The following are three ways to add efficiency and effectiveness to your keyword research today and discover some golden opportunities.
1. Go For Quality, Not Quantity.
- Identify your SERP competitors.
- Analyze keyword overlap.
- Determine keywords within striking distance.
While quality is subject to your business objectives, generally speaking, you’ll be looking at how you can be more visible in search results compared to your actual business competitors, or whoever is currently ranking on the first page for the keywords and topics that you have a solution for. So, you can start there.
Understand who your true SERP competitors are (those unexpected players who show up in results for your target keywords) before you make any assumptions. Assess them by the percentage of keywords you share and/or have overlap with.
2. Automate Grouping Process.
A list of relevant keywords is a great start, but you can end up with a long list of very similar phrases that naturally overlap. To drive actionable SEO and content strategy, grouping similar keywords together is important to understand how many pieces of content you need to create or improve.
- Identify your seed keyword.
- Filter by source type.
- Group similar keywords.
The process of grouping keywords allows you to identify keywords that may have a similar intent.
For example, someone searching for “apple pie recipes” may have the same search intent as someone searching for “how to make apple pie.” By grouping these keywords together, you may be able to identify opportunities to target multiple keywords at once.
3. Balance Volume With Organic CTR%.
Once you’ve identified your top keyword groups and added them to your keyword list, the ideal way to prioritize the best bets is by balancing the weighting of monthly search volume with Organic CTR.
- Add grouped keywords to a keyword list.
- Sort by Organic CTR.
- Identify target keywords based on Organic CTR and Volume.
This is different from the CTR in Google Search Console (which reports how many people clicked on your site specifically) – Organic CTR estimates your likelihood of receiving a click, based on Moz’s proprietary modeling against real-world data that accounts for all other elements appearing on that SERP which will compete for attention.