It’s helpful to use a short, descriptive URL structure highlighting the core topic of the page. As Google explains in its SEO starter guide:
“Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them.”
We recommend using your target keyword as the URL slug, like we do throughout the Ahrefs blog:
Page Title
Target Keyword
URL Slug
SEO Agency Software (My Tried and Tested Tools)
seo agency software
/blog/seo-agency-software/
Franchise SEO: Local and National Growth Strategies for Franchises
franchise seo
/blog/franchise-seo/
SEO Trends 2024: Separating Fact From Fiction
seo trends
/blog/seo-trends/
How to Promote Your Blog (There Are Only Three Ways)
how to promote your blog
/blog/how-to-promote-your-blog/
Adding your keyword to your URL won’t magically boost search performance, but it will build the reader’s confidence that your page is relevant to their query.
(And make your life easier when you come to update your old content and can’t remember what the target keyword was.)
When choosing your URL, it’s a good idea to:
Avoid including dates (unless they’re essential)./best-seo-tools-2024 makes sense this year, but it will send the wrong message to searchers if you want to update your article next year.
Don’t worry about function words. Words like for, and, or to can be safely left out of your URL.
Make URLs simple and readable. domain.com/article/keyword-research-guide is better than domain.com/2024/03/21/article-keyword-research.
Meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, but they can bring more clicks and traffic. This is because Google uses them for the descriptive snippet in the search results 37.22% of the time. The rest of the time, they use other content from the page.
For that reason, there’s no ned to obsess over crafting perfect meta descriptions for every page. Just focus on writing good ones for important pages, like your homepage or those that get lots of search traffic. Here are a few writing tips:
Keep them short—under 160 characters is ideal.
Expand on the title tag—include extra information that your title doesn’t contain.
Match search intent—double down on what searchers want.
Use an active voice—address the searcher directly.
Include your keyword—Google often bolds these in the results.
To speed up this process, try our free AI meta description generator. Describe your page, choose a desired writing tone, and hit “generate”.
The tool will generate a few options for you to use or remix to your heart’s content:
Title tags are often the main piece of information used to decide which search result to click on. More often than not, that hinges on having a great title.
Google rewrites title tags 61.6% of the time (most often for titles that are very short or very long). But these are usually small changes, so it’s worth spending time making your title as compelling as possible.
Here are a few tips for writing titles:
Keep them short—under 70 characters is best to avoid truncation.
Match search intent – tell searchers you have what they want.
Harness the curiosity gap—but don’t create misleading clickbait that isn’t reflective of the article’s contents.
Include the keyword—or a close variation if it makes more sense.
Include the year for topics that demand freshness—like tax allowance 2024.
Do something to stand out—show a sense of humour, or respond to other articles in the SERP.
If in doubt, use the ABC formula—adjective, benefit, confidence booster.
You should set a title tag on every indexable page. If you like, you can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit to find pages with title tag issues like being empty or too long. Once you’ve signed up and crawled your site (it’s free), go to the Content report to check for issues.
Here we can see 226 page titles that are too long, and at risk of getting truncated:
HTML header tags help Google understand the content on your pages, and break it up into logical, easily skimmed sections.
Header tags look like this—<h2>Header goes here</h2>—in your page’s code. You can use the Ahrefs toolbar to quickly see how header tags are used on a page:
As a general guide, try to:
Use one <h1> tag per page.
Use <h2> tags for your page’s main points.
Use <h3> tags (and beyond) for sections that support your main points, like examples or related ideas.
As an added benefit, good use of subheadings will improve the readability of your content, making it easier to see, at a glance, what each section is about:
Including your target keyword within key elements of your page will help Google (and your readers) understand what the page is about:
Page title
URL
Main header (H1)
Subheaders (some of your H2s, H3s, etc.)
Intro paragraph
Or put another way: it would be weird to write an article on “brewing espresso” without mentioning the phrase “brewing espresso” in the title or introduction.
