A guide to keyword analysis

A keyword analysis is the most fundamental document that is an absolute basis for website optimisation (SEO).

SEO, in the long term, cannot be done conceptually, strategically and especially effectively without a proper keyword analysis.

The process of keyword analysis is quite complicated; you need some know-how, follow the procedure, and if you want to do it really well, you cannot really do it without the use of professional paid keyword analysis tools.

This topic is very complicated and complex and exceeds the dimensions of the standard web article.

The guide is a complex of practical instructions on how to proceed in creating and processing keyword analysis. It gives clear instructions on how to deal with the data obtained in practice and especially how to use their potential to the maximum.

Each website or e-shop is specific in a way, so some procedures and approaches may vary, but the basic steps will be similar for most internet projects.

I firmly believe that thanks to this publication, you will be able to create a keyword analysis for your project and then use it for one of the activities I list in the chapter where you can use keyword analysis.

What exactly is keyword analysis?

A keyword analysis attempts to determine which words and phrases (and in what volume) people are searching for via search engines (especially Google). We try to use the information obtained from website keyword analysis, among other things, to optimise existing content or create new content, as well as other tactical-strategic activities that help us reach more customers more effectively.

A keyword analysis determines what phrases typical Internet users use when searching. It investigates specific variants, synonyms, demand, and competitiveness. When creating a website, it helps to translate the website owner’s native language into the language of the visitors. As a result, it removes technical and incomprehensible terms and suggests alternatives so visitors can understand them.

The following basic information is typically included in keyword analysis:

• Relevant keywords and phrases that customers (website visitors) are looking for. Customers would use appropriate words to describe your products or services. The keywords should be directly related to the topic of the page to which you are directing customers.
• Individual word and phrase search volume. The average monthly searches for a given keyword or phrase in a specific search engine (how many times users typed the word into the search box and in the exact match) are indicated by the search volume.
• Data on the competitiveness of specific words (relative value, how many pages already deal with the given topic).
• Categorisation, segmentation and dimensioning – grouping individual words and phrases into logically related units (categories or topics).
• Priorities assigned to each keyword based on its value to the website operator. For example, in the case of an e-commerce site, the priority will reflect the probability of conversion or the likelihood that a visitor who came “from” that keyword will make a purchase.
• A plethora of other analytical and statistical data to help you get the most out of your analysis.

Although it may not appear so from this brief description, keyword analysis is a fundamental and absolutely necessary analytical-strategic material that can be used in a wide range of company marketing activities. 

Thus, keyword analysis assists website operators as well as offline entrepreneurs in better understanding what products and services are in high demand and offers them information about the competition for specific search terms (competitor keyword analysis), as well as how and how frequently people search for particular words and phrases.

What is the purpose of keyword analysis?

Keyword analysis has many forms of use. Even though website keyword analysis is frequently associated with SEO issues, it has an impact on the company’s other marketing activities.

This SEO guide document is an absolute necessity for SEO usage.

Site optimisation for search engines cannot be done conceptually without keyword analysis; it does not allow for full utilisation of the site’s and its content’s potential.

You cannot maximise relevant and converting traffic from organic search without keyword research!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a method of editing (optimising) websites so that they are easier to find in the organic results of search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. The goal of SEO is to get the website to the top of the organic (non-paid) search results for the keywords that will bring in the most conversions.

Where to use keyword analysis

The list below clearly demonstrates the vast scope and applicability of keyword analysis.

