This post was sponsored by Moz. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
The scope of modern keyword strategy is expansive and crosses many disciplines. As Google leans further into user experience and user signals as part of its ranking algorithms, research, execution, and testing must become more interwoven and refined.
If your keyword strategy is underperforming and you’re struggling to drive traffic, rankings, or even onsite conversions, your keyword strategy could be missing critical components.
The following is a look at common mistakes and how to address them. You’ll see screenshots and examples of how you can solve keyword strategy issues and improve workflows during the keyword research stage using the premium keyword research features in Moz Pro, but you can get started free with Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool.
Mistake #1: Failing To Target Intent
You can’t just pick a keyword you want to rank for and move straight into writing a page. What you want to target is the first part of a complex equation, of which the user is the most important part.
Intent can be expressed as a set of questions:
Why is the user searching for the query?
What does the user expect to find?
What do search engines deliver to meet this intent?
You must answer these questions to build content that fits neatly between the expectations of searchers and the search engines. Whether you’re a beginner in keyword research or you’re a professional SEO who wants to brush up on the fundamentals, you must understand the relationship between queries and search intent. Content that does not satisfy intent will result in a poor user experience, which leads to negative engagement signals, which will hurt your ability to rank.
You must understand the relationship between queries and search intent. Content that does not satisfy intent will result in a poor user experience, which leads to negative engagement signals.
If enough of your content is misaligned with user intent, it could impact your entire site, as you won’t be seen as trustworthy or authoritative.
If individual pages or your keyword strategy as a whole is underperforming, this is one of the first things you should audit because a mismatch between search intent and your content will kill those pages, whether they’re old or new.
You also need to keep in mind that intent changes. This can be due to one-off events, seasonal changes, or algorithm updates.
Here are some examples of intent:
Purchase intent: the user is actively looking for a product to buy.
Comparison intent: the user is shopping around and comparing products.
Informational or educational intent: The user wants to learn something.
Screenshot from Moz
Intents can be quite complicated, and you’ll need to rely on your own audience research to get granular. But a tool can help speed up the process by showing you the general intent of a keyword and what is currently ranking on the SERP.
Explore by Keyword in Moz Pro makes it easy to see keyword intent at a glance for individual keywords and a whole batch of keyword suggestions. Let’s look at the keyword [best convertible car seat].
You can probably already guess the intent, and the tool confirms that it’s a commercial intent keyword. This means users are looking to compare products and features to find the best suited for them. Remember, this is based on the results in the SERPs, so it’s giving you some more intel into what Google expects a user’s intent to be, which we’ll discuss more in a bit.
Screenshot of Moz Pro
As you go through the research process, you can use a combination of factors such as Difficulty and intent to discover related keywords worth pursuing to bolster your strategy.
Mistake #2: Not Conducting Competitor And On-SERP Research
When you’re in the weeds of data tables and strategy, it’s easy to forget one of the most simple and critical rules in SEO.
Most of the information you need is on the SERP.
When you evaluate the SERP of a given keyword, you can gain a lot of information with the right approach. But you’re going to need to get good at reading between the lines.
You can use the existing pages on a SERP to understand how well the query is being satisfied and what competitors are and are not doing. If the SERP has many high-quality pages, you can learn a lot from the strategies your competitors use. If there are pages that you consider low-quality, based on your knowledge of the subject matter, then you’ve identified an opportunity.
So, to properly research SERPs, you need a few skills:
Understanding of design and UX to identify suboptimal user experiences or understand why some pages may be outperforming.
A deep understanding of the subject matter covered by the keyword so that you can identify which pages provide trustworthy, high-quality information.
Knowledge of the user intent behind a query so that you can match the intent with the experience that the ranking pages deliver.
From there, you can evaluate the quality of the pages and choose where to focus your efforts. If you’re lacking information or you can’t find a good angle of attack, then start looking at similar SERPs for related keywords or related intents. If you can find a SERP with sufficiently different results but related search intent, you can compare and contrast.