the audience is looking for. When strategizing your content, ensure each content piece targets its own primary keyword.  Never use the same keyword for different articles. This way, your content pieces won’t compete with each other for search ranking. 

When conducting your keyword research, it’s helpful to use keyword analysis tools. Check out our blog on the Four Ways to Find Your Best Keywords & Improve SEO for more information on keyword research. 

2. Structure Your Content Around Secondary and Long-Tail Keywords 

Secondary keywords refer to the terms closely related to your primary keyword. They are particularly helpful because they add context and extra SEO value to your content. 

Long-tail keywords imply keywords that are very specific and typically include longer word counts. 

Secondary keywords are great for understanding the knowledge gaps your users may have. Before creating your content pieces, make sure to identify related long-tail keywords first. They are great identifiers of more descriptive and specific user searches. 

Also, you can use long-tail and secondary keywords to better structure your copies. For example, you can use them as subheadings. This way, you’ll better address users’ knowledge gaps and further improve your SEO.  

3. Use Keywords for Topic Validation 

Researching and validating your topic ideas is another way to use keywords within your content marketing strategy. 

Let’s say, you’ve got a potential list of topic ideas for your future blog posts. But how do you know they’re 100% relevant to your business? Experts from Ivory Research suggest the answer is by validating topics with the help of keywords. 

Utilize the keywords required to write your content pieces to validate your topics. Then, use the same keywords to scope out the competition and create the go-to source for your topic. 

4. Consider The Keyword Taxonomy 

A well-crafted content piece should target multiple keyword types and lengths. Yet, sometimes it can be challenging to structurize primary, secondary, and long-tail keywords within a single content piece. 

In order to target multiple keyword types simultaneously, you have to consider a keyword taxonomy before your content. 

What is a Keyword Taxonomy? 

Key taxonomy refers to the tree-shaped structure containing many keywords that become more specific when you move to the ends of branches. 

For better visualization, take a look at the picture below. This is how a keyword taxonomy will look like for a tree cutting website: 

How do You Create a Keyword Taxonomy? 

Break all the keywords down into subcategories that get more and more specific. Then, organize the keywords by complexity, type, and length. Identify which keywords are better suited for subheadings, which can be addressed as primary keywords, and which will add extra context to your copies. 

Make sure your website contains different sections and copies that cover all subcategories of keywords.

Thinking in terms of keyword taxonomies will help you better strategize your content, and as a result, create more relevant and useful pieces. If you run out of content ideas, you can use keyword taxonomies for inspiration. Look for the holes in taxonomies to find which topics you and your competitors haven’t covered yet.  

5. Use the Right Keyword Placement 

Proper keyword placement is another way to enhance the performance of your content marketing strategy. 

Where on The Page Should the Keywords Appear? 

Choose the primary keyword (or its variation), and ensure it appears in all of these places: 

• First sentence/paragraph 

• The post’s URL and the links to related content 

• Title and H1 tag

• Meta description 

• Image file names 

Before publishing your content pieces, proofread and edit them once again from the keyword perspective. Make sure that there are no long sections where your primary keyword (or its variations) doesn’t appear. Also, you don’t want to overuse the primary keyword as the copy may sound robotic and poorly written. The bottom line is to find a perfect balance between overusing the primary keyword and not using it at all. 

6. Target Multiple Keywords on The Same Page

Targeting multiple keywords is another factor that can improve your content efforts. Intentionally or not, every content piece you publish already includes multiple keywords, especially if you target a long-tail keyword as your main keyword. 

Let’s take Hostinger’s post on blog name generators as an example. It seems like the author chose to target ‘blog name generators’ as their primary keyword. ‘Blog name generators’ contains other keywords (’name generators’ and ‘generators’) within. Both the title and the URL include a longer keyword (‘blog name generators’) and shorter keywords (‘name generators’ or ‘generators’) which contributes to driving more traffic to the page. Even though the author optimized this blog post to target a single long-tail keyword, it’s ranking on other related keywords. 

Final thoughts 

Remember that SEO and content work in balance. Don’t overoptimize your content and stuff  page with many keywords. Instead, use only relevant keywords and follow a strategic approach to implementing keywords into your content marketing efforts. 

Use Google Keyword’s Planner and other keyword analysis tools to compare the most popular keyword competition and volume.