How to do keyword research for a specific page

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

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

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

However, when focusing on a page, you should start with the overall keyword research process. This process will help you identify the possible phrases a customer might use to find your company’s solutions to their problems. This focus enables you to remember which pages need optimization. It also helps you discover which pages you need to build. 

Once you have an overview, do 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 to focus on, return here for more in-depth research.

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

When a page has the proper keyword focus, meaning it uses the phrases most commonly searched by your customers, you’ll get more traffic from Google and more conversions.

When someone tries optimizing several pages on one site for the same (or similar) keywords, this is called “keyword cannibalization.” When this happens, Google keeps testing several pages on your site to see which is best for a keyword. While it sounds like a good idea, 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, selecting a particular query, and then a page for those queries. You might have a cannibalization issue if Google serves multiple pages for a query phrase. 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 use this process (below) to go into more depth.

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

I like to return to this process every few months to ensure the essential keywords I choose are still crucial to potential customers. In other words, I want to see if they’re searching (and finding me) for what I thought they would search for. If not, I can adjust my on-page optimization efforts.

Finding the right keywords for a page