How Many Keywords Should I Use For Seo

Keywords are a seemingly inescapable aspect of the SEO world. SEO professionals (myself included) encourage clients to focus on more meaningful metrics as well the humble keyword ranking, but the fact remains that ranking well in Google for keywords with pregnant search volume will (usually) result in traffic to your site.

Of course, keeping track of keywords isn't free. Whether you spend your fourth dimension manually checking rankings or your money on a keyword rank tracking solution, yous have to limit how many keywords you track per page and per website. So, that begs the question, "how many keywords should yous track?"

Are you set up for this one? Information technology wouldn't be an SEO article if it didn't have the following judgement:

"It depends."

Beginning With Keyword Research

Unfortunately, keywords don't materialize out of thin air or come to u.s.a. in a vision. Even more than, you lot can't just assume you know what keywords people use to search and what yous should be ranking for. That's why you should always start with keyword inquiry.

There'due south plenty of information out there on how to perform keyword research successfully, just I'll outline some of my preferred steps and best practices below.

Which Pages Rank for What?

I'grand not the beginning Portentite to recommend starting keyword inquiry by looking at what you already rank for. I similar to become straight to Google Search Console (GSC) every bit soon as I get my hands on information technology. Despite the evidence that Search Console data is quite unreliable, it does come up straight from the search behemothic itself, then we can't ignore it.

Hop into your site's GSC Performance department to see a table of queries that domain ranks for.

Conveniently, this section defaults to testify which queries got your site the most clicks over the past 3 months. This gives you lot a great idea of what Google thinks your site deserves to rank for, and if you click the Pages tab, which pages are ranking.

From this starting bespeak, get forth and research keywords! Once again, I'one thousand not going to break downward that process in this mail, just I tin can point yous to a couple of corking resources nosotros already created. Our CEO, Ian Lurie, wrote this timeless guide for doing keyword research that doesn't suck. Want more help with Search Console? How most a walkthrough from former Portentite George Freitag? Finally, check out this recent mail from Senior SEO Strategist Zac Heinrichs on how to have your keyword inquiry to the next level.

Cull Landing Pages

One time you've identified the keywords you want to rank highly for, assign them to advisable landing pages. In all likelihood, you will have already identified your target pages while performing the keyword research.

The number of target organic landing pages will directly influence the answer to our main question nearly the appropriate number of keywords to track.

How Many Keywords Should You Track?

You've decided which of your pages yous want to optimize every bit organic landing pages, but how many keywords should you optimize each page for?

At the bare minimum, one; some pages may have a singular focus that answers but i query. It's much more than likely that you lot'll want to target two or three keywords per page, fifty-fifty if they're simply close variations. Any more than four is a bit crowded; later on all, each page only has ane title tag and meta description. With a range of keywords per page adamant, we tin can estimate how many keywords we'll track.

Take the number of organic landing pages you've called
Multiply that number by the range of keywords per page (one-four) to get your range, or
Multiply the number of organic landing pages by ii.v, the average of the range.

For example, permit's say you're working on a services site with v unique offerings and 3 blog posts that you lot want to target as landing pages. Betwixt these pages and your homepage, you should await to rails 9-36 or about 22 keywords on average.

Of class, rules of thumb are meant to be broken. We piece of work with a manufacturing client that offers ten unique manufacturing products. Without including their web log-focused keywords, we're tracking 62 keywords for their site.

Other sites might not be as cut and dried. We work with a major news publishing site which often ranks 1st for extremely high-book keywords due to their backlink profile and manufacture authorisation. Nosotros actively track over 200 keywords for them, almost of which don't directly stand for to a static landing page such as a product or service page.

Or, if yous're dealing with a site for a xx-year-old digital marketing agency run by some of the biggest nerds in the manufacture, yous might end up with well-nigh 500 keywords on your tracking listing so you can keep an eye on all the various blog posts you've published over the years.

How To Rails Keyword Rankings

Although I did mention information technology every bit a possibility, you lot're probably non going to desire to manually track keyword rankings by doing a Google search every day (from the same auto, using a private browsing window, at the same time of solar day, etc.) and looking for your site.

Fortunately, at that place are plenty of options available for keyword tracking.

STAT

We love our Vancouver neighbo(u)rs to the north! Their robust tool allows you lot to prepare upwards keyword tracking for desktop and mobile, specific locations, different languages, and tons of other features. They also archive HTML snapshots of the SERPs for the keywords you track then y'all tin can see how your site and your competitors showed up in Google results.

Screenshot of a STAT daily snapshot

Ahrefs

Another favorite of ours is Ahrefs, a true Swiss ground forces knife for digital marketers. Rather than specifying which keywords y'all'd like to actively runway, Ahrefs updates daily with all keywords that your tracked sites rank for. Yous may not exist able to go along tabs on that ambitious keyword you'd like to rank for simply never have, but it'south still incredibly comprehensive.

Google Search Console

This is a great free option, simply you go what you lot pay for. We already saw how you can use Search Panel to place what you're already ranking for in Google search. However, the platform simply shows your average ranking for a given keyword over a period of fourth dimension. That ways if you spent weeks ranking 80th for a term, but all of a sudden jumped to 2nd, your 28-day boilerplate ranking will be in the 70s.

There are, of form, dozens of options out there; these are only the few that I recommend.

What to Watch for in Rank tracking

You've done your keyword research, assigned terms to target landing pages, signed up for a monthly subscription to your tool of option… then at present what? Should you sweat over every movement in the rankings, no thing how modest? (No.) Should you be worried if all the keywords a unmarried page ranks for plummet 50 positions? (Probably.)

The easiest fashion to stay on top of your rank changes and have peace of mind for your site(s) is to gear up position change alerts. For example, STAT allows you to create custom alerts based on position movement. My about used warning is "If the number of keywords in the top-ten falls by 5%". The difference between a showtime- and 2nd-page effect is significant.

Still, alerts aren't going to take hold of everything. We SEO practitioners here at Portent cheque in on our clients' keyword rankings at least one time a week, making sure zero has fallen precipitously and jubilant with our clients when we run into a huge win.

Of course, fluctuations are to be expected. Google is notoriously capricious, and you may find your rankings undergoing a single-day spring or a back and forth oscillation.

Screenshot of a STAT keyword ranking graph — This screenshot from STAT shows a client's keyword ranking doing what rankings exercise best: bouncing upward and down.

Discover Your Goldilocks Number

I've given you a framework for estimating how many keywords to runway, but anyone in digital marketing can tell you that our rules aren't so much ready in rock every bit they are written in chalk until someone comes along and hoses down the sidewalk.

Y'all may find that yous prefer to track far more or far fewer keywords than I'm recommending. Maybe you lot don't bother tracking rankings at all! Equally long as the tracking that you do is valuable to you and your client, the exact number doesn't matter.