How Many Keywords Do We Need For SEO?

Finding out how many keywords you should have for your SEO strategy is something unique to your business. We’re going to explore how to focus on the keywords that matter for your business and how to prioritize the keywords that are going to make the biggest impact on SEO performance.

Even with careful research using a keyword finder, you’ll likely end up with a vast list of possible keywords. You’ll need to narrow these possibilities by prioritizing them according to relevance. This includes relevance to your audience’s search intent, as well as relevance to your target audience’s current stage in the marketing funnel.

How many keywords should a website have?

The right amount of keywords varies depending on the market you’re in or the audience you’re trying to capture. In the end, your final list of keywords should at least be in the hundreds, and it can even get up to the thousands. Before you build out your entire keyword universe, you first need to learn more about your target demographic. Understand what problems your demographic is trying to solve, and how you solve those problems for them. Then, it’s time to sort the list of candidates in order of priority.

How to prioritize the most important keywords

The biggest challenge isn’t using a keyword research tool to create a long list of potential keyword targets for SEO, but how you prioritize the most important keywords to target.

The purpose of prioritizing certain keywords is to attract the right web traffic; increasing organic traffic won’t be as impactful if your product isn’t relevant to your site visitors. Prioritize your keywords to determine which ones are most likely to attract traffic that converts.

You can start prioritizing your keywords by arranging them into three tiers:

1. First, look for keywords that are very specific to the exact problem and solution your business deals in. These keywords are the most relevant, and there are likely only a few of them. You should highly prioritize these keywords.
2. Next, look for keywords that are a bit wider in scope. These might be keywords that are adjacent to your most relevant keywords but are broad enough to attract people who are still narrowing in on what they’re looking for. There will be more of these keywords, and you should prioritize them second.
3. Finally, you’re left with the least relevant keywords (remember, all the keywords on your starting list that you’ve selected from your research tool should already be relevant to some degree). These keywords will be the most plentiful. They might only be loosely related to your specific solution but are heavily searched and highly relevant to your industry in general. Prioritize these the lowest.

To organize your keywords effectively into tiers, start with the most relevant and work your way down the list to less relevant keywords.

How to prioritize keywords according to the marketing funnel stage

As you prioritize keywords, you must also consider the marketing funnel stage of your audience. When you understand the intent behind searching a keyword, then you can further identify a keyword’s relevancy.

Let’s look at a very basic, hypothetical example. Say you’re a B2B company selling accounting software:

• A customer who is at the top of the marketing funnel (awareness) may not even know accounting software exists, so they are probably searching for terms like “accounting automation examples” or “simple bookkeeping pdf.”
• A customer at the middle of the marketing funnel (consideration) may be weighing different accounting software against other accounting solutions, so they could be searching for something like “list of accounting software” or “what software is used for accounting”
• A customer at the bottom of the funnel (conversion) has probably made up their mind about purchasing accounting software, so they may be searching for terms like “accounting software price” or “best accounting software.”

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to building out SEO content for your marketing funnel. However, it can become a lot more manageable to separate keywords into each stage of your marketing funnel for your complete SEO strategy.

The Takeaway

When you’re trying to determine how many keywords to use in your SEO content, remember that more keywords are better, but only if those keywords are relevant to your audience. Prioritize your keywords according to your target audience’s search intent and marketing funnel stage to help your content perform better in search engines.