Hey guys, this is the continuation of the Keyword Research | SEO Markham Expert Teaches lesson. If you haven’t read that, please do so by clicking the bold text.
Alright, let’s look back at our list of keyword ideas and start checking off some of these boxes.
The 5 Key Steps to Choosing Keywords | SEO Markham Expert Teaches
The 5 key steps to choosing keywords are:
- We want keywords that have search demand
- Keywords with traffic potential
- Keywords with business potential
- We need to be able to match search intent
- We want to know how har it will be to rank at the top of Google for that keyword
Search Demand | SEO Markham Expert Teaches
So first, we need to find keywords that have search demand. To do that, you can set a search volume filter to show keywords with a minimum volume of at least 300 monthly searches. Now that list has just shrunk to 351 keyword ideas which will be easy to manually filter through.
Traffic Potential | SEO Markham Expert Teaches
The second point on this list is to see if they have traffic potential. Again, traffic potential is a more reliable metric than search volume because not all searches result in clicks. At the end of the day, we want traffic, not searches. To check the traffic potential of a topic, you need to look at the top ranking pages and see how much traffic they’re getting. To do that, you can click on the SERP button beside any of these keywords. So if we do that for the query, “golf clubs,” you’ll see that the top page gets around 16,000 monthly search visits from the US.
Business Potential | SEO Markham Expert Teaches
The third point is business potential. Again, business potential is simply the value a keyword has to your business. It has high search volume and if I click on the SERP button, we know after research that the traffic potential is around 5,000 monthly visits from the US. Pretty good. Now, in terms of business potential, this keyword would have a value of 3 because our site makes money by reviewing and recommending products. So it would be super-easy to organically recommend products in a “best of” post, which I assume would lead to a fair amount of affiliate commissions.
Search Intent | SEO Markham Expert Teaches
While 16,000 monthly search visits seems great, you need to consider the fourth point on the checklist which is to ask yourself if you can match search intent. As you can see, almost all of the top-ranking pages are ecommerce category pages. So searchers are probably in shopping mode. But we have a golf affiliate blog, so the site probably isn’t selling golf clubs. Meaning, we can’t create an ecommerce category page and therefore, we won’t be able to match search intent. So seeing as this query doesn’t fulfill the points on our checklist, we wouldn’t go after this keyword.
As for search intent, these are blog posts in the listicle format with the freshness content angle as you can see from titles of the top-ranking pages. So this query checks all boxes and passes our initial sniff test. So I’ll click on the checkbox and add it to my “golf” keyword list.
