Prioritizing Profitable Keywords
The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide - Chapter 3
Which keywords make the cut?
Last Updated: May 25, 2021
By now you should have a big list of keywords in a spreadsheet, divided into topics.
Now, what keywords should you actually create content for?
To answer this question, it's helpful to prioritize your keywords and place them into an actual content strategy. It's possible you have thousands of potential keywords to pursue, but only limited time and/or resources to devote to them.
Prioritizing keywords is a balancing act between many competing forces: relevance, volume, competition, click-through rate (CTR), and more.
In general, the more valuable a keyword is, the more people compete for it. Conversely, when fewer people compete for a keyword, the easier it is to rank for.
Here are several considerations when prioritizing your keywords for content mapping.
1. Relevance
This is the most important question you can ask of any keyword: Is it relevant?
"motorcycle vest with armor" might be a cool keyword, but it may be completely irrelevant if that's not something you sell.
Some questions you must be able to answer "yes" to before considering any keyword:
- Is this something my audience cares about?
- Can I offer solutions around this keyword?
- Can I create content around this keyword that adds value?
If the answer is no, simply strike it off your list before considering any of the metrics that follow.
For the next few considerations, we'll use metrics from Keyword Explorer under the "Keyword Overview" report. (You don't have to use Keyword Explorer for this, but it helps that all the metrics are in one place.)
2. Monthly volume
Monthly volume is a metric available from many keyword tools that estimate the number of times a keyword is searched in a given month. Often, these estimates are given with a minimum and maximum range.
Here's how monthly volume looks in the Keyword Suggestion report. For "motorcycle jackets with armor" we find an estimated monthly search volume of 731 times per month in the United States.
Keep in mind that these are almost always estimates, can be impacted by seasonality (e.g. "halloween" searches rise in October), and lower-volume queries are often less accurate.
What's a "good" monthly volume? It depends. Typically, a higher number is better, but it also means more competition. A lot of lower-to-medium volume keywords can add up to a lot of search traffic. In the end, the keywords that are right for your business are typically more important than any volume number.
3. Difficulty
In short, Keyword Difficulty is how hard the keyword is for the "average" site to rank for.
Moz's Keyword Difficulty score is heavily influenced by the Page Authority of the top 10 ranking results, weighted by several other factors.
What's a "good" Keyword Difficulty score?
In general, lower numbers are easier to rank for, but your own ranking ability is going to primarily rest on two factors.
A. Your Keyword Difficulty potential
We covered this in Chapter 1, but here's the process again for finding your site's Keyword Difficulty potential:
- Enter your site in the Ranking Keywords report of Keyword Explorer
- Search using "Root Domain"
- Set "Ranking" to 1-3 (keywords you rank highly for)
- Set "Volume" to anything over zero (in this case, greater than 101 searches per month)
- Sort by "Difficulty" (high to low)
- Ignore any branded terms
In this case, we can see that our highest volume keywords have a Keyword Difficulty score no greater than 54.
This means that keywords above this score will likely be difficult for us to rank for, and keywords below this score may be a little easier.
If your site is completely brand new, you may find that ranking for even the easiest of keywords (with scores in the 20s and 30s) is still very, very difficult.
B. Topical relevance
The Keyword Difficulty score is meant to apply to the "average" site, but your site isn't average. Your site is about something: a topic. And what that topic is about can determine how easy (or hard) it is to rank for a new term.
Closely related topics are typically easier to rank for. For example, if you rank for "wholesale motorcycle gloves", it's likely easier to rank for "wholesale motorcycle helmets".
Conversely, if the target keyword is way outside your normally-ranking topics, then the keyword is likely harder for you to rank for. For example, if we here at Moz tried to rank for "motorcycle helmets", we might have a hard time doing so.
Ian Lurie: Keyword Research Mistakes
"First, folks still choose phrases without considering intent or context. So many marketers pick sexy phrases with high volumes or phrases for which sites already rank, but ignore the real value of the phrase to the business.
Second, they target phrases for which there’s no available real estate. If you sell bicycle spokes and try to rank for that phrase, you’re clawing everyone else’s eyes out to rank on a page with 900 pixels of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) features.
It’s pointless. Pick phrases that have available real estate, where ranking in the top 5 means people might actually see you."
Ian Lurie - Digital Marketing Consultant
4. Organic CTR
Some keywords generate a lot of clicks in Google SERPs.
Others, not so much.
Click-through rate (CTR) in Keyword Explorer is simply an estimation of how many people actually click on a result in Google search.
For example, an 84% CTR for "motorcycle jackets with armor" is a relatively high score, and means that 84% of people are clicking web results.
CTR is highly influenced by SERP features. The more Google SERP features for people to click on, the lower the expected CTR. Take a look at the SERP for "movies with the rock".
The results are dominated by Google SERP features! This keyword has an expected organic CTR of 41% — less than half.
When prioritizing keywords, a low CTR isn't necessarily a deal-breaker. But it pays to be aware you may only win a certain percentage of the monthly average searches for certain queries.
5. Priority
In Keyword Explorer, "Priority" is an aggregation of all the other metrics: volume, difficulty, and CTR.
A keyword with a high priority score is going to have higher volume and CTR scores, accompanied by lower competition scores.
Like this example for "single malt scotch".
This keyword has great volume, relatively low competition, and an amazing CTR. As a result, the priority score is an impressive 81.
There's no one single "good" priority score. Everything is relative to the strength of your keywords. But the priority score can help you sort keywords by overall value.
Andy Crestodina: Keyphrase Difficulty
"If you’re not checking key phrase difficulty, you’re not doing key phrase research. You simply don’t have a chance of ranking for phrases that are way outside your website’s authority. So don’t target a phrase until you’ve checked the competition to confirm that your authority is in the same range of the other pages that rank.
Imagine you’re a sports team that can score 25 sports points. What sport should you play?
- How about basketball? Bad idea. You’ll lose every time.
- How about football? Maybe, yes. You can win quite a few games with 25 points.
- How about baseball? Absolutely. Play every baseball game you can find.
SEO is a sport. Sometimes you need big numbers to win."
Andy Crestodina — Cofounder of Orbit Media
Final word on prioritizing keywords
Choosing your keywords is a little bit of science plus a little bit of art.
- The science: using metrics to screen for keywords with proven potential
- The art: choosing keywords you know you can create value around
This is probably the most important step because choosing your final keyword set is going to determine the content you create. Let's move onto content mapping.