Keyword prioritization isn’t exactly the final step in the keyword research process. It’s more something that you should do as you go through the steps above. As you’re looking for keywords, analyzing their metrics, and grouping them, ask yourself:
- What is the estimated traffic potential of this keyword?
- How tough is the competition? What would it take to rank for it?
- Do you already have content about this topic? If not, what will it take to create and promote a competitive page?
- Do you already rank for this keyword? Could you boost traffic by improving your rank by a few positions?
- Is the traffic likely to convert into leads and sales, or will it only bring brand awareness?
That last point is a particularly important one. While search volume, traffic potential, difficulty, and search intent are all important considerations, you also need to consider what traffic from that keyword will be worth to your business. How to gauge the “business potential” of your keyword ideas
Many content marketers and SEOs judge the ‘value’ of keywords by mapping them to the buyer’s journey. That’s the process people go through before making a purchase. Conventional wisdom says that the earlier people are in their journey, the less likely they are to buy. How do people do this? The most popular method is to group keyword ideas into three buckets: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. Here are some examples of TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU keywords for Ahrefs:
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU): online marketing, what is SEO, how to grow website traffic.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): how to do keyword research, how to build links, how to do website audit.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): ahrefs vs moz, ahrefs reviews, ahrefs discount.
Generally speaking, TOFU keywords have the highest traffic potential, but visitors aren’t looking to buy anything just yet. And MOFU and BOFU keywords will bring you less traffic, but those people are closer to becoming your customers. we think that this concept is limiting and perhaps even misleading.
Here are three reasons why:
First, it doesn’t take into account that you can take someone from the top of the funnel who’s searching for some general thing like “online marketing” and walk them through all stages of the buyer’s journey on one page. That is what direct response copywriters are known for. They don’t create their ads based on TOFU/MOFU/BOFU. They create one ad that takes the reader from barely understanding their problem to buying your solution.
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, “link building 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 unrelated topics.
The role links play in SEO
When we talk about links, we could mean two things. Backlinks or "inbound links" are links from other websites that point to your website, while internal links are links on your own site that point to your other pages (on the same site). Links have historically played a big role in SEO. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results. Calculating the number of links pointing to any given site helped them do this.
Backlinks work very similarly to real-life WoM (Word-of-Mouth) referrals. Let’s take a hypothetical coffee shop, Jenny’s Coffee, as an example:
- Referrals from others = good sign of authority; Example: Many different people have all told you that Jenny’s Coffee is the best in town
- Referrals from yourself = biased, so not a good sign of authority; Example: Jenny claims that Jenny’s Coffee is the best in town
- Referrals from irrelevant or low-quality sources = not a good sign of authority and could even get you flagged for spam; Example: Jenny paid to have people who have never visited her coffee shop tell others how good it is.
- No referrals = unclear authority; Example: Jenny’s Coffee might be good, but you’ve been unable to find anyone who has an opinion so you can’t be sure.
This is why PageRank was created. PageRank (part of Google's core algorithm) is a link analysis algorithm named after one of Google's founders, Larry Page. PageRank estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. The assumption is that the more relevant, important, and trustworthy a web page is, the more links it will have earned. The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results.
The role content plays in SEO
There would be no point to links if they didn’t direct searchers to something. That something is content! Content is more than just words; it’s anything meant to be consumed by searchers there’s video content, image content, and of course, text. If search engines are answer machines, content is the means by which the engines deliver those answers.
Any time someone performs a search, there are thousands of possible results, so how do search engines decide which pages the searcher is going to find valuable? A big part of determining where your page will rank for a given query is how well the content on your page matches the query’s intent. In other words, does this page match the words that were searched and help fulfill the task the searcher was trying to accomplish?
Because of this focus on user satisfaction and task accomplishment, there’s no strict benchmarks on how long your content should be, how many times it should contain a keyword, or what you put in your header tags. All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content.
Today, with hundreds or even thousands of ranking signals, the top three have stayed fairly consistent: links to your website (which serve as a third-party credibility signals), on-page content (quality content that fulfills a searcher’s intent), and RankBrain.
What is RankBrain?
RankBrain is the machine learning component of Google’s core algorithm. Machine learning is a computer program that continues to improve its predictions over time through new observations and training data. In other words, it’s always learning, and because it’s always learning, search results should be constantly improving. For example, if RankBrain notices a lower ranking URL providing a better result to users than the higher-ranking URLs, you can bet that RankBrain will adjust those results, moving the more relevant result higher and demoting the lesser relevant pages as a by-product.