Hey everyone, it’s Tyree from Website Muscle, and I’m back with our top 10 must-dos for good blog posts. We’ve reached number seven, focus keywords.
Understanding Focus Keywords
If you are accustomed to writing blogs and posting them in your WordPress platform, then you’ve potentially seen the section down at the bottom. There’s a blank field for focus keywords, and that is what I’m talking about.
Remember, keywords are still important for SEO. They don’t carry the weight that they once used to, but they are still super critical to optimizing your blog post for Google rankings.
So, building a keyword strategy is part of the initial planning process that we talk about in our intro video. I recommend creating a top 10 list of keywords that you’d like to rank for. Then you can build your post strategy and your content strategy around those. Then you can do some basic monitoring using Google Analytics to see how your posts are performing.
Long-Tail Keywords
Your focus keywords are the terms and phrases that you want your post to rank for in search engines like Google. To do that, especially when you’re starting out, you’ll usually aim for what we call long-tail keywords.
You will most likely have keywords that are very general and broad, and those will be really hard to rank for because they’re super competitive. The more specific, niche, and targeted you can get with your focus keywords, the more likely your post is going to be able to rank for it.
Let’s say you’re a massage therapist. Massage therapy is a very broad, general keyword. It’s going to be highly competitive and difficult to rank for.
A long-tail keyword for a massage therapist might be corporate chair massages, or sports injuries massage, so on and so forth. So, those might be more likely to reach very specific users who are looking for that service.
Using Yoast SEO
In your Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, you’ll see a blank field at the bottom of each post for your focus keywords. Once you put those in, Yoast SEO will give you tips on how to optimize your post.
When we’re creating content with Yoast, we always shoot for a green light, which means your post is as optimized as it can be. Sometimes you have to settle for yellow, but no red lights — no red lights!
Yoast has lots of tips on their website for how to choose focus keywords, which is linked in our ebook. So set those set those focused keywords, so that you can see what kind of traffic your posts are getting.
Our “Blog Writing Guide” eBook has 10 tips on effective blog posts. Get it here.
Happy blogging!