It helps to include some exact-match keywords in these important locations, but Google is also smart enough to recognize synonyms and related keywords. If your target keyword is three or four words long, you don’t need to include it as an exact match every time.
There’s no magic keyword density to aim for, and including lots of keywords in unnatural ways can actually hurt your performance (it’s called keyword stuffing).
Your goal here is to clearly and consistently tell Google (and your readers) precisely what your article is about.
You should already have a proven topic if you’ve done keyword research. This is something with traffic potential, business potential, and ranking potential:
Traffic potential: can generate enough visits to make the effort of creating content worthwhile.
Business potential: allows you to naturally mention your product or service
Ranking potential: it’s possible for your website to rank for the target keyword.
Here’s a proven topic for a baking supplies store:
It has good business and traffic potential and looks easy to rank for based on its Keyword Difficulty (KD) score.
To find it, we:
Plugged the seed keyword “bakery” into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Checked the Matching Terms report.
Filtered for keywords with good traffic potential and low KD
DID YOU KNOW?
Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in Ahrefs are based on the number of backlinks to the top-ranking pages. It’s a helpful way to refine lists of keywords. Still, it’s always worth investigating ranking difficulty further before pursuing a topic. Learn more in our Keyword Difficulty guide.
Finally, we checked the top-ranking pages and their stats in the SERP overview. As many have few or no backlinks and are from unknown brands, it seems quite a promising keyword.
2. Analyze search intent
Understanding search intent means figuring out what the searcher is looking for. You need to do this because your chances of ranking are slim if your content doesn’t align with it.
Here’s what happened to one of our blog posts after we did a better job of matching the searcher’s intent:
A keyword like “how to make espresso at home without a machine” makes it easy to guess the intent behind the search. The information is right there, in the keyword: searchers want to learn how to make great coffee, at home, without an espresso machine.
But the intent behind “espresso” is harder to infer from the keyword alone:
Does the searcher want to buy coffee?
Do they want a simple definition or a detailed process for making it?
Should we write about expensive espresso machines or DIY alternatives like a mocha pot?
This information isn’t in the keyword, but it is in the search results. If an article is ranking well for a particular keyword, it’s probably giving searchers what they want. The existing search results can provide a roadmap to help you understand and match intent.
Most of the top results for “espresso” focus on definitions and simple explainers.
To identify search intent, look at the top-ranking results on Google and identify the three Cs of search intent:
Content type: what is the dominant type of content? Is it a blog post, product page, video, or something else?
Content format: are all the top results how-to guides? Or lists, or reviews, or comparisons?
Content angle: what approach do the top-ranking articles take? Do they all talk about the “best”, or “cheapest,” or “for beginners”?
For example, the top results for “neapolitan pizza dough” are all recipe blog posts. And authenticity is the dominant angle.
In most situations, your content should take a similar approach to the content that already ranks well (similar, but not identical—more on that below). Once you’re happy that you’re giving searchers what they want, it’s time for the nitty-gritty of on-page SEO.
TIP
Some search results can contain several different types of intent (the SERP for “kiwi” includes the bird, the fruit, the airline company, and the Harry Styles song).
If you want to use data to help you determine which intent to target, try the “Identify intents” feature in Ahrefs.
Head to Keywords explorer, enter your keyword, scroll to the SERP overview and hit the Identify intents button:
Here you can see that an estimated 49% of the traffic goes to basic information about kiwi fruits. But there’s another angle that might be worth taking: 19% of the estimated traffic cares specifically about the health benefits of eating Kiwi fruit.
Learn more in our guide to search intent: Search Intent in SEO: What It Is & How to Optimize for It.
3. Check your expertise
Today more than ever, Google values content that shows first-person experience of the subject matter. Here’s what they said in a recent update to their quality rater guidelines:
“Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced? There are some situations where really what you value most is content produced by someone who has first-hand, life experience on the topic at hand.”
Google uses signals that help determine content that demonstrates expertise. This is especially important for topics that could impact a reader’s happiness, health, or wealth. Google calls these Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics.
