How Many Keywords Should You Target for SEO? (One Topic Per Page)

0:00 Intro One Topic Per Page
Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads and without struggle. And what we’re looking at today is how many keywords should you target for SEO? So the simple answer is it’s one keyword per, per page on in most cases, right? And this is sort of changing with AI SEO happening, and it’s we’re kind of moving away from keywords, uh, you know, by themselves into more like topics. And so you be– should be really be thinking about sort of topics per page and not super worried about keywords, right?

0:35 Key Takeaways Topic Structure Overview
So let’s get into it here. Um, so the key takeaways is really instead of like a one keyword or five or ten keywords, think about, uh, different pages targeting different topics. So you can target one primary topic per page, and you could in that case, in, in the, in the content, whether you’re writing it or an AI is writing it, you can have natural long tail coverage that happens naturally. You obviously wanna avoid putting too many keywords into the content, um, and you wanna build a structure of inner hidden pages. All of these inner hidden pages need to be connected to each other. And there’s a guy who figured out– figured this out that he, he got… He went… He took a website from… His name is Koray, and you can look up the Koray framework. But he took a website from essentially zero visitors to thousands of visitors a day in, like, three to five months just by building inner hidden pages. So and you have to connect them with text links, but you need to have sort of this page structure, and you need to expect sort of patience here, right?

1:38 How Long SEO Takes to Work
So I started making a whole bunch of content around one of our niches, which is restoration companies and, uh, restoration SEO. And, and it looked, it looks like it took about four months, four to five months from making the content to where I started showing up in ChatGPT, AI searches, and also showing up in Google for that. So expect there to be a maybe a six-month time period. So if you have a client that is expecting really fast results, they really need to be doing Google Ads. Or, or if you’re, you know, a small business owner yourself and you, you know, you do restoration or con- you know, remodeling, you really need to be looking at paid strategies like Google Ads, LSA to really, um, get some momentum before, um, you know, before you, before you, uh, expect SEO to happen. So

2:29 One Topic Per Page Short Answer
And so let’s get into the short answer here, the one topic, um, several related terms. So each page should be writ– um, built around one clear topic that maps to the primary keyword. Um, and this is gonna be a real phrase somebody would search. So related phrases will occur naturally. Don’t worry about putting related keywords. It’ll just happen naturally. Um, and modern search engines, of course, do reward this approach. According to Semrush, which a one of the great tracking keyword software tools out there, n-nearly about eighty-eight percent of searches tr– that trigger AI– Google’s AI overviews are carrying carry informational intent. And those summaries pull from the content on the page that answers those questions. So pages that thoroughly cover one topic get service, whether pages that kind of are scattered do not, right? So you can learn more about… We have an on-page SEO guide. So this brings up the, the question really, how many keywords per page is

3:29 Old Keyword Thinking vs Modern SEO
really kinda like… And if you have an SEO company saying h– this is how many keywords per page, they’re really, you know, talking the old school. Um, this is like really twenty twenty-two, twenty twenty-three, before twenty twenty-four, before AI became a thing. Um, and so it’s really an old methodology. Uh, the Goo– how Google actually works is they understand topics and intent, not just like the keywords or the phrase matches. So a f- a p- a page, or in this case, an AI, you know, a video that I’m, I’m actually making this video putting on YouTube and also, um, LinkedIn because AIs look at the transcriptions of videos as well, right? So in having an active YouTube channel is actually one of the things that makes you show up for AI. I think it’s about twenty-nine percent of Google’s AI, um, you know, equation having video here. And, of course, you need to upload the transcripts and have good titles and descriptions. But bottom line is whether it’s video or, you know, content, um, Google understands it. Um, and position one, of course, gets twenty-two percent click-through rate. Position two gets thirteen on and on down. So really wanna focus on reli– uh, um, creating, um, crafting really high quality content that around your, um, services and products or your client services and products.

