How To Create Keyword Optimized Content

This resource is to share my working methodology when creating fresh content that will get rankings. When we create keyword optimized content we need to maximize our opportunities to rank for the keywords that we are going after as well as keywords that we hadn’t thought of that we can rank for.

When I create keyword optimized content I use three SEO tools.

• CognitiveSEO
• Keyword Cupid
• Google AdWords

These are, in my opinion, the best SEO tools out there for content creation. Period.

You could use other growth marketing tools but these are the ones that I use for my content creation when finding keyword opportunities.

BTW: I also have resources on SEO Hacks, Digital Marketing Growth Ideas, Offline Growth Marketing, and Email Hacks!

Does my method also work for existing published content?

There are likely dozens if not hundreds of pages that with enhanced and optimized content, you’d be able to vastly improve your SEO and get a higher ranking for your pages (products and categories) on your site.

Very often we just need to tweak and add new content using keywords to get more traffic.

1.0 Content Types For Keyword Optimized Content

The types of content that I optimize content for using this SEO technique include:

• Product pages
• Category pages
• Brand pages
• Landing pages
• Blog Posts
• Pillar Posts
• Responsive Posts
• “Staple Posts”

2.0 Steps In Optimizing New Content

The following, from #3.1 – #3.7 are steps that you can take to optimize existing or when creating new content.

So! Let’s investigate each of these steps and explain them!

3.0 The Process To Achieve Keyword Optimized Content

In the following sections, I will outline my process.

Of course, tweak this any which way works better for you. I’m only sharing what has been working for me in 2021; that as ever, is always subject to change.

3.1 Have x1 Main Keyword With Slight Variations

We need to start with a “seed keyword”, some people call this the “Head Term”.

In any event, we need to start somewhere; and for the sake of this tutorial we will use the example: “Growth Hacking”.

We will need slight variations of this keyword to pull in some other variables within this keyword to help our scraping and to broaden our reach when seeking opportunities.

So, in our example, let’s take:

1. Growth Hacking (as the “seed keyword” or “primary keyword”); and,
2. SEO Growth Hacking and SEO Content Process(as our slight variations)

3.2 Use Google Adwords To Discover Search Volumes

For the next step, we head over to Google AdWords.

What’s important here is that you have an account otherwise you won’t be able to access the tool.

Google is not forthcoming with its’ data, and the best place (from my experience) to get reliable and accurate SEO keyword data is from Google AdWords because after all, that is where Search Engine Marketing professionals (advertisers) budget their bidding for keywords so it has to be accurate.

These are the steps for using Google AdWords:

1. Make sure you select “English” as the language
2. Then, select the “United States” as the search market

Once you’ve hit the Google AdWords dashboard panel, enter your select keywords…

And – hit “Get Results”

3.3 Upload The .csv File And Sort The Keywords

The next step is very straightforward, simply, download the generated keywords in a .csv format.

3.4 Filter The Keywords From Highest To Lowest

In this stage, we need to upload the keyword list (in a .csv format) into a Google sheet (my preference) but you can also use Microsoft Excel of course.

If you are using Google Sheets then click

> View > Freeze > One Row

…and this will freeze the header columns of the data.

Then, to sort the data correctly, click

> Data > Sort Range > Data Had A Header Row > (select) Average Monthly Searches > Z - A

…and click “Sort”

Once you have done that then the next step is to sort all the keywords by “Search Volume”.

This will, of course, filter the keywords by the most searched, and this is what we want to use when we create our keyword clusters and groupings that we will then use to formulate our titles and content.

By “titles” I am referring to the sections within the body of the content.

3.5 In Keyword Cupid, Create A Project And Import Keywords

The “go-to” tool for keyword research and the grouping of keywords is “Keyword Cupid” which is a new tool but is already becoming very popular with the SEO community.

Once you’ve logged in, you will need to create a “Report” that will form part of your project, please see the screenshot below.

In the next section, be sure to select “Simple Keyword Report” because we have already taken our keywords from Google AdWords.

Keyword Cupid also allows us to upload data from the following sources:

• AHrefs
• SEMRush
• Custom Templates

Using the data from these other SEO Tools would be useful if we were grouping keywords from our indexed content and we were looking for missing opportunities, but in this tutorial, we are discussing creating NEW content; i.e. a “new landing page” or “vertical”, etc.

Once we have selected “Simple Keyword Report” a form will appear where we paste in the x50 keywords we took from Google AdWords.

Keyword Cupid needs a minimum of 50 keywords.

The keywords need to have commas so visit this site for a fantastic online tool that does precisely that – and paste in the keywords and this free tool will add a comma to each of the keywords, then paste them into keyword cupid.

And then paste the keywords into Keyword Cupid:

And click “submit” and the process will take anywhere between 30 mins to an hour.

Just to reiterate, this tool is grouping keywords by associations and placing them in a titled group.

For example, if the keywords were as follows:

• Apples
• Pears
• Bananas
• Peaches

Then Keyword Cupid would place these x4 keywords in a titled group called “Fruit”

You will be sent an email when the tool has finished grouping the keywords and finding associations.

3.6 Download Data & Plan Keywords For Sections

Once Keyword Cupid has finished processing, it will give you two choices.

You can either visualize the data by looking at a mindmap, or you can download the data in a spreadsheet that will have the data placed with what’s called “Mini-Silos”.

Mini-Silos is what I explained in my example above with the fruit.

Personally, I prefer looking at the keyword “mini-silos” data in a spreadsheet, shown in the below screenshot.

Column A gives suggested content sections or headers.

So, taking this specific example, imagine that a sub-header (H2) would be:

Growth Hacking SEO [This would be a sub-header]

With keywords taken from Column B and placed within the content, e.g. “growth hacking, growth marketing, growth hacker marketing, Instagram growth hacks, .etc”

Based upon this data you can create content that can be anywhere between 300 to 3,000+ words.

It’s worth noting that I’d recommend that you use the Keyword Cupid data to create ideas for content sections.

The recommended keywords that the tool gives you can help, but I’d place more emphasis on using CognitiveSEO for ease of use for creating content that is keyword rich.

3.7 Use Cognitiveseo To Further Enhance The Content

In this section, we can go to CognitiveSEO and open the Content Optimizer Tool.

Once you’ve hit the dashboard for Content Optimizer Tool, you need to enter the keyword that you will be optimizing.

In this tutorial, I am suggesting using CognitiveSEO to optimize each of the content sections, as per the screenshot below:

Upon submission, CognitiveSEO will scrape all the search results from Google and will filter out all the keywords that the competition is using in the top placed results.

This will therefore help us to figure out what keywords we can use to maximize our on-page SEO and optimize our content as much as we can.

The tool helps you by suggesting keywords that you can insert into the content that you are creating.

Once you have written several paragraphs within the content then you’ll be able to “rescore” your content to see whether you’re using the suggested keywords that the competition is using in the top results.

Lastly, if you want you can also export the keywords if you prefer.

This will allow you to use the keywords in your own editing workflow.

4.0 Wrapping Up

The suggested workflow in this tutorial is a recommendation.

You can, of course, tweak it as you wish but I’d like to emphasize that the tools being used are “best of breed” and they are extracting genuinely actionable data that will help us get higher rankings in the search engines.