As Google explains:
Non-YMYL topics. “Everyday expertise” is enough. If the writer has the type and amount of life experience to make them an expert on the topic, you’re good.
YMYL topics. Formal expertise is important, but “everyday expertise” is enough for some topics. For example, someone with cancer can answer “what is it like to have cancer” better than a doctor.
The easiest way to demonstrate first-person experience is to write about subjects you know well. For example, Chris from our blog team has years of experience running SEO at agencies at in-house companies, so he can write authoritatively on a topic like A Beginner’s Guide to SEO Reporting.
Use the flowchart below to decide if and how to cover a topic.
There are on-page elements that can help too:
Include expert quotes. When your expertise isn’t enough to be authoritative on the subject, seek out quotes and feedback from people who are experts (especially in fields that require specific certifications and qualifications, like healthcare or accountancy).
Get hands-on with your topic. If you’re writing about brewing espresso, actually go and brew a few hundred shots. Reviewing free CRM software? Download, install, and spend a few hours with each option. If you aren’t willing to go to these lengths, there’s a good chance you’ll be beaten by someone who will.
Show evidence. Prove to readers (and Google) that you did the thing you’re talking about: add experience to your author bio, and include photographs and videos of your experience.
4. Cover the topic in full
If you’ve got expertise covered, it’s time to create the type of content searchers want to see. Analyzing search intent gives you a high-level idea of this, but it doesn’t reveal all. That’s a problem because the best result for a query covers everything searchers want to know.
If a reader clicks on an article titled How to brew perfect espresso, it’s likely they’ll feel frustrated if the article misses out important steps, like grinding beans or dosing your basket.
Good search content is exhaustive: it covers all the steps of the process, lists all the resources the reader needs, and answers all the questions that need answering. It delivers on its promises and leaves no important gaps in its information.
Exhaustive content is great for readers, but it also increases the likelihood that your article will rank for more keywords. In the image below, we can see an article called How to brew espresso ranking for 712 keywords, including terms like how to make espresso at home and espresso shot:
Importantly, being exhaustive doesn’t always mean writing something very long. Content can be thorough, helpful, and short—it depends on the topic. If the reader is looking for a quick definition or—dare I say it—a recipe, thousands of words of writing can sometimes get in the way.
An important part of being exhaustive is covering relevant sub-topics. Keyword research can be a big help here: in Ahrefs, head to Keywords explorer, enter your target keyword, and you can quickly find hundreds of related keywords to consider covering, including:
Terms match: keywords that contain all of the terms of your target keyword (“how to make espresso martini”).
Questions: relevant keywords phrased as questions (“how to make espresso at home”)
Also rank for: keywords that the top 10 ranking pages also rank for (“what is espresso”)
Also talk about: keywords frequently mention by top-ranking articles (“coffee maker”)
You can also read the top-ranking content for inspiration, like this section on moka pot espresso:
Or you can use Site explorer to look at the different keywords each article already ranks for. From this selection, it might be worth covering how to make espresso without an espresso machine:
You can run this process for multiple articles using the Content Gap report. In the screenshot below, I’m comparing our article (highlighted) with three competing articles:
Hit “Show keywords” and you can immediately see keywords that you don’t rank for, but your competitors do. In this example, we should probably add a section talking about the type of coffee that works best in espresso machines:
And perhaps most important of all: use your common sense.
If you know from experience that a particular subtopic is crucial to mention, but can’t see any keywords or existing articles to justify it, go ahead and add it anyway. Information that helps the reader is information that helps search rankings.
A NOTE ON ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION TOOLS
On-page SEO tools can be helpful for identifying sub-topics—with one important caveat.
If you take all of their recommendations at face value, it’s very easy to create content that’s a nonsensical mish-mash of everyone else’s content, or worse—horribly and obviously keyword-stuffed.
I like to use on-page optimization tools as an extra source of possible topics to include in my content outline. If my article is exhaustive, I don’t worry about whether it scores a B- or an A+.
Learn why here: Do Higher Content Scores Mean Higher Google Rankings? Our Data Says It’s Unlikely.
