How Many Keyword Phrases Should You Optimise For?

Website search engine optimisation is a complex process, where the most important part is to choose the proper keyword phrases. It’s important what phrases and what number do you choose.

It’s impossible to definitely say how many keyword phrases should a website be optimized for. Each website is different – some are single page websites, others much more complex. Some have unique and engaging content while others focus mainly on graphics and short texts. Type of business and its scope of activities is also important – is it local, national or global.

It's difficult to answer how many phrases a website should be optimised for

Is it reasonable to optimise for a few highly competitive keywords?

It’s ok to optimise for highly competitive keywords if the company doesn’t have much competition. Competitive phrases work well for niche businesses, although it’s easy to notice that their number is decreasing – currently you can find everything online.

If your businesses’ main goal is to broaden brand awareness it’s a good idea to choose competitive phrases. Still, you can’t expect to rank higher immediately.

How many phrases to optimise for? As it’s explained above it’s not a good choice to  use three or four words which are highly competitive, short and therefore very general, like for example men’s jackets. After all, you can find multiplicity of men’s jackets, all different. When you Focus only on these words you will need to rank higher than over thousands, if not millions of websites optimising for these exact words. The whole process will be time consuming and costly. It’s better therefore to optimize for and build online promotion around long tail phrases.

Website optimisation - assumptions and results

How many phrses to optimise for? It all depends on the size of your business

The so called long tail consists of a few words phrases that are less competitive than shorter and more general ones. Although, they don’t necessarily generate much traffic on your website they can directly answer users queries. Thanks to this website is visited by users who are really interested in the services it offers. When optimizing for long tail website can appear within 10 tops search results. How many such phrases should you use? In theory, the more the better. However, it all depends on our budget and the size of our business. Good idea is to consider promoting phrases which generate the most profits. (for example names or models of popular products).

Competitive phrases and  long tail – or maybe both?

There is no one answer what’s really better in case of optimization for keywords. It’s good to think the whole process over and choose a few prestige keywords that can help you build your brand awareness and consider this a long term investment. In the meantime it’s worth to tests less competitive phrases that can bring results faster.