How do you measure the total number of keywords you should be targeting?

[question]The Mequoda approach to keyword research begins with editors brainstorming the primary keyword phrases they think people are searching for that their content could help answer. Those primary terms then get expanded to include secondary terms, which can result in a rather large total keyword universe. How do you measure the total number of keywords you should be targeting? How do you know when you’ve got too many, or too few keywords in your entire keyword universe?[/question]

[answer]It depends on the size of the editorial staff. We have one client that has 5,000 keywords in their total keyword universe and has about a 15-person editorial staff. So you should think about this in terms of keywords per editor, because what’s going to ultimately happen is that your keywords will be a guide for where you’re going to be generating content online, so having more keywords means more editors to support them.

For some of our smaller websites, where there’s often just a single online editor, although they’re usually playing with an archive of content they can tap into, we might be starting off in the 800 to 1,200 range. So there’s a range of anywhere between 800 to 5,000 and it would be dependent upon the size of the editorial archives and the size of the editorial staff. The more staff, more archives; it means you can go after more keywords.

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