Hudson Creative Documentation

Keyword Research (Online Ads Category)

Keyword Analysis Step by Step Process

Goal: To create a Keyword Analysis document (that we’ll send to a client) that lists the top keywords for their campaign.  This process should combine keyword suggestions from Google, Moz and SEM Rush into a large list (Raw Data) and then choose the best words from this list which have:

  • High Volume
  • Low Competition
  • And are valuable to the campaign goal

Steps to do Keyword Analysis:

Section 1: Setup 

  1. Duplicate Keyword Analysis document and add to client folder in Drive. Fill out the Cover tab and make sure 3 new tabs are created: Modifiers, Keywords and Raw Data. 
  2. Take a step back. Given what you know about the brand, think about all the different ways that someone might be searching for this brand or campaign that we’re working on. In order to do this, you will have to have already gathered information from the client and discussed the high level goals of this project with the Account Manager.  
    • A good place to start is the seed keywords that you received from the client during the onboarding process.
    • You also may want to spend a little time googling the business or campaign (or similar businesses or campaigns) to get an idea of the market you are going to be researching.
  3. Your next goal is to write down 5-20 “modifiers” that encompass all the different ways that someone might be searching in google for this brand or campaign.  

As an example, if someone searches for “Italian Restaurant in New York City,” that search is divided into three sections: Tail, Head, and Modifier. “Italian” is the Tail, “Restaurant” is the head, and “New York City” is the Modifier in this case. If you change the search term to “Italian Restaurant in NY,” you haven’t really changed what the person is looking for – an italian restaurant. You’ve simply modified the term, specifying where the person is searching. For your restaurant, the modifier might just lower the difficulty of ranking for a term without losing focus. 

The other most common modifier is brand, where a store sells multiple. For example, a shoe store may sell a variety of brands and so the modifier would be “Nike” in the following searches:

Nike running shoes

Nike track shoes

Nike skate shoes

The head of the search term, “shoes” stays the same, and the person is looking for a type of shoe specifically, i.e. running, track or skate, which is the tail, but for your store Nike could easily be changed out for Adidas or Puma or any other brand without changing the search significantly. 

Make sure to record these on a new tab in the keyword analysis document called “Modifiers.”

Create a new Moz Pro Keyword Explorer list where you will add all keyword ideas to (this will hold 1000 words and will resolve duplicates for you, don’t worry about adding duplicate words).

Section 2: Gathering Keyword Possibilities (we should use all 3 tools)

