A Guide for Keyword Prioritization

Keywords provide a foundation for every search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. They define what your website is going to be ranked for and is thus essential to define this prior to implementing any actions. You want to know what your potential customers are searching for in order to define which keywords are relevant for your website to rank for in search engines. This is where keyword prioritization process steps up. Mastering this process will help your overall marketing strategy and thus get your business a good position on the market.

If someone still has concerns whether SEO is still important, it’s worth noticing that in US, almost 150 million people use search engines to search for information. 

Number of Search Engines Users in US, Source: Statista

This step-by-step guide should help you prioritize the keywords for your website.  

You need to start from somewhere and this means brainstorming the keyword ideas. Or in other words: coming up with what your potential customer might be typing to retrieve the information you are offering. Luckily with the advancement of tools related to SEO, this process is now whole lot easier. 

These are the tools we use at Amberd Design Studio.

Ubersuggest.io provides you with the suggestions from Google. It’s those longer keywords that Google is providing you when you start typing. What Ubersuggest does is captures these so you don’t have to go manually and search for them. One problem with this tool is that you need to take the keywords manually, which is not that convenient when you are trying to get plenty of keywords.

Keyword Sh*tter - despite its name this tool is one of the best one there is when you don’t know where to start with keywords. While I am not sure how many SEOs are using it, as long as the word spreads out, everyone will start their keyword prioritization with this tool. Once you type the root of the keywords, it will start listing everything related and being searched for in search engines. All you need is, to export it and there you have it.

Briefly check what is to be left out

Basically, this is the part where you check for the relevancy. I would recommend doing it manually first in order to make sure you are leaving out irrelevant keywords and focusing on the right ones. You can easily do this in the Excel sheet you exported from the keyword research tool you initially used. Also, what’s important to have in mind is that this process requires a human eye. No matter how good certain tools are, the relevancy of the keywords to your business could be affected by many other facts.

For instance, imagine you want to rank for ‘British in USA’. This term has some history related to it and maybe most of the searches want to end up on Wikipedia. 

Or you are selling Dob Beds and most of the searchers will be directed to amazon or eBay. You may want to target long-tail keywords if you are selling products that are likely to be listed on Amazon.

Check for the search volume and competition

Except for its use for advertising across various platforms, SEOs can make a good use of Google AdWords. It has a tool called Keyword Planner which will provide you with insights such as search volume and level of competition for a particular keyword. In addition, you can also break this information by the device of the user. After retrieving information from Keyword Planner, export it into an Excel sheet and sort it according to the search volume. 

Ideally, at the end of this process, you will have a good amount of keywords with a fairly good search volume while low in competition. Normally these should be longer and more specific by nature. 

In addition to all of these, if you are not starting a fresh new project you could check out for the keywords you are already ranking for. You might be surprised. If you go to search console and click on search analytics you will get a list of keywords you are ranking for. Somewhere at the last pages some things might come off as a surprise. Check out your performance for these and see if there is something worth of improving. 

As mentioned earlier, having a proper keyword strategy is absolutely essential to succeed online. However, one should not underestimate the amount of work, effort and attention to detail required in order to excel. Once you do, your website will get a lot of leads from the search engines, traffic that comes on a long term compared to the one coming from PPC which stops when you stop paying.