Creating a Keyword List
The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide - Chapter 2
Creating your keyword list
Last Updated: May 25, 2021
In the previous chapter, we showed you how to gather a set of seed keywords.
Good keyword research is typically an iterative process, which means repeating lots of steps.
In this case, it means repeating what we've already done and researching each of these seed keywords as its own parent topic.
We'll show you the process below.
Keyword Suggestions via Keyword Explorer
First thing first, pop your seed phrase into the Keyword Suggestion report of Keyword Explorer. This will give you a list of closely-related keywords, sorted by relevance.
Here's what we get when searching keyword suggestions for "motorcycle jackets."
Doing this, we find many related keywords such as:
- motorcycle jackets for men
- motorcycle jackets leather
- motorcycle jackets for sale
Export everything into a spreadsheet. Create separate tabs for each seed keyword.
In this case, "motorcycle jackets for men" and "motorcycle jackets leather" sound like they could each be a topic on their own, so we'll create a unique tab for each of these and research them separately.
Repeat this process for each of your seed keywords.
Expanding your list with Google and competitor keywords
So far, we've got a great start, but we want to find all the keywords related to our subject. To accomplish this, it's often helpful to go back to Google and do a little competitive research, as we did in Chapter 1.
1. Who's ranking for your seed keyword
If our seed keyword is "motorcycle jackets for men", we'll simply grab the URLs of who is already ranking. For now, ignore any local results or other search features.
Next, put these exact URLs into Keyword Explorer's Ranking Keywords report. Set the search to "exact page."
Sort and filter as necessary and add these to your spreadsheet under your seed terms. Make sure to remove any duplicates.
Here's a video of Britney Muller showing how to find ranking keywords for any URL.
2. More related searches
As we're repeating our search process for each seed keyword until we get more and more specific, we also want to look at Google related searches for each seed keyword and add these to our list.
When we find more seeds, we separate them out and repeat the process.
3. Question keywords
Keyword phrases in the form of questions are some of the most powerful phrases you can find at this stage. While they often don't have as much search volume, they are typically laser-focused in their relevance and provide topics to consider for on-page content and FAQs.
For each seed keyword phrase, it's helpful to record (repeatedly) questions from Google's "People also ask" boxes.
Another rich source of question keywords can be found in Keyword Explorer itself. Simply filter for keywords that "are questions" in the keyword suggestions report.
Finally, we also like the tool Alsoasked.com, which allows you to discover multiple "People also asked" questions from various Google search engines across the globe.
Lily Ray: Question Keywords
"Question keywords are crucial, especially given how many different Google search features pull in questions directly into the search results. Top-performing informational pages are often structured using a question and answer format containing the most frequently asked questions about a given topic. Furthermore, leveraging 'question' keywords can help you to incorporate Frequently Asked Questions onto various pages on your site, and potentially benefit from FAQ Schema."
Lily Ray — SEO Director, Path Interactive
4. Keyword modifiers
When researching, certain keyword modifiers will become apparent. Modifiers are common, intent-based phrases that often accompany your primary keywords. A few examples include:
- Location: California, Spain, Chicago
- Time: September, 2020
- Buy: cheap, free shipping, deal, low-cost, free, shop, online
- Brand: Nike, Adidas, Brooks
- Comparison: best, alternative, versus, top
When you see a keyword modifier repeating in your list, it's helpful to make note of it and apply the modifier to other keywords on your list in order to see if they're worth pursuing.
Doing so, we start to create more detailed lists using our seed set. For example:
- best motorcycle jackets for men
- motorcycle jackets for men 2020
- cheap motorcycle jackets for men
- best motorcycle jackets for men online
5. Rinse and repeat
Keep repeating this process until you've populated your spreadsheet with enough research that you feel you've comfortably covered your topic.
You'll likely have dozens of potential topics (or more) and hundreds of keywords. Some will overlap, and that's okay at this point.
Next, we'll filter our keywords to decide which ones we should go after and add to our content strategy.