If you’re thinking about launching a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your business, you’ve probably heard a lot about keyword research. Maybe you’ve even seen a list of keywords delivered by a strategist or agency. But without an overarching framework for deciding which keywords to target, that list of keywords won’t get you very far.

That’s where a keyword strategy comes in. A good keyword strategy will help you prioritize the keywords that line up with your business goals, so SEO work contributes to your bottom line.

This guide explores keyword strategy, including how to develop one for your business and four common approaches.

What is a keyword strategy?

A keyword strategy is a business’s framework for choosing the specific keywords and search intents to target with website content. It maps areas of your website—like your homepage, product pages, and blog pages—to specific categories of keywords.

The goal of a keyword strategy is to align SEO efforts with business objectives. This might mean increasing top-of-funnel brand awareness, which could lead to sales growth over the long term, or it might mean increasing sales in the more immediate term.

Example of keyword strategy in action

Let’s say your goal is to grow top-of-funnel brand awareness. Your keyword strategy may be to focus on medium-volume, non-branded informational searches relevant to people interested in topics adjacent to what you sell.

Imagine you sell a line of kitchen accessories that chop, slice, and dice vegetables. Your strategy might focus on keywords like “right way to dice a shallot” with blog content. This would expose your brand and product to people who could benefit from it, but may not know you yet. Those people might not buy right away, but by reaching them in search results, you start building a relationship.

If, on the other hand, your business goal is a more immediate increase in sales, your keyword strategy might prioritize middle- to bottom-of-funnel keywords. You might focus on searches with high purchase intent, like “vegetable slicing tool” or “best vegetable slicer.”

Your keyword strategy will also take into consideration your likelihood of ranking for categories of searches, based on your topical authority and the competitor set. You could, in theory, generate a lot of traffic if it targeted keywords for recipes that involve a lot of slicing and dicing, like “ratatouille recipe.” But recipe keywords are highly competitive, with home cooking blogs and food media sites dominating the results. You may opt not to chase recipe keywords because the likelihood of ranking in search results is too low.

Along with technical SEO, keyword strategy is the bedrock of your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

Keyword research supports your keyword strategy. Once your strategy is in place, you can dig into the specifics of exactly which keywords to target, based on their search volume and difficulty score. Keyword research can also refer to the dataset itself—the list of relevant keywords and insights you’ve gathered.

How to build a keyword strategy

1. Map your goals to keyword categories
2. Identify the must-wins
3. Analyze current performance
4. Prioritize opportunities
5. Launch and measure

A strong keyword strategy is key to the success of your business’s SEO efforts. Here’s how to build one for your business:

1. Map your goals to keyword categories

An effective SEO strategy isn’t just about more organic traffic. It’s about achieving outcomes aligned with your overall business goals. Lay out business objectives that intersect with your SEO work, and rank them from highest priority to lowest priority.

Then, based on your goals, identify the categories of keywords that are most likely to support those goals. They might be higher volume terms that could generate a lot of awareness. They might be clusters of longer-tail, lower-volume keywords aligned with your product, which might generate more sales.

2. Identify the must-wins

Get specific with your keyword research, identifying keywords within each category that are must-wins for your business. To do this, you can do the following:

• Brainstorm specific keywords based on larger seed keywords that are relevant to your business.

• Look at what competitors are ranking for that you want to rank for, too.

• If you’re doing paid search, also called search engine marketing (SEM), look at what keywords are delivering high-value traffic to you, as you might want to try to rank for these organically instead.

Use keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner to support this work. These tools can generate keyword ideas based on core topics or terms. For example, you may enter “vegetable slicer” as your seed or primary keyword. These tools will generate a related keyword list (“vegetable spiralizer,” “electric veggie slicer,” etc.) and content ideas (“how to use a mandoline slicer”). You’ll see related monthly search volume and a general estimation of how hard it would be to rank on the first page of search results. 

You can also use these tools to scrape competitors and perform a gap analysis, and estimate how much you’d have to pay for winning keyword traffic.

Taking all of this into account, identify and prioritize the keywords that you view as most essential for your business to win.

