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Finding the best keyword strategy

19 January 2018 | 13 Comments | Tags ,

Doing keyword research is a vital part of your content SEO strategy, but can be a long and difficult process. It’s just not easy to get into the heads of your audience: what words and phrases could they be using? What is their intention when searching? Another important aspect to check is whether it’s realistic to try to rank for a certain keyword or keyphrase, especially if there’s heavy competition.

In this Ask Yoast, I’ll get into a specific case of a business aimed at reaching people who want to start a company in Vietnam. What are the most important things to keep in mind?

Brian Ho emailed us his question on keywords:

I’m trying to reach out to people around the world who want to open a company in Vietnam. Does that mean that I need to add the word ‘Vietnam’ to all my focus keywords?

Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer to finding the best keyword strategy!

Finding the best keyword strategy

“Well, you don’t have to add it to all of them, but ‘Vietnam’ is probably one of your important keywords at that point. So if you think about ‘start business,’ then yes, ‘start business in Vietnam’ is probably the focus keyword that you want to optimize for, not ‘start business,’ because then your competition will be way, way, way bigger.

At the same time, there are reasons why people would want to move to Vietnam, and they don’t know that when they’re searching. So you probably also have keywords that relate to starting a business, and that might actually make you want to convince them that they should do that in Vietnam, but they wouldn’t use the word ‘Vietnam’ when searching.

So think about your keyword research. We have a course about that if you into that: our SEO copywriting course has a whole module about all of this. This is not something that you should just add, because just adding ‘Vietnam’ to your focus keyword is not going to change anything. You really should think about your strategy, like: “Okay, which keywords do I want to be found for, which topic should I write about?”. And then, based on that, decide your focus keywords. Good luck.”

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Discussion (13)

    • Hi Ali! Well, technically, yes, you can use a focus keyword that isn’t in your title. But that isn’t necessarily a good idea, since the title is one of the important places that Google checks to see what a page is about. Check out this article if you want to know more about titles: https://yoast.com/page-titles-seo/ :)

  • Hello Joost de Valk,

    Keyword Research is indeed very vital to write a good SEO Article. I have a question of my own.

    Is there a way Yoast can fetch Data from Google Webmaster tools to show me which keywords I should include in my article for internal links?

    Regards
    Boty

  • Hi, can you explain how to be found for a keyword that is not a part of the root domain??

  • This is nice information to learn seo and selection of keyword to target.
    Thanks for sharing

  • Thanks for offering this opportunity, Valk. I will send in some questions soon.

  • Hey Joost,

    I’ve been loving the Yoast plugin, but I find it difficult to figure out what keyword to focus on for each article, especially if I write the article to address a common issue amount our readers, not necessarily with SEO in mind right from the beginning. Do you have any tips for that?

    Also, I’m a bit confused about the term “keyword.” You’re using more of a phrase there: “start business in Vietnam.” That’s considered a keyword, yeah?

    • Check out our must read articles about Content SEO