• Development of website architecture. We will learn which keywords deserve their own categories and landing pages and which do not, how to name the individual types on the website, and how detailed the individual categories must be, thanks to categorisation (a cluster of keywords and phrases into logically related units – topics).
• Filter options for specific categories. The setting of the depth and detail of the individual product filters, which the keyword analysis should identify and bring an answer to the question of whether users will use the filters and if they have a place in our category tree and entry pages, is related to the point raised above.
• Developing an SEO content strategy.  You will be able to identify all relevant topics that users are interested in as a result of the analysis. You can write about a variety of issues in the content section of the website (blog), the glossary of terms, and the magazine, but also in the main product categories or descriptions of the products and services themselves, thanks to categorisation (a cluster of keywords and phrases into logically related larger units).
• Producing SEO-friendly content. You will be able to create content that is appealing to both users and search engines. You will have a complete dataset of keywords that should be used on each landing page.
• Improving existing content. You have already covered a number of topics on the website, but they may not rank well in organic search. Keyword analysis will assist you in developing these topics in terms of content, refining, supplementing, and identifying new and essential information related to previously existing content.
• Creation of new landing pages. Website keyword analysis will reveal many new words and phrases users use to find SEO content. You will be able to create new landing pages that better answer searchers’ questions by categorizing these terms (grouping them into thematic units).
• Establishing optimisation priorities. When we have limited resources, we must decide what to do now and what to do later. Keyword analysis clearly identifies which topics or keywords are popular, have low competition, are relevant to our conversion priorities, and so on. With this information, we can prioritise which content is likely to have the most significant impact in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of effort.
• Recognising search terms in your customers’ speech. I have met many website owners who have been in business for many years and believe they know all of the terminologies and search terms that customers use to find their products and services. And they are always surprised by how much this assumption differs from the actual result. It is impossible to guess all of the actual search queries relevant to your content, and it is also impossible to estimate their search volume.
• A basis for PPC campaign management. Keyword analysis can help you save a lot of money. A specialist will use it to set ad groups to the most relevant and converting terms when managing PPC. It can also use information about the competitiveness of individual expressions, as well as the average price per click for individual expressions. It can thus allocate its budget to less exposed (searched) words that are equally or more relevant, despite having a lower CPC. If you are ranking first in organic search, you can reinvest your PPC budget in other areas. Similarly, thanks to the analysis and keyword research for PPC, you can target less exposed keywords that are cheaper and have the same or higher conversion rate.
• General knowledge of the existence of Landing Pages. There could be a number of keywords and phrases that are potentially conversion-friendly for your business (help you meet your goals) but for which you do not yet have content. Or you have content, but it is of poor quality, so the search engines have not yet recognised it, and this page occupies the positions reserved for pages with low-quality or worthless content.

Keyword analysis will tell you whether the given keywords have already appeared in search results, where they appear, and which page they appear on (Landing Page). You can then improve this page’s content and other ranking factors to move up in the search engine rankings.

• A complete audit and revision of the current SEO status. You can easily measure your position distribution (how many words you have among the TOP 3, TOP 10 or TOP 20 terms in the two most popular search engines), how you stand in comparison to your direct competition, and so on, thanks to the identification of all relevant keywords and phrases. You can precisely determine your current SEO position, and, more importantly, you can measure the improvement and effectiveness of your SEO activities in the coming time period.
• Finding SEO opportunities. In life, business, and SEO, there are not many shortcuts. However, there are times when quality data allows you to gain an advantage and thus achieve a faster effect than in other circumstances. If you know how to do keyword research you will be able to identify SEO content and optimise opportunities that can generate high traffic on relevant topics that the competition has not yet adequately covered.
• Another intriguing advantage of keyword research is the analysis of direct competitors. You will be able to identify the keywords and phrases that generate the most traffic for your competition using the analytical keyword research tool I will show you.

Long Tail Strategy and Keyword Analysis

To begin, let us define the Long Tail and how it relates to the SEE / THINK / DO / CARE marketing framework.

Only then will I explain why some SEO specialists believe that keyword research will provide them with Long Tail terms on a silver platter.

Long Tail is a term that describes the relationship between the search and traffic generated from the most frequently searched keywords and, on the other hand, the search and traffic caused by phrases and long phrases.

Single-word terms have an extensive search, but there are too many websites that contain that word. As a result, the term is highly competitive, and ranking high in search engines is difficult (sometimes impossible). Examples include words like car, coffee, reality, television, and furniture.

On the other hand, using multi-word phrases in searches by users increases the likelihood that pages with a large amount of relevant text on a given topic will be displayed at the top of search results.

Because the searching consumer is already at the end of the decision-making process, multi-word phrases convert significantly better.

According to the SEE / THINK / DO / CARE marketing model, the customer is already in the DO stage. One-word or very general keywords and phrases, on the other hand, occur in the SEE or THINK phase, when the customer is simply looking around and considering a purchase in the near future.

Definition of See / Think / Do / Care

Framework See Think Do Care helps to understand better shopping processes and customer decision-making so that you can design and build functioning marketing strategies and tactics. In practice, it looks like we want to assist and attract customers in all four stages of the shopping process. However, at every step, we have to communicate with him differently. In SEO, it looks like this.

Phase See: The customer looks at mobile phones without needing to purchase them. The sought phrase is a “mobile phone”.

Phase Think: The customer is already considering the purchase. The sought phrase is, for example, “the best mobile phone on the market“.

Phase Do: The customer is already looking for a specific phone model: “Samsung Galaxy Note 9 London store”. Phase DO the most converted one, but we try to accompany the customer in all his steps.

Phase Care: We provide customers with post-warranty services (instructions on how to use the product, related products, etc.). The author of this framework is the well-known marketer Avinash Kaushik.

Some SEO specialists and consultants claim that creating a  website keyword analysis will provide the foundation for Long Tail terms. Unfortunately, this is not entirely true, at least not because you identify the resulting Long Tail terms.

Long Tail terms (four or more words) typically have a very low search rate because they consist of longer combinations of words and phrases, and each user constructs a slightly different search term. The longer the compound, the less likely it is that another user will use it in the same way (in the same combination of words).

