The Difference Between Keywords and Topics — Jeff Coyle // MarketMuse

About the speaker

Jeff Coyle

01:26

Keywords versus Topics

Your topic is a concept while your keyword would fall within that topic. But your keyword is more about intent.
04:23

Differentiating between topics and keywords

When thinking of whats your keyword versus whats your topic, you consider any ambiguity surrounding your query. Your content needs full coverage to find yourself in Googles favourite intent.
09:45

Understanding breadth versus depth

Produce content for different stages of your funnel. This builds your authority to rank. You cant just write one great article. You need to show that youre an expert at what youre talking about.
13:27

Evaluating a topic versus keyword for SEO performance

Monitor your pages both individually and collectively. From this data, you can get ideas on where to improve and what you can further branch out into. Think of the entire user journey.
17:12

How Google evaluates intent

Sites that lose authority on their core topic, no longer rank for intent on similar or adjacent topics

A topic is more like a concept, so it can be an entity. It's a group of concepts. And a keyword will typically live inside that pool of topics." - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse
"The mistake people make is they look at the search result in isolation and say, oh, there's 9 definitions on this SERP. I just need to go write a better definition." - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse
"I have no pages that answered this question or satisfied this intent. However, I got traffic coming in. That's the easiest sale for the budget to go write that article." - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse
“If you get a page trying to target a head term or a topic and it starts ranking for other stuff, thats an intent mismatch.” - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse
“If I'm ranking for head terms and not ranking for lower competition variants, its because I'm not satisfying that intent...” - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse
“Sometimes even when you own the head and you don't own the tails… You need to understand where you have the wins...” - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse
“Sites that dropped in authority on their core topics can no longer rank for non on-the-nose intent.” - Jeff Coyle, Co-founder & Chief Product Producer, MarketMuse

About the speaker