Although much of your SEO activity should, rightly, be focused on understanding what keywords and phrases you want to target and then structuring your content to go after it, there is a secondary consideration that might also be helpful.
Recently, I was writing an assessment report for a potential client on how he might improve the amount of organic search engine traffic reaching his family of websites. I had a look at the keywords that were already resulting in traffic finding one of his sites and I was surprised to see a whole bunch of culinary-related phrases had resulted in quite a bit of traffic over time. The reason this was surprising was that the website had essentially nothing to do with cooking, food, recipes, or anything like that. There were, however, some articles submitted that supported the main theme of the site but also included mention of these culinary terms.
As a result of this ‘discovery,’ we are considering more comprehensive coverage of this foody theme on the site and ways in which we can convert those visitors into customers for the main website.
It is difficult to get top search engine positions for the keywords that bring visitors, the ones you really want, but sometimes looking at things in reverse like this can create some good opportunities, and it is quite possible to use unlikely content which has brought your traffic in to draw visitors across to, what is for you, the main reason for them being there. Food for thought perhaps?
There are a number of ways to find out what keywords people are using to find your site. All website statistics programs ought to show you. Personally, I prefer using Google Analytics.
Thanks for this. I have a sports website that targets golf. I have other categories on the site, but on Google search console, the top queries I see are for a few topics under the gymnastics category, not even golf. I’m thinking of targeting those keywords instead and redirecting my focus.