Terms with low search volume will be excluded from the keyword analysis because we only work with terms with a minimum monthly search volume.

If you want to get from keyword analysis Long Tail terms, you must include terms with a monthly search volume of 10 or more. By including these keywords in your SEO content, you will be able to serve various combinations of search queries better.

How long does it take to make a keyword analysis?

The amount of time you will need to devote to keyword analysis is primarily determined by the scope of the topic and the number of keywords you manage to collect.

The most time is spent on word reduction and subsequent categorisation, but without it, the analysis would be significantly less helpful.

Complete keyword analysis for SEO will take about 20-30 hours for a smaller e-shop, which we will use as an example.

For more significant e-commerce sites, each larger product category will always take tens of hours.

How much does keyword research cost?

The cost of the analysis is determined by the number of hours spent on it by an SEO specialist or a consultant.

As you will see, analysing the order of units of hours is not possible; we are talking about dozens of hours. As a result, either the specialist works significantly below the market price or cheats the analysis processing in some way, providing irrelevant and partially usable data for your subsequent optimisation and work.

How frequently should keyword research be performed?

Keyword research is a continuous process. A keyword analysis is similar to how your website requires periodic maintenance, such as a redesign, UX modification, or the deployment of new technology after a few years.

Search queries constantly change, and new words and phrases reflect the changing demand.

It is not that the language would fundamentally change. It is far more critical to identify new search trends, new products, new product lines, and so on.

Of course, the dynamics of your industry will also play a role.

Every year, smartphone manufacturers introduce new flagship models. What was searched for last year will be searched for significantly less this year. It is the development of mobile technologies that demonstrates how difficult it can be to keep up with innovations at times.

For less dynamic fields, I would recommend doing keyword analysis for SEO at least every two years.

What how a proper keyword analysis should look like?

There is no single type of keyword analysis. There is also no clearly defined procedure for processing the analysis. The workflow will differ depending on the specialist’s experience, technical skills, and analytical tools.

There is no standard for what should and should not be included in the analysis. That is also why you may come across various outputs labelled as keyword analysis but fail to exploit their potential fully.

What must the analysis definitely include?

• A comprehensive database of relevant keywords and phrases that users search for (for a specific business or purpose).
• Individual KW search volume
• Word categorisation (classification of KW into individual groups up to the level of the landing page).
• Evaluation of the obtained data.
• Practical suggestions for dealing with data in practice.

The method for conducting a keyword analysis

We will create keyword analysis using the following procedure (workflow).

1. Data gathering 
2. Data cleaning
3. Choosing conversion priorities
4. Obtaining evaluation key performance indicators (KPI) for all keywords
5. Establishment of the classification scheme
6. Classification and categorisation
7. Creation of data insight using graphs
8. Interpretation of the data – conclusions and recommendations

The sequence of these points is my proven procedure for keyword analysis for SEO.

There will undoubtedly be cases and situations where a different procedure or methodology will be more appropriate.

The result must provide the expected data to serve as the foundation for future decisions, strategy, and subsequent execution.

Data collection

(Google Ads, Google Search Console, autocomplete, related searches…)

Obtaining all relevant keywords and phrases is essential to create a quality keyword analysis.

The key to success is to collect data from several sources, which we combine at the end, remove duplicity and clean the irrelevant expressions and terms with low monthly searches.

Thanks to the analytical systems that help us to obtain this data today, this part of the analysis can be managed quite quickly and painlessly.

Of course, the most effective methods and keyword analysis tools cost something and are not always completely free.

We will show all the most important variants of data collection and approaches to get to the data, whether entirely free (not counting the value of our time) or to use paid analytical keyword research tools. It is up to you which of these paths you choose.

Creation of the Excel document 

I highly recommend processing the complete analysis in MS Excel. 

The analysis can also be processed in alternative table processors (Libre Office, Open Office or the Google G Suite office package), but these programs have their specifics and restrictions. 

I also recommend storing individual data sources on separate tabs.

In the keyword analysis, we also save the source data to return to it at any time (revision – back check, omission of part of the data, etc.).

If you are processing a keyword analysis of an e-shop, the category name and product list are precious kW lists that serve as basics in the search for related topics and phrases.

If you have a few categories and a few products, you can conduct the kW research process manually. However, this will be in a minimum of cases; most of the time, you will have to solve this activity by exporting categories and products from your platform (CRM / editorial system/business system).

I cannot describe the detailed description here from different platforms. Still, I assume that as an e-shop operator, you will be able to export categories and products without any problem.

In some CMS systems, we can export categories directly from the menu – download complete export (CSV). The downloaded CSV file will be the first imported keyword dataset to our table. You cannot insert CSV into Excel by simple copying, but you have to import it.

