As the cornerstone of SEO, keyword research is the basis for numerous SEO techniques. If you need to know what people are searching for and what results from pages your site appears on, how can you optimise your website for search engines?
The likelihood is that you often conduct keyword research, whether you’re new to SEO or have been practising it for some time.
What improvements can you make to your current procedure, then?
1. Go For Quality Rather Than Quantity
Start Here:
- Find out who your SERP rivals are.
- Look into keyword overlap.
- Find terms that are within striking distance.
It is tempting to compile all of the keywords that have ever existed into a spreadsheet and proceed from there. However, working more efficiently is best when time is short, and results are required immediately. Thankfully, technologies have been developed to aid you in this endeavour.
What do we mean by quality, then?
In general, you’ll be considering how you may be more visible in search results compared to your company competitors or whoever is already ranking on the first page for the keywords and themes you offer a solution for. Quality depends on your business objectives, and you can begin there.
Before you make any assumptions, identify your real SERP rivals (those unexpected players who appear in results for your goal keywords). Consider how many of their keywords you overlap with or share with you. For this, Moz provides a quick and straightforward metric; try stack ranking by RivlaryScore.
Image Source: Moz.com
Use a keyword gap tool to compare those top rivals to find the keywords where you can easily reach page 1 by ranking in the top three.
Image Source: Moz.com
2. Automate The Process of Grouping.
A list of pertinent keywords is a fantastic place to start, but you may end up with a lengthy list of naturally overlapping, similar phrases. Grouping related keywords together can help you determine how many pieces of content you need to generate or update to drive actionable SEO and content strategy.
- Choose a seed keyword.
- Set a source type filter.
- Related terms together.
You can find keywords that might have similar intent by grouping your keywords.
For instance, someone looking for “apple pie recipes” can have the same goal in mind as someone looking for “apple pie-making instructions.” You can find opportunities to target several keywords simultaneously by grouping these keywords.
Depending on the number of terms you’re working with, manually grouping keywords can be time-consuming. Use a tool if it makes the process you’re now performing manually in Excel simpler. There is a use for SEO software, after all. The more physical labour you can eliminate from your schedule, the more clients you can service, and the more time you have for other SEO activities.
Use a keyword grouping tool to help you focus on the kinds of keywords and phrases that will help your content team deliver rather than sifting through your enormous ambiguous list of keywords to create groups of similar keywords.
With the term suggestion filtering feature, Moz’s Keyword Explorer makes this process a breeze. Filter from a selection of recommendation types after inputting your seed term to return suggestions, including keywords that are questions. To focus on it, you can group it according to different levels of lexical similarity and volume range.
Image Source: Moz.com
3. Use Organic CTR% To Balance Volume.
The optimum strategy to rank your top keyword groups after you’ve chosen them and added them to your keyword list is to balance the weighting of monthly search volume with Organic CTR.
- To a keyword list, add grouped keywords.
- Sort by Organic CTR.
- Determine the target keywords based on the volume and organic CTR.
In contrast to Google Search Console’s CTR, which shows how many people specifically clicked on your site, Organic CTR predicts your chances of receiving a click based on real-world data and Moz’s proprietary modelling, taking into account all other elements that will compete for users’ attention on that SERP.
Image Source: Moz.com
Choose a few lower volume keywords in favour of higher CTR %, depending on your objectives.
Using the Lists tool in Keyword Explorer, you can easily combine Organic CTR% with Volume to get a good sense of where your powerhouse keywords are. The Priority metric combines Volume, Difficulty, and Organic CTR to make it a breeze.
Image Source: Moz.com
There you have it, then. There are three different approaches to make your keyword research more efficient, save time, and get results. Depending on where you are in your journey or what project you are working on, you should follow this advice in a different order. The main lesson here is to prioritise quality, automate where you can, and remember there’s more to the tale than search traffic.
Small businesses like yours may improve every aspect of their search engine optimization with D’Marketing Agency assistance in order to rank better on search engines.
In this case, keyword mastery is of relevance. DMA SEO Keyword Services would be of much assistance to help unlock the true potential of your keyword related services.