4:53 Signs You Are Targeting Too Many Keywords
So here’s a, here’s a couple signs that you’re targeting too many keywords. You have sort of unrelated top- subtopics on the page. The page is dumping your trained topics searcher wouldn’t expect to find together, and that’s diluting the topical authority. You know, you are repeating a keyword, uh, over and over again, which creates an awkward reputation. You have internal pages that are around the same top- topic, right? So if you’ve got, uh, if you’re targeting, um, home remodeler, um, Charlotte, North Carolina, and you have two other pages going after home remodel Charlotte, home remodeler Charlotte. Dude, that was done, like, ten, fifteen years ago when Google wasn’t as smart. So and any page that hovers in position ten to fifteen for several terms that but wins none, that’s usually a focus problem. That page is trying to go after too many pages.

5:44 How to Choose Your Target Keywords
So how to choose your actual target keywords. You really wanna lead with the searcher intent, not the keyword list. So ask what someone is typing the search wants to accomplish. Plumber near me, they’re looking for a plumber right away. Any kind of near me search is going to be right away. How to fix a running toilet, they want to solve it themselves, right? So any kind of how-to term is going to be a DIYer. Um, so once you know the intent, you can pick that phrase, and you can put that in the title and description of your page and have at least a thousand to two thousand words of content. Um, sometimes AIs like ChatGPT reward content that’s three or four thousand words long. Um, and you also want to do all the things on that page, um, like internal links and citing, um, and also citing external websites. There’s different things there that you can make the site, um, the page more, um, visible in AI searches. And here’s a graph about earning the top three mobile, um, positions, you know, showing you get twenty-four percent click-through rate, um, at the highest, um, position one. Position two is like thirteen. It goes on down to ten and on down, right? So, um, when should one page target multiple keywords?

7:00 When One Page Can Target Multiple Keywords
So if you have– There are some, there are some cases one page is targeting a small cluster of two to four terms, and that’s going to be okay, right? So for example, um, if these, if these two terms share the same intent, so emergency plumber and twenty-four-hour plumber are going to be different keywords, um, but they describe the same need. Um, so in that case, one single organized page could satisfy one searching for either phrase without going and making two pages, right? They belong together. Now, when you should you split these, um, if satisfying both of these terms would pull the page apart. So for example, they need two separate pages. So you have two totally different ideas like, you know, um, kitchen remodeling Charlotte, North Carolina, living room remodel Charlotte, North Carolina. Those are going to be separate pages. So be sure that you’re building a sh- uh, a structure around this. Um, a simple test to find out whether two keywords should be on the same page is if no, is this? Is it the same intent? Would one page satisfy the both? Um, right. So if yes, then you combine those into one page. If no, you can make two separate pages. And here it’s that example I just talked about, um, but we’re talking about water heater repair. So water heater repair and water heater replacement sound similar, but this, but in that, uh, but repair is where some- the searcher wants to fix what they have or hire a service to fix it, and then repla– and then water heater replacement, they essentially want to hire a plumbing company to just replace the whole thing, right? Um, and so they have another example of water heater repair and water heater not, not heating that describe the same problem. So in that case, you could make one page satisfying them both.