Dataset is a collection (cluster) of data. CSV (Comma-Separated values, values separated by commas) is a simple file format that replaces tabular data. The CSV file consists of rows in which individual items are separated by a comma (,) character. Items can be closed to quotation marks (“), allowing the item’s text to contain a comma. If the text of the item includes quotation marks, these are doubled.

Next, we will proceed in the same procedure to export products. From the e-shop platform, export all product names and import them to Excel into the next tab. Now you should have a list of the most basic and relevant expressions representing one of the fundamental pillars of keyword analysis for seo.

In other steps, we will expand this list of KW to include related terms.

First, however, we will expand our rough dataset of keywords with other sources, keywords from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

SEO in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a Google tool that provides website owners with statistical data about their website visitors.

This service allows you to track past and present traffic, user behaviour and characteristics, conversions, sales, and more.

In the keyword analysis, we will use Google Analytics to extract additional relevant words from the website’s organic traffic. We can only do this if you have the Google Analytics measurement code installed on your site and have been collecting site traffic seo data for some time.

Keywords from other analytics tools, such as those that provide hosting services, can be used in a similar way to monitor traffic from search engines.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (abbreviated GSC) is a free Google service that makes it simple to monitor and manage a website’s presence in search results (Google searches and troubleshooting).

If you have GSC, which I highly recommend, you will get a list of all the keywords your site is ranking for in Google, as well as other helpful information.

Google Ads system

The Google ads advertising system is another source from which we will “mine” relevant keywords.

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords – many people still use this name and ignore the new name) is an online advertising service that allows advertisers to give their website more prominence in Google search results.

PPC specialists use the Google Ads advertising system to manage campaigns across Google search and content networks.

Definition of PPC: PPC is an abbreviation of Pay-Per-Click and means payment for a click. A relative is the abbreviation CPC (Cost-Per-Click, price for click). Advertisers only pay if the user clicks on their PPC advertising in search engines, on Facebook or anywhere else on the web.

Keyword planner

The keyword planner is a free Google Ads tool for new and experienced advertisers. It is like a workshop for creating new search networks. You can use the keyword planner to find SEO keywords and determine what performance the keyword list could achieve. Google keyword planner can also help you choose competitive offers and budgets for campaigns.

To get the following keyword dataset, we use the built-in Google Ads keyword planner. In the top bar, click “Tools” and select “Keyword planner” under the planning category.

We are not interested in the keywords for the PPC campaign but in expanding our keyword dataset and phrases for our keyword analysis.

Google autocomplete

The search engines themselves are another excellent source of new keywords. The autocomplete feature is the first free keyword tool we will show you.

On the first sheet of Excel, we have primary word forms from our e-shop categories, such as “gift for mom.”

People, however, do not search for “gift for mom” only in this form and wording; they use a variety of modifications, adding other words that help them refine their search query, different tenses, cases, and so on.

The autocomplete can tell us how users expand our category and product names in search.

When you enter a query, a menu of extended expressions appears below the search field. Suggested terms are derived from statistics of user queries collected over a specific (usually longer) time period.

In the case of Google, on the other hand, there may be popular terms, terms that the user has previously used (if logged into the browser).

Modern “whisperers” can broaden search queries with left-hand expressions (complete the expression before the entered phrase), make language corrections (misspellings, diacritics addition), and so on.

If we input our keyword into the Google search bar, we will get nine additional related search terms.

So we “multiplied” our keyword “a gift for mum” and now have nine alternative expansion terms:

• a gift for mom on her 45th birthday 
• a gift for mom on her 40th birthday 
• a gift for mom on her 60th birthday 
• a gift for mom on her 50th birthday 
• a gift for mom on her birthday 
• a gift for mom for the holiday 
• a gift for a mother in the maternity hospital 
• a gift for mom on Mother’s Day

Google Suggest does not sort results by search volume, as many people believe, but by popularity and freshness layer, which is an algorithm that considers current events. If you have a Google account, the autocomplete will also show you previous searches related to the entered search query.

We could get an additional 9 KW for each of the previously stated long tail keywords using this rather laborious and slow method.

Related search queries in search engines

Very similar expressions will return the related queries that we find at the bottom of the SERP page in search engines.

Google will offer us eight related expressions with our key phrase. For related queries, the same applies as in the case of autocomplete. It is laborious and slow work. Fortunately, this process can be done in bulk.

Data cleaning

Let’s summarise it. So far, you can obtain the dataset of relevant keywords from various sources. The keywords could be obtained from:

• Names of e-shop categories
• Terms of products offered on the e-shop 
• Keywords from the search engine List (Google Analytics)
• Keywords from Google Search Console 
• Keywords from Google Ads from a Google keyword planner 
• Keywords from other SEO software

It would help if you created a table with all of the collected keywords to be able to proceed to the next step, which is keyword cleaning.

