W2P5: Putting it Together

Develop Your Keyword List

Now that you have an understanding of buyer intent and you’re familiar with using keyword classes, here’s how it to put the knowledge into practice:

Create a Seed List

A seed list is your initial set of keyword ideas. Write down the four keyword classes (buckets) – these would be based on your products or services. Then use a combination of brainstorming and investigation (using the methods below) to add keywords to each bucket, spending the most time on brand and product terms.

You want this list to represent all of the things your product/service does and the problems it solves, but you don’t need to add every possible synonym, etc. That will happen in the next step.

1 – Research Your Audience

Who is your idea customer? The better you know who they are, the easier it will be for you to target them.

What terms do they use to describe your products or services? What other relevant terms do they use in their day-to-day lives? Look at blog posts and comments, forums, LinkedIn groups, and your own support requests.

2 – What Terms Is Your Audience Using?

Use your analytic tool, Google Webmaster tools, and your weblogs to see what search terms people are using to find your website. If you have access to data on your internal site search, look at those terms to see what people are searching for on your site.

3 – Get Suggestions

Use some of the autocomplete tools (outlined in the Keyword Tools section) to discover what the top results are across multiple search engines and other sites. You don’t need to run very keyword through them, but you might try a sampling to see if you missed anything.

4 – Research the Competition

Use tools like SpyFu or SEMRush to see what your competitors are bidding on. There’s no need to analyze every competitor, but it can be helpful to research the top 3-5 to see if there’s anything you didn’t think of.

Building Your List

You’ve only just started – now it’s time to expand your list.

You could use one of the many keywords tools we’ve covered, but the Google Keyword Planner will work fine. Why? Because Google owns over 65% of the United States search traffic market and an even larger portion of the PPC market making them the authority.

A few tips for how to use the Keyword Planner:

1 – Group Keyword by Topic

You can enter more than one keyword at a time. By keeping them topically grouped, your results will not be diluted.

Example:

Imagine you sell baby merchandise like strollers and car seats. You can put all of your stroller keywords in one group but not the car seats. Those below in a separate group.

2 – Use EXACT Match Types

You can find a thorough explanation for of the Keyword Planner match types here; basically Exact Match will give you the number of searches for that exact term (and only that term). Typically, this will provide you with a more conservative traffic estimate for that keyword.

3 – Use Language and Location Settings

You can set your desired language and geo-targeted located under the Advanced Options and Filters setting.

Example:

You have a dating offer you want to present to Mandarin speakers located in San Francisco. Set up your filter with these settings and you will see Local Monthly Searches that represent searches from people matching your criteria.

4 – Set Up Your Columns

Make sure you have access to the Competition and Monthly Searches data. You can set column options within the settings area. You might also want to include Approximate CPC data so that you can spot keywords sought by advertisers.

5 – Download Your Keywords

As you go through the list, check off the keywords that seem best; then select Download/My Keyword Ideas. This will produce a spreadsheet of your keyword choices. Your keyword ideas will remain in the left column as you enter more seed terms. Once you are finished, you can download the results when you are finished.

Refine Your List

You’ve invested the time and have developed a sizable list of keywords – now it’s time to zero in on the best ones. This is an important step, especially if you’re developing a keyword list for SEO purposes.

The process is more art then science. Go through the list and eliminate the “least” interesting keywords. There are no rules, but here are some factors to consider:

1 – Keyword Class

If you ended up with 500 informational keywords but only 15 product keywords, you can drop some of the less interesting informational terms. Focus on the “buyer intent” keywords.

As you review your keywords, double check and see if any of the phrases could be turned into “buy intent” keywords – especially the product terms.

2 – Check Your Competition

The Google Keyword Planner rates keyword competition two separate ways, allowing you to make better decisions.

1. Suggested Bid Column

Checking the Suggested Bid value is a simple way to determine the real world value for a specific keyword. The more an advertiser is willing to bid (pay per click), the more you know that the traffic generated by that keyword is valuable.

2. Competition Column

The Competition value displays three levels of competition: Low, Medium and High. The metric isn’t very useful online, but when you download your spreadsheet the value changes to a number from 0 to 1 (with higher values meaning more competition).

Both of the metrics relate to paid search only, but advertisers risk real money everyday using this information and both of these represent real world data to help you in your decisions.

Don’t spend an enormous amount of time researching these metrics. This step is to help you identify easy keywords, but don’t be discouraged from going after more competitive terms as well.

3 – Check Google Search

Search some of your most important keywords in Google and check the results. Remember the example about “refrigeration”? You want to check that the results are related to project and not referencing some other industry. If some of your keywords are vague or ambiguous, they might be worth dropping from your list.

You might also keep track of some of the misleading terms that appear in the results. This list of “negative keywords” will come in hardy if you ever decide to do paid advertising.

4 – Semantic Grouping

As you go through your spreadsheet of keywords, add a column labeled “Semantic Grouping” so that you can keep “related” keywords together. These connected groups of keywords will be equally useful for SEO and paid advertising purposes. If one of your semantic groups has a large number of words, you might drop some of the words with a lower search count.

Read: Google continues to improve their search algorithm and the latest improvements have centered around their ability to interpret semantic search. This article, How To Improve Your search Rankings With Semantic Keyword Research by Neil Patel will give you some insights into what semantic search is and it’s impact on SEO.

Final Thoughts

• You probably want to know “how many keywords” should be on your list. This depends on how “big” your project is or how “complex” your product or service is, but your list doesn’t need to be large. Most keyword lists are in the dozens (or even hundreds) – not the thousands.
• Try categorizing your keywords to capture the interest and intent of the searcher. This will make it easier for you to develop, refine, and analyze your list.
• When making your final keyword choices:
  • A commercial website (one that offers products and/or services) should go with keywords that seem to have the most commercial intent based on the currently ranking websites.
  • An informational website (like a blog) should go with keywords that have the most informational intent.
  • Look for a “sweet spot” of high search volume in conjunction with low difficulty / competition.
  • Look for keywords that have a high search volume with top competitors displaying lower domain authority and backlinks.
• If your website is already ranking on the first page, but not in the top 5 spots (or beneath other search result areas such as images, local results, etc.) and the keyword has good search volume, focus your attention on getting those keywords and phrases to move up in ranking. This is not the time to try and rank more keywords.
• Sometimes, it’s not the actual decision making that is difficult – it’s the time spent compiling the data!
• Don’t forget to use your more informational keywords as content topic ideas – these can be gold mines!

NEXT: Homework