5. Make it unique
If you base the entirety of your content on top-ranking pages, you’ll end up with copycat content. This content fails to stand out from the crowd or offer anything unique.
Copycat content is a problem for SEO because people have no incentive to link to it. And links are important because they’re a ranking factor.
Whatever you want to call it—information gain, uniqueness, value-add—the answer is straightforward: offer something that can’t be found anywhere else:
Cover subtopics no one else has covered: “The most overlooked factor in great espresso…”
Share an expert opinion or personal experience: “Machine espresso is overrated because…”
Run an experiment: “I brewed all my coffee with an Aeropress for a month…”
Provide original data through polls, surveys, and studies: “I surveyed twenty baristas and found…”
Interview subject matter experts: “I spoke to a World Brewer’s Cup champion…”
If you use the Best by links report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to see our most linked blog posts, most of them are studies. This shows just how effective original research can be for earning backlinks in our industry.
Another tip is to look at why people link to top-ranking pages.
For example, we found links to a competing page about SEO copywriting thanks to a formula coined by the author. So we created our own called the ASMR formula for our post. It’s already earned us a few links.
DID YOU KNOW?
Google is aware of the issues with copycat content. They even filed a patent in 2020 with a potential solution. It’s called Contextual Estimation of Link Information Gain. It presents a solution whereby documents are given information gain scores. These state how much more information one source may bring to a person who has seen other sources on the same topic.
6. Make it “sticky”
People aren’t going to stick around for something they find confusing or hard to read. That’s bad because Google uses interaction data to assess relevance. If searchers abandon your content like the Titanic, that’s unlikely to help SEO.
Here are a few tips for making content more “sticky”:
Keep it simple. Avoid complex words and sentences.
Make it visual. Break up walls of text with images and videos.
Speak your audience’s language. Use terms and jargon that resonate with readers.
Boss your spelling. Run a spell check; it makes all the difference.
Tools like Hemmingway and Grammarly can help with simplification and spell checks. If you’re curious what kind of language and terms your audience might use, try this:
Enter your keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Go to the Related terms report
Click the “Also talk about” toggle
7. Keep it evergreen
Content doesn’t stay fresh forever. That’s an issue if you’re targeting a fast-moving topic. It means you’ll have to work to keep your content updated to keep Google and searchers happy.
For example, the estimated traffic trend for our list of top Google searches goes up and down.
This happens because the topic demands fresh content. Searchers don’t want a list of the top Google searches from yesteryear; they want something up to date. Each dip happened when our content became stale, and each rise happened when we updated the page.
If you’re a WordPress user, you can keep an eye on declining rankings with our free WordPress SEO plugin. Just set a target keyword for each page, and it’ll tell you if rankings start to tank. You can then investigate whether this is because the content needs refreshing.
SEO content is content designed to rank in search engines. It could be a blog post, product or landing page, interactive tool, or something else.
Why is SEO content important?
Not all content ranks and gets traffic from organic search. Only content crafted for searchers about topics they’re searching for does (unless you get lucky).
Keyword research is practically impossible to do without specialized tools. And if you’re only starting out or have a tight budget, here are some free keyword research tools for you:
Google Search Console – It shows all of the search queries that your website is currently ranking for and getting clicks from.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – This is our free plan, which is very similar to Google Search Console. But other than showing you what keywords your website is ranking for, we also show you their Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores.
Google Keyword Planner – It’s a tool for those who want to run ads in Google. But SEOs, too, can get some value from using it.
Keyword Generator – Our free tool for generating keyword ideas.
Keyword Difficulty Checker – Our free tool for checking the ranking difficulty of a keyword.
And once you get truly serious about growing the search traffic of your website, make sure to sign up for Ahrefs and give Keywords Explorer a spin. This tool has pretty much everything you need to perform expert-level keyword research and discover some lucrative keyword ideas.
Prioritizing your list of keywords and deciding where you should invest your efforts first is probably the least straightforward and extremely “individual” part of the keyword research process.
