SEMrushAcademy_20200519

Recap

Create a List

Hey, I'm Greg Gifford. In this lesson, the fourth in the Keyword Research course, we're going to be talking about building your list of potential keywords.

 

Now you're finally ready to build your list of keywords. Using the knowledge you gained from your discovery questions, start by making a list of important topics relevant to the business. This list should include both what's important to the business and what's important to the customers.

 

Separate the topics into buckets, so similar concepts and ideas are grouped together. Use your knowledge about the business to prioritize the buckets. Some concepts might be better for informational discovery queries, while others are more likely to lead to customer transactions.

 

Once you've got your concept buckets figured out, you need to start filling them with keywords. Here's where you use your new knowledge about the customers' wants and needs. Build out keyword phrases that those customers will use to look for the business or what it's selling.

 

This is the brain dump phase. Come up with anything you can think of, you'll refine the list later.

 

Don't forget to check the phrases that the business already ranks for. Check Google Analytics, Search Console, and any rank tracking that might be set up for the business – or your own rank tracking tools if you've got them in place.

 

It's also important to include phrases that competitors rank for. If competitors have been doing SEO, they've done a lot of this work for you already, so piggyback off of their efforts and “borrow” their strategies!

 

Then you'll want to get creative and come up with variations. Check the People Also Ask widget in Google. Look at the related search terms that appear at the bottom of the SERP.

 

Use keyword research tools to help you come up with related terms and variations of your phrases. SEMrush has some killer options here, I'm going to cover them in the next lesson.

 

But don't skip ahead just yet – there's still some important info in this lesson.

 

Once you've got your list of keywords, it's time to refine and prioritize. For those of you who are new to the SEO game, it's important to understand the difference between what's called “fat head” terms and long-tail terms.

I hate how they call them fat head… they're not fat, they're just big-boned…

 

But anyway, check out the graph – the vertical axis shows the number of monthly searches conducted, and the horizontal axis shows the number of keywords.

 

The fat head terms are on the left – these are the shorter terms that get the highest monthly search volume. As you move to the right, there's lower search volume, but more terms. When you get to the long-tail terms, you can see how the graph stretches out because of the massive number of phrases.

 

When you're trying to classify the popularity of a keyword phrase, don't just target the head terms with higher search volume. There are incredible opportunities in the long tail searches, and as searches continue to be more conversational in nature, the long-tail opportunities will continue to increase.

 

For example – someone searching for “jacket” is probably just browsing, while someone else searching for “cheapest North Face rain jacket near me” is ready to buy immediately.

 

Any keyword tool you'll use will show monthly estimated search volume for each phrase. Keep in mind that certain phrases will have seasonal spikes in volume, but the volume numbers presented in the keyword tools are annual averages.

 

Use the volume estimates to prioritize keywords. Obviously, if a phrase has higher search volume, it's an important phrase to target. But that doesn't always mean you'll need to target that keyword…

 

Remember, while the long-tail keywords have much lower search volume, there are tons more long tail phrases.

 

Most businesses will target the head terms that have the most traffic, which means the competition makes it more difficult to rank. You might be able to score big wins by targeting more long tail phrases, which could add up to higher monthly search volume.

 

Every keyword tool includes a keyword difficulty metric. You could analyze each individual keyword in your list, compare it to competitors, test actual search results, and use your SEO skills to determine which keywords will be easiest to rank… but as you add more keywords to your possible target list, you might end up with thousands of keywords – and that simply won't scale.

 

The keyword difficulty scores save you the time of analyzing each phrase. The tools all calculate their scores differently, but the end goal is the same. The difficulty score tells you how difficult it will be to get your site to rank for that phrase.

 

You'll need to consider the business goals and decide if it's worth targeting a more difficult term. It's going to take more effort and will probably take longer, but if it's a term that will significantly increase business, it might be worth it.

 

You might instead decide to target the longer tail phrases, which will give you quicker wins. I always like to take a two-pronged approach. I find the difficult terms that will provide the biggest boost to the bottom line and target those as a long-term goal, while I'm also targeting a selection of long-tail phrases with low competition. The quick wins with the long-tail phrases make the client happy and help our agency look good while we're working towards the big wins at a later date.

 

Once you've decided which phrases you're going to target, you're done with your keyword research! Those phrases will become the foundation of your SEO strategy moving forward – they're literally the basis of everything you do.

So that's it for lesson 4 of the Keyword Research course, we hope you learned something awesome. If you've got any questions, feel free to tweet them to me directly at @greggifford or the awesome team of pros over at the SEMrush Academy at @semrushacademy.

 

Don't forget to check out the next lesson, and when you think you're ready, head over to the SEMrush Academy page and take the test for this course so you can get officially SEMrush certified.

 

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Apply your newly acquired knowledge by practicing with SEMrush and build up your real-world skills.

Go to Keyword Difficulty

Continue learning by using this list of educational resources to help you study and master your new skills.

1. Find your competitors' best keywords with SEMrush.

2. Explore the functionality of the Keyword Difficulty tool.

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Choose two long tail keyword phrases from the list:

A. cheapest winter hat in town

B. wool jacket

C. buy bleu jeans in Denver

D. dog food

C. one wheel bicyle