Should I be optimizing for Keywords that we already rank for?

[aircyclemegan]

When selecting which Keywords to optimize for, should I choose all words that I want us to move up for? Like that my company appears ranked for 5, 10, 42, 44, etc.?

Or should I select a mix of some that rank well (top 1-2 pgs in Google) /rank near pg 5/ and some that aren't showing up in the top 50 yet?

I don't want to waste my time optimizing for words I don't need to.

Thanks!

[itrogers]

I think you should keep optimizing for keywords that you already rank for, if you are not #1, your pages can still be better optimized. Keep them in back of you mind, but don't forget about them. With SEO, you don't have to sacrifice a lot of keywords as long as they are all somewhat related. Also, a good measurement to see if you should keep any keywords or variations or not is to check their search volume in Google Keyword Tool. That is what would tell you if you are wasting time on not.

[aircyclemegan]

Cool thank you. Does anyone else have any other opinions?

[TheEspresseo]

Just so I can understand the question let me try to rephrase it back to you. You want to know how to prioritize your keyword targets. Specifically you want to know how much _less priority _you should give a given keyword that you are already ranking well for.

If I am understanding your question correctly, then I have to say that I don't have enough information to fully answer it.  I agree with itrogers in that I think you need to factor in the traffic of each of your keyword targets. And I would add that you should factor in the difficulty of each, too. And consider factoring in the commercial intent (on noes, the tool's down!) of each. And if different keywords reflect an interest in different products or services that represent different profit margins for you, that should be taken into consideration. And ideally if you have enough conversion rate data for each keyword, that should be a factor too! And for that matter, if you can figure out how to group related keywords together such that would lend synergy to your on-page SEO, all the better.

But without a clearly defined metric for finding the efficiency of each keyword or keyword cluster (KEI isn't good enough—this is a step in the right direction, though), and without the values for each factor for your keywords, I still want to say something along the lines of "yeah, you want to target a mixture—some keywords that you are already strong in, since an improvement from position 10 to position 1 represents a ginormous (if anyone knows of a better dataset, let us know!) increase in traffic, but you also want to be working on some longer-term keyword targets that might represent more traffic in the long run, but are more difficult and so require some longer-term planning".

Is that helpful at all?

[aircyclemegan]

Yes it is thank you.