How to Choose the Best Keywords

Choosing a good keyword to target is completely different from choosing the best keyword to target.

We try to target the best keywords for our clients!

Many of our clients operate in a market with tens of thousands of viable keywords to target.

Today, we’re going to talk about how we make tough decisions on where to focus.

We’ll use the hypothetical example of a UK-based nationwide chain of care homes. The chain offers:

🏠 Residential care – A residential setting where several older people live, usually in single rooms, and have access to on-site care services 24 hours a day.

🏠 Nursing care – A higher level of care than a residential setting, with nurses on site.

🏠 Specialist care – Support for complex conditions like dementia.

One of the goals for the SEO campaign is to generate new customers across all three of the above categories.

Let’s take the hub of dementia.

In theory, people searching for advice or support on dementia may also be thinking about or interested in care home support.

We always start by looking at the numbers in Ahrefs.

Unsurprisingly there is a high volume of traffic for main dementia key terms.

It’s incredibly competitive—more so than we thought it would be, but we were never going to target these main terms, so let’s look deeper.

The question we’re asking is: Are there any viable terms that aren’t dominated by high DR sites?

On the first two pages of Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, I find three terms that have much lower difficulty.

And you may have noticed, term three is pretty damn perfect. Also, on page two is the direct term dementia care homes.

This has thrown up a huge opportunity early on in the search. We have found two direct terms that are very uncompetitive.

I thought we might need to skirt around the fringes of dementia with indirect terms.

But it seems we can just serve the direct intent. So, let’s see how hard they are to rank for.

Let’s focus on the term when should someone with dementia go into a care home.

On paper, the term looks good – low difficulty + high intent

But there are a few concerns:

😨 The top few spots are not only impenetrable (dominated by the Alzheimer’s Society/NHS) but they will also suck up most of the clicks because they are so trustworthy.

😨 The quality of content from the top sites is so good that it will be hard to improve on it.

However, I’m optimistic for a few reasons:

😺 As a care home, we can offer some vendor-specific insight on moving into a home. This is a slightly different perspective of the health and charity sites

😺 We have the authority and credibility to answer the query

😺 Below the first few spots on the first page is wide open, there are sites with DRs of 8, 25, and 37 all ranking on page one.

So, I’m feeling like there is a nice set of dementia care home-specific terms that are a perfect for a care home to target.

✅   High volume

✅   Low competition

✅   High user intent

✅   Relevant to the service

✅   Brand enhancing

✅   Relevant in-house expertise

We’re always going to weigh this against other terms but it seems we have stumbled quickly onto a great set of terms. Let’s look at one more.

This hub feels very relevant. People searching for this are looking for prognosis, support, and general information.

Many of these users will likely be open to care facilities at some point.

Let’s rate this hub on the initial six core criteria.

Let’s think about which terms to start with.

This would require a deeper look but here are three terms I like because they tick the boxes above.

Overall, vascular dementia is a solid hub to target.

I’d be a bit concerned that competition can be high for some terms and the volumes are good but not extremely high.

Would we go ahead?

It would depend on the other potential hubs. We’d run 15 to 20 hubs through this process before making final recommendations.

For care homes, there is an absolute ton of direct traffic (check out carehomes.co.uk), so we’d want to nail all of these terms first.

Once that is done, there are many keyword options for a care home chain.

When looking for great keywords, remember to start with a hub, discover your main keywords and then:

1. Analyse the keyword difficulty and volume – based on your own sites DR, will it be realistic for you to rank?
2. Look at the SERPs—can you compete with at least the top 3 ranking pages?
3. Make the final decision based on the search intent behind the word. Is it relevant to your services?

Finding good keywords is no easy task, but the goal should always be to find great ones!