How Many SEO Keywords Should a Page Really Target?

Here’s what we recommend: pick just one primary keyword and enough secondary keywords to cover a given topic infull.

In the rest of the article, I’ll explain why andhow.

Going forward, we’ll differentiate between two kinds of keywords.

The primary keyword, also called the target keyword, is the main topic of a page. It’s also the single keyword to optimize a pagefor.

Secondary keywords are any keywords closely related to the primary keyword that you’re targeting with yourpage.

Synonyms, subtopics, and long-tail keyword variations can be considered secondary keywords. But the best use of secondary keywords for SEO is as relevant subtopics—this is what I’ll focus on in this article.

So to sum up the difference, if the primary keyword is the topic of the book, you can use secondary keywords as subtopics.

There are at least three reasons why.

Reason 1. Any page needs one clearly defined topic

Sounds quite obvious, but a satisfactory explanation of this idea can become complicated quite quickly. It’s probably best if we look at this from a user experience perspective.

Since people look for specific things online, it won’t be the best idea to make them look for those things on pages about multiple things or even worse—everything. So a single page targeting multiple topics will not be that useful.

And since Google exists to help people find specific things, it will likely show a page with a specific...