  1. SEM Rush (the best tool for getting keywords from a URL or domain that has been online for 6+ months and is already indexed by Google for certain keywords)
    • Add the domain or URL of the landing page for the brand or campaign you are trying to research (if this is a new brand or campaign and you have no existing URL then move on to Step D in this section)
    • Filter out any keywords that you know are not a good fit by using the filter tool.
      Note: this can take some time, in some case you may add 20-30 filters to make sure you’re removing words that we know are not a good fit.
    • Export the words that are left and add them to your Moz Pro Keyword Explorer list.
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    • Repeat this steps A-C for 1-3 of the top competitors for this brand or campaign.
      Note: when viewing a competitor domain or URL it’s even more important that you use as many filter as it takes to remove words that don’t fit our campaign. Any keywords that include the competitors name or information about that competitors we can’t use. We’re only looking for more ambiguous terms that fit our campaign.
  2. Google Keyword Planner (the best tool for getting geographically specific keywords. In fact it’s the only tool that allows us to get keyword volumes by city or state)
      • First select the region, state or city you are researching for. 
        Note: For most major metropolitan cities there is a region available called the Nielsen DMA region. We should use this! It casts a wider net around the region we’re researching and the larger the statistical pool we’re pulling data from the easier it can be to identify major trends. 
      • Next open a new tab and go to a normal Google Search. Enter the term or modifier you selected in the first section that is the most common or primary query that someone would be searching for our campaign including the region (i.e. for Hudson Creative it may be “digital marketing agency new york” or “restaurant marketing company nyc”). We still want to cast with a pretty wide net here.  Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the related search terms.  Click the related term that best matches this common or primary goal that fits our campaign. Click, scroll and click on the best word 3-5 times and get a feel for the words that Google is suggesting for us to use as the most common keyword to search for the thing we are researching.  Let’s call this the alpha keyword.  Copy the alpha keyword and now let’s go back to the Google Keyword Planner and paste this word in there, searching within the region, state or city we already selected. Be sure to record the alpha keyword on the “Modifiers” tab in our Keyword Analysis doc.
      • Filter out any words from this list that you know will not be a good fit, or the volume is too low.
        Note: Depending on your search there may be a lot of words here! Remember we can only enter 1000 words into our Moz list so depending on how many words you are gathering from SEM Rush and the Google Keyword Planner you may want to filter out words here that are under a certain volume (like filtering out >=11 or >=21).  It doesn’t really how many words you get from each tool as long as the quality of the words is good and the list doesn’t include too many words that are obviously not a good fit.
      • Export this list and import into our Moz Pro Keyword Explorer list.
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      • Repeat steps B-D if there are multiple common or primary queries for this campaign (i.e. if Hudson Creative had a different department of the company that also made knit sweaters, we would need to find a different alpha keyword for this! )
  3. Moz Keyword Explorer (the best tool for finding longer tail, more specific keywords that fit your campaign or brand in a unique way and will show clients how detailed our research is)
      • If the brand or campaign has a domain or URL (and we were able to use this in SEM Rush) let’s also enter that same URL into the Moz Keyword tool. (if this is a new brand or campaign and you have no existing URL then move on to Step E in this section)
      • Click on Top Ranking Keywords
      • Filter Monthly Volume to anything 11+
      • Use the Moz Keyword Explorer “Add to…” tool to import keywords into our Moz Pro Keyword Explorer list.
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      • Next add our alpha keyword to the search bar at the top of the Moz Keyword Explorer
      • Filter Monthly Volume to anything 11+
      • Click on Keyword Suggestions
      • The filters at the top should be set to:
        Display keyword suggestions that: include a mix of sources
        Group Keywords: yes with low lexical similarity
        Volume: 11+
      • Use the Moz Keyword Explorer “Add to…” tool to import keywords into our Moz Pro Keyword Explorer list.
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      • Repeat steps E-I if there are multiple common or primary queries for this campaign (i.e. if Hudson Creative had a different department of the company that also made knit sweaters, we would need to find a different alpha keyword for this! )

Section 3: Selecting Keywords

  1. Navigate to the Moz Keyword Explorer list that you’ve created and added words to from three different sources: SEM Rush, Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer.
  2. Organize this list by Highest Priority
  3. Go through the first 2-3 pages and delete any words that are obviously not a good fit for this brand or campaign
  4. Now let’s export the list and import as a new tab to our Keyword Analysis document in our client drive folder. Call this tab “Raw” and the tab should be colored red.
  5. Sort this list by Highest Priority
  6. Now starting at the top and run down the list to select the top 20-30 keywords that match our goal for the brand/campaign for this project.  Add these words to a new tab called “Keywords” that is colored green.  The final words must:
    • Be able to be used on the website or web page for this campaign. Here are some examples:
      • For Rock Center Cafe we can’t choose “restaurants near rockefeller center” because restaurants is plural and Rock Center Cafe would never refer to itself in this way)
      • “restaurants near me” is also another example of a word that we could never use in copywriting on our website and therefore this word can’t be on our final list
    • Not be too similar to another word (i.e. don’t choose a singular and plural of one word). The goal of this final list is to provide variety to the copywriter so they have a different angles to choose from when generating copy
  7. Remove all other columns on the “Keywords” tab except “Monthly Volume,” “Priority,” “Branded,” and “Notes”. To generate the Monthly Volume you will need to average Min Volume and Max Volume and then copy that column and paste as text.
  8. Organize the list by Highest Priority
  9. In the notes column put a “1” by the keyword that is the #1 keyword overall that we should use on the homepage or landing page for this campaign. This should be a term that encompasses the entire campaign (not too specific) and closely match the primary category that will go on the ABIS.