How to do keyword research for a specific page

To optimize a particular page, you need to know what phrases your customers are using to look for what you have to offer.

Why is it important to find the right keywords for a particular page?

Each page on your site should have a unique, topical focus. Within this topic, you need to identify some of the possible phrases (ie “keywords”) that people might use to find that topic. This allows you to speak your customers’ language when looking for the services or products your company has to offer them.

When focusing on a page, however, you should first start with the overall keyword research process. This should help you identify the possible phrases a customer might use to find your company’s solutions to their problems. This helps you identify which pages need optimization. It also helps you discover which pages you need to build. Start with an overview.

Once you have an overview, do some more in-depth keyword research on a particular page’s topic. That’s what this process describes.

Repeat this process for each page that needs to have an SEO focus.

TL;DR: Don’t start here. Start with a keyword research overview. Once you know what you should be focusing on, return here for more in-depth research.

What should you expect from a page’s keyword focus?

When a page has the right keyword focus, meaning it uses the phrases most commonly searched by your customers, you’ll not only get more traffic from Google, but more conversions as well.

When someone ties to optimize several pages on one site, for the same (or very similar) keywords, this is called “keyword cannibalization”. When this happens, Google tends to keep testing several pages on your site to see which page is best of a given keyword. While it might sound like a good idea, I think you’ll find that you’ll never get much traffic as Google keeps switching users between different pages, trying to find out the best one. You can see if Google is testing keywords with different pages by going into Google Search Console > Performance and then selecting a particular query and then a page for those queries. If Google serves multiple pages for a query phrase, you might have a cannibalization issue. Instead, let’s focus each page on one clear and distinct topical focus- so Google doesn’t have to guess and we maximize our traffic.

While each page has a topical focus, you don’t want to optimize each page for a different keyword. Some pages should try to “rank” for several related keyword phrases. We’d using this process (below) to go into a little more depth.

This process should also show you a little more about what you should write on your page. When I tell clients they need “more content” on their pages they sometimes get frustrated. They don’t know what to write about. This in-depth per-page keyword research process should help fill in those blanks. This should bring in additional, long-tailed traffic to your page. While long-tailed traffic is small, it tends to convert into new customers very well.

This process can also be used to come up with topics that will help you know what blog posts you can write for your blog- or on other websites, as part of your link building process. This not only will bring in more traffic to your site but will help build internal links to your core landing pages, helping them rank better, too.

I like to return to this process every couple of months to make sure the most important keywords I choose are still important to potential customers. In other words, I want to check to see if they’re searching (and finding me) from what I thought they would search for. If not, I can make an adjustment in my on-page optimization efforts.

Finding the right keywords for a page