8:49 SEO Silos and Internal Linking Structure
And sure, if you want to, you could maintain a spreadsheet of hundreds or thousands of individual keywords, um, but it’s really better to build a structure or have an AI do it for you. Um, "Hey, I wanna, um… I have a plumbing company, and I want to have a whole bunch of inner pages around different topics. Help me build a structure." Right? That’s a great prompt to give to an AI. And you want to group the keywords by topic and then by intent and then describe how many pages you want or get the AI to do it. Pick… You obviously want to group by topic, so cluster all keywords around the same subject. You want to layer by intent. Within each topic group, create separate informational content from informational f- from transactional intent. These always need to be separate pages, and you can assign one sort of main home for your pages. So if you have like plumber repair page, that plumber repair could, um, could be inner hidden pages that connect to that plumber repair page. And then you want to build these major, these hub pages, um, and then link your little spoke pages to that, your inner hidden pages to that. Um, so nearly eighty percent of AI overview triggering keywords fall in these lower difficulty ranges, and structured pages are what really does it, these inner hidden groups of pages. So you can definitely learn a lot more on our website, um, and, uh, we have a lot of information there about that. One thing you got, you got to remember is that keyword targeting connects to the rest of your site, right? Because Google’s looking at the individual pages, but they’re also looking at the entire site. AIs look at the entire site. So nothing is in isolation. The page you built around one keyword needs to have internal links pointing to that page and from that page, right? So internal linkings, internal links tell search engines what page is the most important and how the topics relate. So a focused page gains authority faster than something that’s like not focused. And again, the site a-architecture, the keyword position within your structure signals the topic authority itself. So orphan pages, pages that don’t have any internal links going to and from them, don’t really show up in Google. So if you’re making these inner hidden pages and you don’t have, um, text links between them, then you’ve just wasted all your time. So we, we, so we call this SEO silos, um, us SEO people. And SEO silos have been around forever, um, and, uh, expect this to take four to six months, maybe a year to rank. John Mueller with, um, Google says being patient is good, so, um, need to be doing ongoing work and have ongoing patience. So absolutely.

11:28 Keyword Density Is Obsolete
So is keyword density still worth tracking? Well, the old way is that marketers used to chase a keyword density by putting one to three percent of density of keywords on the page. It was really frustrating because you had to sort of double-check it. The modern reality is we don’t have to worry about that. Keyword density just happened sort of, um… It, it’s essentially an, an am– So the modern reality is that keyword density as a metric is effectively obsolete. Google systems reward clarity and completeness over density math. So as long as you’re covering the topic naturally and thoroughly, the keyword usage sort of happens naturally in the content. So the goal is writing something that’s knowledgeable that a human would find generally useful, and then search engines and also AIs will find that u- repetition as well. And more repetition or inner hidden pages that are the same pages is what’s called cannibalization, and we just talked about that. You don’t wanna have cannibalization. That will cause you to get flags and dings from Google. And then what about long-tail keywords?

12:30 Long-Tail Keywords and AI Overviews
Uh, keywords w- that have, like, five or ten words in it or, you know, um, another way to think of this is AI, um, phrases, uh, or AI searches have long words in… have, have multiple words in it. So these usually describe the same intent as the broader term. So a page built around water heater repair naturally captures water heater repair costs near me without being a dedicated page. So searches that have eight or more words are generally seven times more likely to trigger a Google’s AI overview. So covering these long-tail variations really helps as well.

13:07 Frequently Asked Questions
So here are some frequently asked questions. Can one blog post rank for more key… than one keyword? Absolutely, and it usually does. Um, a thir… A, a good blog post built around a clear primary keyword generally ranks for dozens of keywords because search engines are connecting the content to topics, not phrases. What about how do I know if I have too many pages targeting similar keywords? You can look at Search Console for pages that are ranking the same, or better yet, upload your content to an AI and say… You can download your Search Console and upload that to Claude. I choose– I’m a huge fan of Claude versus ChatGPT. And you could say, "Hey, do we have, do we have pa- do I have pages that are competing?" If two or three of your own pages are competing in the results, that’s keyword cannibalization. And so in this case, um, you know, removing the older pages and doing four, um, three to one redirects really helps as well. Should every page on my site target a keyword? No. Obviously, pages like the About page, the Contact page, navigation pages, these aren’t gonna necessarily always target keywords, so don’t try to just over-SEO it, right? It needs to feel, like, natural. So bottom line is one topic, one page done right is going to be a clarity exercise. Building each page around one primary topic, writing it thoroughly enough to cover it completely, and just let the related phrases take care of themselves. So you can start on our On-Page SEO guide to learn how to do that. You can dig into Topic Authority and Silos, and you can learn how to fix what’s broken. I’m Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads. I help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk to you soon.