There are just too many things to consider:
What is the estimated traffic potential of this keyword?
What’s the ranking difficulty? Who are you competing against?
What will it take to create a perfect page? Or maybe you already have one, and it needs to be improved?
What’s the business value of this keyword? What would you get from ranking for it?
That last point is a particularly important one. While search volume, traffic potential, ranking difficulty, and search intent are all important considerations, you also need to factor in what ranking for this keyword will be worth to your business.
How to gauge the “business potential” of a keyword
Many marketers judge the value of a keyword by mapping it to the so-called buyer’s journey, i.e., a process people go through before making a purchase. Conventional wisdom says the earlier people are in their journey, the less likely they are to buy.
Here’s one popular buyer’s journey framework:
Top of the Funnel (TOFU) – People are looking for general information about the subject.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) – People are researching available solutions to their problem.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) – People are looking to make a purchase of a specific product or service.
TOFU keywords tend to have high search volumes but low conversion rates (i.e., “keyword research,” which has 5,700 monthly searches). While BOFU keywords are extremely lucrative but their search volumes are much lower (i.e., “best keyword research tool,” which has 800 monthly searches).
At Ahrefs, we think that this kind of framework is rather limiting and perhaps even misleading.
Here are three reasons why:
First, the fact that someone is looking for a TOFU term like “keyword research” doesn’t mean that you can’t promote your product to them. (Which is exactly what I did in this very article with all the mentions of our Keywords Explorer.)
Second, it’s quite challenging to assign each keyword a definitive TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU label because things aren’t always that clear-cut. For example, “best keyword research tool” could be a MOFU or BOFU keyword for us. It depends on how you look at it.
Third, some marketers broaden their definition of TOFU to such a degree that they end up covering completely unrelated topics. For example, the folks at HubSpot have written articles targeting the following keywords: “famous quotes,” “ice breaker games” and, most hilarious of all, “shrug emoji.”
Here at Ahrefs, we’ve developed our own way of determining the business value of a keyword.
We call it “business potential,” and it’s a simple score from 0 to 3, which indicates how easy it will be to pitch our product while covering a given keyword.
To be completely honest with you, we do sometimes have internal debates within our team when we’re scoring our blog topics according to this scale. And yet we still prefer it to any of these conventional “buyer’s journey” frameworks.
Which keywords should you start working on first?
Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this question. As SEOs like to say, “It depends.”
Are you working on a brand-new website or an established business?
Are you the only marketer, or do you manage a large team?
Are you responsible for the actual conversions or providing new leads to the sales team?
How fast do you need to show results?
Keyword research is an act of balancing your unique circumstances with a set of metrics and concepts, which we’ve just covered: traffic potential, keyword difficulty, business potential, and search intent.
In some cases, your job will be to get as much traffic as possible as fast as possible, which comes down to finding the high-volume, low-difficulty keywords. Other times, you’ll need to focus on leads or conversions, in which case business potential will be the most important metric to focus on.
Keyword research is not the process of finding “easy to rank for” keywords. It’s the process of finding the keywords that make the most sense to your business.
You should also have short-, medium-, and long-term ranking goals. If you only focus on short-term goals, you’ll never rank for the most lucrative keywords. If you only focus on medium- and long-term goals, it’ll take years to get any traffic.
A very important step in analyzing keywords is to identify what kind of page you’ll need to create in order to maximize your chances to rank. And if you can use that page to target a group of relevant keywords all at once. Or perhaps create a few additional pages to target some of the keywords individually.
Let’s explore how you determine those things.
1. Identify the Parent Topic
Let’s say that you’ve got the following keywords on your list:
All of these search queries seem to be talking about the same topic: “whipped coffee.” But does that mean that a single page can rank well for all these keywords? Or perhaps you’ll need to create individual pages to target each of them separately?
The answer largely depends on how Google sees these keywords. Does it see them as part of the same topic? Or does it see them as individual topics?