All tables from different sources should also be carefully categorised in an Excel table, each dataset on a separate sheet so that you can return to them at any time in the future.

Removing duplicates

Now copy all the keywords from all sheets to a new sheet.

Then in Excel, go to the Data tab, where you click on remove duplicity.

A dialogue box will open, asking us which columns we want to remove duplicates.

Since we only have a column with keywords on the sheet all KW, we will leave the only column that was offered to us checked.

Search volume

Before we further clean the database of keywords, we will find out their search volume.

In this way, we avoid cleaning, sorting and assigning priorities to words that do not have the minimum search we have set and do not deserve our attention.

The best solution, in this case, would be to import all keywords the professional SEO software. Copy the keywords from the keyword analysis into a new (.xlsx) file.

Why a new file? The analysis contains a large amount of data and bookmarks. In that case, we unnecessarily send data that we do not want to analytical systems and increase the upload speed. In this way, we also prevent the possible error of choosing a different tab for the analysis than the one we want to measure.

Minimum search volume 11+. Why?

Usually, in seo keyword analysis, a line is drawn below a certain level of keyword search, below which keywords are not analysed and resolved.

It is for several reasons.

The goal of optimisation is to identify keywords with interesting searches and to create content and landing pages for them and thus obtain a good position in search engines, which subsequently generates organic traffic, which subsequently generates conversions (i.e. the fulfilment of conversion goals, whatever they are, most often but realised sales).

From keyword analysis, it is usually possible to obtain thousands of relevant keywords with a decent search. We then try to integrate them into our content.

It makes no sense to optimise the keywords with a search volume below 10. On the other hand, these less searched terms can form the Long tail keywords or can be their part.

Sometimes we collect so many keywords that even words with 20, 50 or 100 searches can be “unattractive” for us from the point of view of subsequent optimisation.

So it depends on you; after what search volume, you draw an extensive thick line, and you don’t look below it.

I usually choose level 11+. 

Google reports searches in tens, so it returns a value of either 0 or 10. 

Typos, grammatical errors, incorrect punctuation

If you look at your keyword analysis, you will probably find that some terms appear in many variations.

Let me show you an example:

• birthday cards
• birthday crds
• brthday cards
• birtday curds
• birthay cards
• brithday cards

…and so on.

Most often, numerous variants of the same word are caused by wrong spelling – grammatical errors. For the sought expressions, you can expect a vast palette of terms.

When to optimise misspelt terms

In the analysis of the keywords, every time, you should record only one variant of the word. In general, never optimise for expressions that contain grammatical errors or typos.

However, there are cases where incorrectly typed, or inaccurate expressions can have a significant search volume, and it makes sense to mention them in the text or even create a separate input page in some cases.

I will mention one such case.

When analysing keywords for our site, I found that “SEO optimisation” has a high search volume. On Google.com, it was 2 890 000 searches per month, which is a relatively exciting number for SEO dates.

SEO optimisation is actually an incorrect term because SEO itself means Search Engine Optimization. It is an acronym that already contains the word “optimisation”. However, if we see the keyword is searched in this way, we will try to speak the “user language”, and so we can use it in our content to rank higher, even though it’s not correct.

Cleaning data in OpenRefine

OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful tool for working with raw data. Openrefine is suitable for cleaning data and their transformation.

Even though you work with the tool in your Internet browser, you always work with data locally, i.e. on your computer.

Openrefine is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), German, Japanese, Italian, Hungarian and Hebrew.

Where and how to download Openrefine

Go to OpenRefine.org, and click Download in the left menu. On this page, you will choose the software to download according to your platform. You have software for Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

Download a zipped program, which you unzip into a folder where the software will be placed permanently. Although OpenRefine works via a browser, it has a standard installation package.

Installation

Click on openrefine.exe in the unpacked directory. The program checks if you have installed Java. If you have not installed it yet, it will redirect you to a page where you download the current version.

Launch

After installing Java, start openrefine.exe. A dialogue box pops up, and after a while, the program throws you into the Internet browser, where a new tab opens.

Import data

Open the application, and on the front page, we have several ways to get gross source data to OpenRefine. Import an Excel table from your computer.

To look at the basic use of OpenRefine, I recommend watching three short videos that will introduce the tool and explain how to use it. Videos can be found at https://github.com/openrefine/openrefine/wiki.

Data clustering (grouping key data)

Now let’s get on cleaning our data.

It will help if you eliminate all keywords with typos, other words and other mistakes. We will try to clump all these words into a single, correct expression. We will use the so-called data clustering process with the help of a cluster analysis that OpenRefine will do for us.

Cluster analysis is a multidimensional statistical method that is used to classify objects. It is used to sort units into groups (clusters) so that units belonging to the same group are more similar than objects from other groups.

Do not worry. It will not be complicated.

