If you go into a furniture store looking for a couch, you probably wouldn’t just go home with the first couch you see when you walk through the door. You’re most likely going to look around at couches that are made from different materials, that are different colors, have different elements, are different sizes, etc.
And just like how people don’t buy furniture by choosing the first couch in sight, people also don’t search for things online this way, either. So how do we know how many keywords we should be putting on each page?
each post you create can be found for many different search terms
Whether you’re a product or service-based business, every podcast episode, every video, every image, every blog post, every portfolio or case study that you create, can be found for something a little bit different
And every piece of content that you create can be found for an infinite number of search terms.
Let’s continue with this furniture store metaphor to get a better understanding.
So I want you to imagine your website as a furniture store. And every room in the furniture store has something that’s just a little bit different. Some items are sectionals, some are love seats, some are living room sets, some are leather, and some are recliners.
Each of those rooms is like a category on your website.
And people can either walk in the front door (through your homepage), or they can be metaphorically dropped directly into the sectional room and skip that entryway altogether.
And then I want you to think of every piece of furniture in your website furniture store as having more than one interesting thing about it. All leather couches are made of leather, but they’re not all the same – some are blue and some are green, some have two cushions and some have three.
And the same is true for the content on your website. If every blog post that you write is a couch, think about it seating two or three different keywords in each of those seats.
Your categories are your “couches”
I have a category (or a “room”) on my w ebsite that is SEO tools. I have a bunch of different blog posts about 30ish free SEO tools. Every one of those tool reviews would be a different piece of content in my SEO tool category.
One of my “couches” is a review of the Keywords Everywhere tool and a tutorial about how to use it for Google. And then right next to that, I have another “couch”, which is a review of the Keywords Everywhere tool and how to use it to find keywords for YouTube.
Now, these are pretty much the same pieces of content. They have the same general idea about the Keywords Everywhere tool. But each of those blog posts ranks for over 30 different keywords. Each post can fit a lot of different ideas.
Each of your “couches” has a cluster of keywords
And so instead of thinking, “What is the one keyword that I need to rule them all?” I want you to start thinking of your keywords as clusters and figure out how they fit together within the same spaces.
So, yes – both of those blog posts are related to each other. They both belong in the SEO Tools category. But people who are looking for something specific can drop directly into the post that they need to, people who don’t quite know what they’re looking for can land in that room, and people who still don’t know what they’re looking for can come in through the front door and navigate around using the main navigation or the sidebar.
By thinking of each piece of content as having a cluster of keywords and not just limiting yourself to one target keyword per page, you can actually tap into a larger volume of things that people could potentially be looking for.
So as you’re doing your keyword research and thinking about how you want different keywords to go to different pages or posts on your website, consider the fact that you could have an entire cluster of 30, 50, or even 1000 different keywords coming to the same page.
Recognizing that everything that you create can rank for an entire cluster of keywords and not just one singular phrase opens you up to lots of possibilities and takes the pressure off finding that ~one magical keyword~. You can think about an idea or an intention that you want that piece of content to do which will allow people to use kind of a “choose your own adventure” to find their perfect metaphorical “content couch”.
people are gonna go where they want
One important thing to expect is for people to navigate wherever they want to go.
Very rarely do people get to the homepage of your website and go page by page in chronological order – that’s just not how people behave.
Even in a store like Ikea that has very specific paths throughout the store, they still have little shortcuts in there.
So recognize that every page of your website can be found for something completely different and think of all the opportunities and ideas that one piece of content can be found for.