You can get a sense of this by searching for each of these keywords one by one and comparing the search results. For example, let’s compare the search results for the keyword “whipped coffee” with those of the keyword “whipped coffee recipe”:
The top-ranking pages for both keywords are nearly identical. This means that Google sees the search query “whipped coffee recipe” as a subtopic of a more general query, “whipped coffee.” So you can rank for both keywords with a single page.
Now let’s compare the search results for “whipped coffee” with those of “whipped coffee without sugar”:
This time, there’s absolutely no crossover between the two SERPs. That means that “whipped coffee without sugar” isn’t part of a broader “whipped coffee” topic. Or at least Google doesn’t think so. Which means that you’ll need to create two separate pages if you want to target both of these keywords.
Comparing the search results for seemingly related keywords is a great way to understand how closely related they are and if you should target them with one page or multiple pages. But doing this for hundreds of keywords can be a rather daunting task.
That’s why we developed a handy feature in Keywords Explorer, which helps you to identify if a keyword you’re looking at is a part of a broader topic or, rather, deserves a dedicated page of its own.
We call it the Parent Topic.
The way we identify the Parent Topic of a keyword is very simple. We take the page that ranks #1 for that keyword and look up if there’s a more popular search query that it gets search traffic from.
So for the keyword “whipped coffee recipe,” we have identified that its top-ranking page is also ranking at the top for a more popular keyword, “whipped coffee.” Which isn’t the case for the keyword “whipped coffee without sugar.” It turned out to be a Parent Topic to itself.
The Parent Topic functionality is extremely helpful for grouping large lists of keywords into the so-called topical clusters. But we don’t recommend that you follow it blindly. And here’s why.
In the screenshot above, Keywords Explorer says that the search query “what is whipped coffee” is a subtopic of “whipped coffee.” Which means that you don’t need to create a dedicated page if you want to rank for it.
But let’s take a look at the top-ranking pages for the “what is whipped coffee” keyword:
Right at position #3, we see a page that is optimized precisely for targeting that specific search query “what is whipped coffee.” While the pages above and below it are actually targeting a more general term: “whipped coffee recipe.”
Thus, if you feel that a certain subtopic may actually deserve a dedicated page of its own, just take the risk and go for it! It may very well pay off.
2. Study the search intent
Let’s say that you have the following keywords on your list:
Now you need to understand which should be best targeted with informational blog articles and which should be product or category pages.
For some keywords, this is obvious. You wouldn’t create a product page for “how to brew cold brew coffee” because searchers are clearly looking for a tutorial.
But what about a keyword like “arabica coffee”? Do searchers want information, or do they want to buy some? In SEO, we call this studying the search intent.
Google, presumably, has some ways of identifying what exactly searchers want to see for any given search query. And whatever page satisfies the search intent best tends to float to the top of the search results. So the way you determine the search intent behind some keywords is by looking at the top-ranking pages.
Let’s look at the SERP for “arabica coffee”:
Here we have both: informational pages and online shops. In SEO, we call this a fractured search intent. It means that you may be able to rank for this keyword with any of the two page types.
But pinpointing the right search intent doesn’t end with identifying the right page type for a particular query. Ideally, you want to factor in the following variables:
Type – For example, blog post, product page, category page, landing page, online tool, etc.
Format – For example, guide, listicle, news, review, comparison, etc.
Angle – That’s your unique spin on a given topic.
Here’s a nice example of a dominant content angle. In the search results for “how to make latte,” someone has focused on making a perfect one, while someone else has decided to share how it can be done without an espresso machine.
But what if you tried the following angle for your own article: “How to Make a Latte Like Gordon Ramsay.” Maybe some people would consider this to be better than “perfect” and click on your page?
As you can tell, the reason why you need to analyze the search intent of a keyword is to not necessarily follow it to a T.
If you have a strong opinion about the search intent of a given search query but none of the top-ranking pages seem to follow it, give your intuition a chance. Even if your page is different from what’s already there, Google may give it a chance and show it to some of the searchers. And if they happen to like it, your page will secure its spot on the SERP.