In the keyword column menu, select Edit Cells -> Cluster and Edit.

This feature will help you find groups of different cell values ​​that can be different variants of the same word. To cluster data, use the Key Collision method with the Fingerprint function.

The problem of losing the search for data clumping

This brings us to one of the weaknesses of clustering keywords and phrases. In the resulting keyword analysis, you can lose a considerable amount of search.

X terms with a certain search volume are combined into one, but in most cases, the most searched highest one.

Of course, these losses can distort the resulting data to some extent.

Personally, I am of the opinion that the whole analysis of keywords, searches and other performance indicators are indicative values ​​that need to be seen as ratio indicators (you compare the search for keyword A vs the search for keyword B).

In the analysis, you will not overlook the most crucial keyword because of data clustering. You will only work with one variant of the wanted term, which usually has the highest search for all alternatives. Since you apply cluster to the entire dataset, the search will be cleaned of typing, anagrams and grammatical mistakes.

By closing a large number of similar expressions and terms into one, we have created a large number of new duplicates in the dataset. You can remove the duplicates in this program as well as in Excel. Subsequently, export the data. Click on Export at the top right and select Excel (you will get a .xlsx file).

KPI SEO

Priority determination, evaluation of conversion potential of each keyword

KPI in SEO: What indicators to focus on

Key performance indicators are indicators that help us evaluate different activities if they are successful or unsuccessful.

Performance indicators have different forms; in the corporate sector, it will usually be profit, turnover, market share, etc.

In Internet marketing, for example, it will be the price for a click, conversion cost, etc.

In SEO, we can follow the following KPI:

1. An increase in organic traffic
2. A shift in monitored keywords positions
3. Conversion and Leads
4. As low as possible (or acceptable) bounce rate (or Dwell-time)
5. The length of the user´s visit
6. Elimination of the pages with a high level of abandonment
7. Crawl errors

We will not discuss individual points here. Now we should assign the fundamental performance values ​​to our keywords. We also have to evaluate the meaning and potential of individual words for our business or goals.

Determination of priority (meaning) for each keyword

If you have collected a certain amount of keywords so far, not all of the words will be relevant to your website, and not all words will have the same meaning for the business.

Therefore, at this stage, mark each keyword by a priority (number) that expresses its value in terms of future benefits (influence on conversion).

How to set priorities for individual keywords and phrases

First of all, it is important to realise what your goal is.

In the case of the e-shop, the primary goal will probably be an order. You will want to maximise returns, watch the profitability of the individual product categories, etc. You will primarily focus on “conversion words” to help you generate new orders.

In the case of a content magazine, priorities will be different. If the magazine benefits from selling advertising space, it will probably focus on maximising traffic seo. It will stick to the keywords and phrases that are thematically interesting for the magazine and will be able to generate the highest possible traffic, regardless of the further definition of the visitor’s quality.

Today’s online marketing is already so sophisticated and complicated that sales or conversions are only one part of the process.

What precedes the conversion and what follows it is as crucial as the conversion itself because all these steps support each other. These steps are called the customer’s shopping phases.

SEO also has its phases, and the strategy of using optimisation (especially in content creation) may vary depending on the phase of the shopping process.

In this context, it is essential to realise that optimisation and focusing only on conversion words would be a mistake.

The customer goes through various stages of the shopping process. We should try to reach it ideally at all these stages, so we should always determine the priorities to cover all shopping cycles.

Always try to identify the largest groups of relevant or irrelevant words and assign them the proper priority.

Classification

The classification is used to include individual keywords in narrower categories or thematic units.

On the Internet, you can meet other names such as categorisation or distinction into dimensions.

Classification is an essential part of SEO keyword analysis.

Thanks to the classification, we can identify new, nonexistent categories and clusters of keywords that deserve your own landing page, edit the architecture of the entire site, and create your own filters and parameters for products and categories.

The classification allows us to look at the keywords from all angles and perspectives.

Editing the output table, filter application and conditional formatting

In the end, you should edit the table so that you have the keywords divided into several vital columns.

I recommend the following orders of columns:

1. The keyword
2. Priorities 
3. Total Search 
4. Competitiveness of Google
5. Google Search Volume
6. Another search engine´s Search volume (not necessary)
7. Google Position
8. Keyword note
9. Google Analytics traffic

A significant step, essentially for e-commerce websites, is determining the classification scheme. Create a classification diagram based on the keyword dataset. Each keyword analysis is different, so it must also be reflected in the design of categories. Try to make such classifications or categories that contain keywords that are interesting from the point of view of ranking and that deserve their own landing pages.

Creating Landing Pages

Categorisation of KW was not a goal; it was only a tool to identify all landing pages.

Landing pages are like a gateway of keyword groups. This phase is thus very important and must be done very precisely.

