Keyword Themes - What's in a theme?

[Emily_A]

I recently read the Moz guide for  "How To Rank - 25 Step SEO Master Blue Print" and had a question on keyword themes.

What is considered a theme? Is there a recommended number of keywords in a theme?

For example, if my site is for listing and selling cars, would the following terms fit within the same "car" theme or should the terms be broken out by "cars general" / "car locations" / "car types"?

• Cars
• Cars for sale in new york
• Ford Explorer for sale

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Cyrus explains this in a little more details here:

If your topic is the football, you’ll find it hard to rank for “Super Bowl,” but slightly easier to rank for “Super Bowl 2014” - and easier yet to rank for “Best Super Bowl Recipes of 2014.”

Apply that to cars...

If your topic is cars, you’ll find it hard to rank for “Chevrolet Cars” but slightly easier to rank for “Chevrolet Cars 2015” - and easier yet to rank for “Upcoming Chevrolet Car Deals for 2015”

And...

It’s much easier, and much more profitable, to rank for 100s or even 1,000s of long tail keywords with the same piece of content.

Pay close attention to this...

The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:

1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
2. Keywords with too much competition
3. Keywords without enough traffic
4. Keywords that don’t convert
5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

-Andy

[Linda-Vassily]

You can try using Google Adwords Keyword Planner to help you with this. [Keyword Planner > Find New Keywords > Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category]

Click on that, fill out the form using (for example) "selling cars" for your product or service and drilling down to cars and trucks for product category [you can skip the landing page part] and you will get a lovely list, by relevance, of Ad groups each of which contains closely related keywords. See which ones seem appropriate to you--refine your seed term as needed and repeat.

[You need to have an Adwords account for this, but there is no cost to set one up.]

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Turns out I wrote a post that expanded on this idea of keyword themes: https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.