Making your written content SEO friendly is an important aspect of writing content for the web. When you’re doing this, you may find yourself faced with some some zero sum choices, which were going to explore here.

You see, content has at least two major SEO applications for your website, and they can sometimes be mutually exclusive. That can be:

1. Establishing keyword relevance for your website.
2. Driving traffic to your content.

Sometimes one piece of content can serve both purposes, but this depends on your topic. Very often your business might be dealing in a specific or fairly obscure niche product or service. In this situation, you cannot attract readers to your content without casting a much wider net, which will not serve your ranking strategy significantly.

We covered how you can get a high ranked piece of content that attracts readers, so I will focus on building your website’s money keywords instead.

A good content marketer can guide readers from your high traffic content into your sales funnel, but that does not absolve you from the need to rank for the actual products and services that your company offers, or you are sacrificing a significant stream of potential customers.

If you have a website that sells sells hunting crossbows, for example, you may be able to write a fantastic content piece on the legalities of bow hunting that attracts thousands of readers a month and leads to multiple conversions, but that will never help you rank for your money keywords like “crossbows for sale”, or “barnett crossbows”, or whatever you may need to rank for.

To do this, you need a coherent strategy to send the signals that your website is THE website for that topic.

Google recognizes your website’s topical relevance by recognizing the fingerprint of a set of keywords. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to look organic and real. Instead of thinking linearly like crossbow-bolts-hunting-bows-bow hunting-hunting season, you need to think about the word cloud that belongs around a normal organic conversation around crossbow hunting.

This is best achieved by doing proper research into the topic and reading forums and articles about crossbow hunting. There may be a significant statistical relationship between mentions of crossbows, camouflage, protein bars, and brass annealing reloading equipment. These are guesses, but you need to think broadly here. Seemingly unrelated topics and items could be strongly associated, and having none of them mentioned on your website could be an indicator of either thin content or low relevance.

When you do this, don’t forget to use multiple instances of the money key phrase that you are trying to rank. It also helps to include this in the slug and in the title tag for that page, or your homepage.

Remember that you need to pick your battles here. If you spread yourself thin, you will rank for nothing. Your primary key phrase should be spread all over your website and show up in your homepage title tag.

If you follow those basic rules, your content will help you rank for your chosen topic. The key is to be consistent and coherent. The main cause of failure in this regard is when people get greedy and try to rank for everything at once, and so fail to establish a clear, site-wide relevance to their central topic.

Good luck!