3. Analyze current performance

Next, review your current SEO performance using Google Search Console or your preferred performance tracking software. The goal is to understand which must-win keywords (and related keywords) you’re already ranking for and which you’re not.

Here’s how to use Google Search Console to review current keyword rankings:

• Sign in to Google Search Console and navigate to Performance, then Search Results.

• Select Queries to view search terms for which your site is currently ranking. The Position column shows your average search ranking for the query. You can also review clicks and click-through rate (CTR) to see whether high-ranking keywords are effectively driving traffic. 

• Navigate to the Pages tab to view total organic search traffic per page, and identify high- and low-performing pages.

Analyze your current performance to understand which categories of keywords will be easier to rank for, and which will require more work.

4. Prioritize opportunities

Review your must-win keywords or clusters of keywords in light of your performance data, and assess what needs to be done to rank for each of them. Then, prioritize the opportunities. There are a couple of approaches you can take:

• Highest potential for impact. You may decide to focus your efforts on the keywords with the potential to yield the most traffic or conversions, even if it requires more effort to rank. High-volume, high-difficulty keywords usually require supporting content to rank. But this resource- and time-intensive strategy could dramatically increase your brand visibility.

• Quickest wins. You might decide to prioritize going after low-hanging fruit. This includes terms with lower competition or topics with strong performance and opportunity to expand. The impact of these wins might be smaller overall, but you can see impact quickly.

Your budget will also inform your prioritization decisions, so consider the resources available to you when deciding which approach to take.

5. Launch and measure

Once you’ve chosen a keyword strategy for your business, you’ll develop and launch content against it. As you do, track performance with a keyword research tool. Google Search Console can monitor your site traffic and keyword rankings. Connecting your tracking platform to Google Analytics (or your other website analytics software) enables you to view how visitors from different traffic sources interact with your site.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Are we successfully ranking for the target keywords we set out to win? 

• Are those keywords delivering the business value we expected? 

• If part of our strategy isn’t working, can we diagnose why? 

Effective keyword strategies to consider

• Branded keyword strategy
• Competitor keyword strategy
• Nonbranded keyword strategy
• Long-tail keyword strategy

Here are the most common keyword approaches and when to use them:

Branded keyword strategy

Branded keyword strategies target keywords specific to your company, such as your brand name, the unique names of your products, or a combination of the two. Examples include “Gymshark” and “Allbirds Tree Runners.” Owning branded keywords is generally a priority for ecommerce companies. Those keywords are often less competitive than generic options. Ranking for them ensures people searching for your brand find you and not your competitors.

Competitor keyword strategy

You can also target a competitor’s brand or product name, often with a modifier that describes your business’s advantage or positioning in relation to the competitor. Think “sustainable Keurig” or “cheaper Celine Box bag”—or simply “better” or “alternative to” a competitive product.

This approach can capture attention from audiences already interested in your competitor’s products, but it carries risks. Established competitors may put significant resources into protecting their branded terms, making it harder to siphon their audience. Use this strategy with intention, weighing potential traffic gains against the resources you might need to compete for the keyword.

Nonbranded keyword strategy

A nonbranded keyword strategy targets searchers who aren’t looking for you yet, but who have a problem your brand or product can solve. A nonbranded strategy is often at the heart of SEO content marketing. The idea is to target keywords with informational search intent with high-quality content that answers the searcher’s need—and subtly exposes them to your brand.

For example, Fresh Heritage, which makes beard oil and grooming kits for Black men, provides information and educational pieces on its blog targeting “winter skincare” and “vacation shaving,” among other keywords. Its articles aim to provide helpful information to people who could become customers one day.

Long-tail keyword strategy

Long-tail keywords have lower search volumes (typically less than 1,000 monthly searches) but higher specificity. They often are three to five words. Examples include “translucent teal travel umbrella” and “men’s slim straight fit denim.” Ecommerce brands often try to rank for these keywords with filter or category pages.

Because long-tail keywords typically have lower difficulty scores, they can be easier to rank for, and even modest search volumes can be valuable if click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates are high.