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Determine relevance and achievability of terms

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Once you have a long list of options, start assessing the search terms for feasibility (how realistic is it to rank well on these words) and relevance (how important is it to rank well on these words). Review of all words: 

Which synonyms or variants are used more than others?

For example: job / vacancies / job / jobs / position?

Use a tool to find out search volume (how often are the words actually entered into search engines?) This can be done, for example, using Google Ads' keyword planner mentioned in the previous paragraph, or Google Trends. Google Trends (https://trends.google.com; no account required) gives an indication of the search volume on entered terms, over time.

Determine the degree of competition

This is the probability that you can rank high on these words. In Google Ads, you can find an indication of how many organizations are advertising on the word. That doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the competition in the organic results, but it can give you a rough idea. You can also enter the word into Google and see what pages are currently ranking for it. Are they pages from established sites that are likely to be highly rated by Google (e.g. Wikipedia, major brands) and pages that are very focused on the topic? Then you will have to put a lot of effort into appearing in the top 10 as well.

The broader the term, the more competition you can expect. Logically, you can expect more / stronger competition on a term like 'study biology' or 'work in Nijmegen' than on e.g. 'courses Radboud University' or 'Vacancy University Nijmegen'.

Can you form useful compounds?

Perhaps you have some (broad) terms and can combine them? For example, you have "master," "master's program," "Dutch" and "Biology," which you can make into "master's in biology" and/or "master's in Dutch," so that you both reflect both keywords in your content, and make your term more specific.

Determine the relevance of a term

How well does the term fit your product/service? How likely is it that when someone enters this word into a search engine, that person is actually looking for your product or service?

It is a waste to put a lot of effort into ranking for a broad term such as 'biology' or 'studying', because someone who enters this word into a search engine may be looking for information for their profile paper, or a HBO education, respectively. Avoid "shooting with hail. Do not allow personal opinions to weigh in, such as 'I think this word sounds old-fashioned and therefore does not suit us'.

Example: the choice between the term "continuing education," "post-initial education" and "professionalization"

It may be that according to one tool, the search volume on the word "professionalization" is the greatest. This makes sense, however, because many more things can fall under that heading than training-related issues. So perhaps this word is too broad to choose for a page about training courses that professionals can take later in their careers. There would otherwise be too much competition from other Web sites focused on an entirely different topic.

The word "post-initial education" is jargon. It is questionable whether someone who wants to pursue additional education knows what is meant by it and thus entirely questionable whether he will enter it in a search engine. Therefore, in the above example, the term "continuing education" may be best.

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