Getting your targeted traffic to your site is very challenging and rewarding at the same time. A common mistake people make is to write content for highly competitive keywords. They are very generalist in nature, thus they neither bring many potential buyers nor do they present good ranking opportunities. Consider this example: if you are in a web design business, what would your prospective customer search for if they are looking to get their website designed? Will they search for "best web design company in New York" or just "web designing"? The answer is obvious.
Instead of focusing all your attention on head keywords, we should focus on targeting content for long-tail keywords as well. For example, if your site is about online textbook rentals, your head keywords would be e-books, online textbooks, etc. and your long tail keywords would be textbook rentals online, cheap textbook rental online, should I buy or rent textbooks, etc.
Focusing closely on more specific keywords reduces competition and brings in more targeted consumers who are likely to buy your products. Writing content that is consistent with our brand goals but also appeals to the target audience is a challenge. It involves considerable time and effort in brainstorming ideas that solve the most pressing problems of our target customers.
Also, avoid a repetition of the same words in your composition and rather include synonyms or what Google popularly considers as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). These words cater to a similar target audience and are related to the content's main keywords. For example, if the site is about volleyball, then the semantic keywords would be the equipment of volleyball, 10 rules of volleyball, volleyball ball price, etc.
To find your targeted keywords, you can go through the following points:
Use Google Analytics to find what queries are bringing visitors to your site in the present scenario.
You can use Google Keywords Planner and Google Suggest to search for related keywords.
Use Google Trends to check the most appropriate keywords for your target location. You can also compare the popularity of various keywords you already chose.
You may also use Wikipedia to see suggested terms your prospective customer is likely to search for.
Use Latent Semantic Keywords (LSI) to bring relevance and content to the site. You can use the site LSIGraph to see a list of suggested keywords for your query.
Using question-and-answer sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers can help you get a general idea about the queries of your target audience.
To analyze the most trending topics in social media, you can use BuzzSumo. It gives you a list of trending topics and is very helpful in generating content ideas around share-worthy content.
Several factors influence your rankings in SERP. Know about the On-Page SEO factors that influence your site rankings.