Practical use of keyword analysis

The keyword analysis will help you in many ways. Right at the beginning, we listed areas in which the SEO keyword analysis would help us.

• Creation of web architecture
• Creation of content strategy
• Creation of SEO Friendly content
• Optimisation of existing content
• Creation of new landing pages
• Determination of optimisation priorities
• Identification of search phrases in your customers’ language
• The basis for PPC management
• Information about the existence of landing pages
• Complete audit and revision of the current SEO status
• Identification of SEO opportunities
• Analysis of direct competitors

Now we look at each point closer and show practical examples.

Workflow work with keyword analysis, or where to start

The keyword analysis is a relatively complex Excel table of thousands of rows of keywords and phrases, then up to dozens of columns with values ​​that relate to individual keywords.

After the analysis is completed, no less important part of the work occurs. We have to make the analysis perfectly extract and actually reflect its processing into our website.

I know that the workflow series of SEO specialists and consultants or web owners will differ. I try to work with SEO keyword analysis as follows:

1. Edit the web architecture (creating the correct categories and subcategories, creating parametric filters for individual categories). The point is to make all landing Pages identified in keyword analysis. At this point, it is enough to create the pages (to have the H1 headings, headline, URL and, of course, products if it is an e-shop). All new input pages must be logically incorporated into the existing site structure. The structure (architecture) of the website must have an order.
2. Creation of new content or optimisation of existing content. According to (business) priorities and traffic, we will start to create new content (texts on the landing pages). If we already have them, we will optimise them (enhancement of all evaluation factors on the page – headline, tags, quality and length of the text, extension with relevant keywords and phrases from keyword analysis.
3. Internal link building. After completing the specific part of the content (category/topic), perform internal link-building. For the content created, create internal references from another existing content (if it makes sense, i.e. there is a thematic reason to do it).
4. Optimisation of the existing content. Also, already created content can be further improved, expanded and supplemented with other relevant content. On these pages, we can enhance other on-page factors such as titles, tags, internal linking, etc.). 
5. Content marketing, i.e. creation of additional expansion content in a blog/magazine or other parts of the website.

Naturally, you will come to a different order of priorities, or you will think of a separate procedure that I do not mention here. That is all right. The process of using keyword analysis should always be in line with your overall strategy and priorities.

Creating a web architecture

Adequately designed web architecture will increase page performance and search engine visibility.

In most cases, it is clear that not all content fits on the main page, and you will need to structure the site into several levels or logical parts.

The aim of creating the web architecture is to design a clear and intuitive structure of pages (categories) and subpages (subcategories and filters), in which the customer and search engines are easy to navigate.

From the SEO point of view, it is ideal when every primary cluster of keywords (one broad topic) has its landing page on the website. This page should be included in logically arranged categories so that the user is able to quickly and intuitively navigate through them.

Properly designed page architecture will help you with the next point below, with the creation of landing pages.

As an example, I would demonstrate a scheme of the architecture of an e-shop.

If the e-shop has many types of products, they need to be shifted into different groups and subclasses.

I would proceed in the following scheme:

• Identification of the main categories (for whom products are suitable, the purpose of use, product category…)
• Identification of derived subcategories (more detailed division)
• Identification of product filters (division according to individual parameters related to the category)
• Suggesting landing pages outside standard categories and filters
• Offering the content parts of the site

Creating a content strategy

In the SEO content strategy, I focus mainly on content creation relevant to the site’s topic while bringing the promise of generating decent organic traffic.

Interesting topics can often be identified according to the beginning of the search phrase. If users ask questions – what, how, why… it is often an exciting content opportunity. You will process a relevant answer to the search query. This will help users, support brand awareness (in this case, about your site), and capture the customer at the beginning of its decision cycle (See Framework See / Think / Do / Care, which we mentioned in the part of the keyword analysis and Long Tail).

The creation of the content strategy is, of course, a much broader concept and more complex discipline. 

Creation of SEO Friendly content

Under the term SEO Friendly content, you can imagine content that is original, relevant to the main topic of the page, brings valuable information, is well readable and contains all relevant keywords and phrases that are searched for, and brings answers to all search questions related to the topic.

Part of the formation of SEO Friendly content is also the correct construction of essential evaluation factors such as the title (page title), the meta description (page description), the SEO heading tags structure, the content itself (quality and length), and internal and external linking to the article.

Optimisation of existing content

If we already have the overall architecture of the site, we have all landing pages created and their content with a sufficient number of internal links; we can approach the optimisation of the existing content.

You can focus on creating higher-quality headlines, titles and descriptions of the pages, expanding existing content with other relevant and related keywords and phrases. You can also optimise the URL, but here I would be very careful.

Page headline (title)

One of the most important tags on the website is <title>. This very important SEO factor is significant across all search engines. The <title> mark tells the user and search engine what the topic of the site is.

The headline is one of the basic SEO factors. It should contain our keyword. What is no less important is that the headline has to attract the user in SERP.

And what do you think? Do the creators of websites reflect the importance of this tag? Try to type into the search engine “Untitled Document” and see how many pages have pages without a title. Or try to see how many corporate web presentations have the home page “Home” or “Introduction”! 

Headings H1, H2 etc.

Tags H1, H2, H3… are headings levels. The most valuable and important is the H1 – heading of the first level. You should follow the following rules on your page:

• Always have only one H1 heading.
• Use lower levels of H2 and H3 headings to structure the document (if it makes sense concerning the context).
• Lower levels than H3 no longer have any meaning in terms of SEO; their value will be somewhere at the level of bold text.
• Do not use the headings as a “keyword warehouse”.
• Use the headings instead as sales arguments; try to attract readers and make them read the content.

The content of the article

Now the most challenging part comes. Write a readable, interesting article that will be loved by search engines and readers.

Remember that:

• You do not write for the search engine but for site visitors! The fact that you follow the basic principles and rules for optimising the page should in no way suppress the content quality.
• Include all essential keywords and phrases you got from the analysis, as well as the most commonly used terms from search phrases.

Basic rules to help you write readable, structured, and search engines loved content

Apply the rules below to write your articles.

• Perex – Write a short introduction (2 – 5 sentences) that attracts attention to the following text. 
• Summarise the benefits of the article – just below perex, you can summarise the main advantages and benefits of reading the article.
• Content with anchors – if the article is longer, you can create content where individual anchors lead to H2 and H3 SEO heading tags.
• In the first 100 characters, use a keyword (phrase) – in Perex (in the first paragraph), the keyword or the key phrase should not be missing. This gives the search engines a clear signal that this word contained in the title, domain, and heading H1 is not missing in the first sentences either.
• Short paragraphs – do not write uniform continuous text. Not so much because of search engines, although they also work with individual paragraphs and perceive them as content blocks, but rather because of readers. 
• Use external and internal links – refer to relevant products or interesting articles from your blog. Your goal is always to keep the reader interested and convert him into a customer. 
• Use images, multimedia, and visualisation – many studies have confirmed that if there are other multimedia in your content (pictures, YouTube videos, graphs, infographics, polls, etc.), they are plus points for your readers and search engines. Readers like to look at relevant graphics; the nested video increases content relevancy and extends the time spent on the page. The duration of the visit impacts your search engine position. Of course, Google sees it and takes it into account.
• Describe all images by Alt tag – alternative tag. Search engines cannot yet read the image’s content, although it will probably not take long with artificial intelligence. The idea is to put key phrases into the Alt tag if, of course, the image’s content relates to the key phrase.

Anchor texts for internal and external link building

Analysis of keywords will help you identify the most appropriate wording of anchor texts (text of links).

Internal links are hyperlinks that refer to (target) the same domain as the domain on which the link is located. Simply put, the internal link is the one that refers to another page on the same website.

These types of links are helpful for three reasons:

• They allow users to browse websites.
• Help create an information hierarchy for the website.
• They help spread the power (link juice/ ranking power) of individual pages to other pages.

Anchor text is a visible text link, and you can click on it. Very often, the text of the link differs from the surrounding text. I recommend paying attention to the form of the text of the links on your pages.

SEO FRIENDLY TEXT of the link is:

• Brief
• Relevant to the target page
• With the low keyword density
• Non – generic

I recommend using different link texts that will always describe the relevancy and the topic of the target page but will be formulated in different ways. This gives the search engines a signal that the links are natural (not link spam).

Foundation for management and optimisation of your PPC campaigns

You can use keyword analysis to manage PPC campaigns, expand the targeted words, optimise the budget, etc.

Budget optimisation lies in simple things. The most exposed (sought) words are usually also the most competitive. If you target the campaigns at extended tail expressions, you will probably compete in the auction with a lower number of competitors, resulting in a lower price for gaining the traffic of a highly relevant visitor.

Information about the existence of landing pages

By assigning each keyword to a clump, whether category or topic (landing pages), you will find out if you have already created the landing page or have to create it. 

Complete website SEO audit and revision of the current SEO status

Thanks to the keyword analysis, you will find a complete dataset of relevant words for your business. You can measure their position in search engines and watch how it changes over time.

You will get a perfect overview of which KW has not yet had any landing page assigned to the search engine, so you will need to work on their placement (creating a new input page or optimising the existing landing page that contains this keyword).

Of course, the whole issue of evaluating your existing SEO activities is more complicated. To obtain a professional SEO audit, you will need to study an entirely new SEO section or hire a professional who will tell you precisely what you need to work on.

However, using the knowledge, procedure and tips we provided you in this article, you will be able to make a massive step towards your desired (SEO) results.