SEO
How to Build a Keyword Strategy [Free Template]
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Building a keyword strategy is the process of deciding what keywords to target and prioritize in organic search.
There are many ways to do it, but all methods pretty much boil down to finding keywords that:
- Potential customers are searching for.
- Have value for your business.
- Are within your wheelhouse to rank for.
Let’s go through how to do this in four simple steps.
There’s no point in targeting keywords that nobody types into Google because they won’t send you traffic even if you rank #1. So the first step is to find keywords that potential customers are searching for.
Let’s look at a couple of ways to do this.
A. See which of your competitors’ pages get the most traffic
If your competitor gets a lot of organic traffic to a page, the keyword it’s targeting must have traffic potential. And because they’re a competitor, such keywords are probably ones your customers are searching for too.
Here’s how to find which of your competitors’ pages get the most search traffic:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter a competitor’s domain
- Go to the Top pages report
For example, if you are looking for keywords for an online computer parts store, you may enter newegg.com. In the report, you’ll see its top pages by estimated organic traffic and the keyword sending the most traffic to each page.
Recommendation
Make a note of any that your customers may also be searching for.
Here are a few for our hypothetical computer parts store:
Note that we didn’t highlight “gaming desk” or “gaming pc” because our store sells computer parts, not accessories or ready-built computers. There’s no point in targeting these keywords, as the people searching for them aren’t our customers.
B. Use a keyword research tool
Keyword research tools are big keyword databases that you can search and filter.
Here’s how to use our keyword tool to find keywords with traffic potential:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter a few broad keywords related to your site (these are known as your “seeds”)
- Go to the Matching terms report
- Filter for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP)
For example, for a computer parts store, you can enter seed keywords like pc, computer, computers, motherboard, motherboards, amd, and intel. Then you’ll filter the Matching terms report for keywords with Traffic Potential.
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Now it’s just a case of eyeballing the report for keywords potential customers are searching for.
Each keyword your potential customers are searching for has some value for your business. But some have more value than others.
Take these three keywords, for example:
- “graphics card” – Searchers are shopping around. They’re nowhere near ready to buy.
- “b550 vs x570 motherboard” – Searchers have done some shopping around and narrowed down their options. They’re almost ready to buy.
- “amd ryzen 5 3600” – Searchers have decided what they want. They’re ready to buy.
Given that some of these searchers are closer to buying a computer part than others, some keywords arguably have more “business potential” for a computer parts store. These are the ones you should prioritize in your keyword strategy.
Here’s a quick cheat sheet for scoring the “business potential” of keywords:
Sidenote.
This is based on the scoring system we came up with when assessing keywords for our blog. Read more about this in our guide to keyword research.
Just keep in mind that the way you score a keyword may differ from how someone else scores it. It depends on how valuable it is for your business. For example, if you don’t sell the “amd ryzen 5 3600,” that keyword has a “business potential” score of 0 for you—not 3.
Keywords vary in ranking difficulty for a number of reasons. This doesn’t mean you should avoid those that are harder to rank for than others, but it’s important to take ranking difficulty into account when building your keyword strategy.
Here are four things we recommend you look at to assess ranking difficulty:
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors. The more high-quality backlinks the current top-ranking pages have, the harder it’ll be to compete with them.
For a rough idea of how many backlinks you’ll need to crack the top 10, check the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. This is based on the number of links to the top-ranking pages.
For a more thorough assessment, scroll to the SERP overview and check the “Domains” column to see the number of linking websites to each page.
Just keep in mind that these numbers only tell you the quantity of links to each page. To understand link quality, you’ll have to review each page’s backlink profile. You can get to this by clicking on the number in the “Backlinks” column.
Learn more: How to Do a Basic Backlink Audit
Authority
Many SEOs believe that popular websites have an easier time ranking on Google. For that reason, most take a website authority metric like Domain Rating (DR) into account when assessing a keyword’s ranking difficulty.
Google representatives have said many times that Google doesn’t evaluate a site’s authority. But there are a couple of ways the so-called authority of a site could indirectly contribute to rankings.
- Internal links – High-DR sites tend to have more high-authority pages, and internal links from those pages may help other pages to rank higher.
- Familiar brands – Searchers likely want to see household names for some queries. If that’s not you, you may have a harder time ranking.
If you are in the camp that thinks Google takes site authority into account or just want to err on the safe side, check the top-ranking pages’ DR scores in Keywords Explorer. If they’re all much higher than your site’s DR, you may want to prioritize other keywords.
Recommendation
Search intent
People are looking for something specific when they search. This is known as their search intent. As Google wants to give searchers what they want, you’ll struggle to rank for keywords unless you can create content that aligns with intent.
For example, people searching for “backlink checker” are clearly looking for a free tool. We know this because all of the top-ranking results are free tools.
To stand virtually any chance of ranking for this keyword, you’ll need to create a free tool. Unless you have a backlink database like ours, that will be almost impossible.
For that reason, we recommend analyzing the top-ranking results for the three Cs of search intent to figure out a keyword’s ranking difficulty for you.
- Content type – Are they blog posts, landing pages, product pages, or something else?
- Content format – Are they listicles, how-tos, recipes, tools, or something else?
- Content angle – Is there a dominant selling point, like how easy it is?
Learn more: What Is Search Intent? A Complete Guide for Beginners
Quality
If the top-ranking pages for your keyword are high quality, it’ll take more time and effort to compete.
For example, the folks ranking #1 for “best air purifier” tested 47 air purifiers over eight years to make their recommendation. It’s going to cost an awful lot of time, effort, and money to compete on content quality.
Compare this to the top results for many other queries that have no background information on how recommendations were chosen. It’ll likely be much easier to beat these on content quality than the former.
Based on your assessment of the four attributes above, you can give keywords a “ranking potential” score like so:
Creating a keyword strategy from this process means combining everything into one document. You can use our free template for this. It’s a simple spreadsheet with the following data points and conditional formatting:
- Keyword
- Traffic Potential (TP)
- Business Potential (BP)
- Ranking Potential (RP)
This strategy document lets you see the most promising keywords at a glance.
For example, if we assess a few keywords for our hypothetical computer parts store, the keyword “amd ryzen 5 3600” has high TP, BP, and RP. So the row is all green.
On the other hand, “how to install ram on pc” has high TP but low BP and RP. So the row is mostly red.
Your keyword strategy from here is simple: prioritize targeting keywords with the most traffic, business, and ranking potential.
Keep learning
If you want to learn more about finding, prioritizing, and ranking for keywords, read these:
SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
SEO
How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget
Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:
“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.
What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”
Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.
First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.
What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It
If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.
If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.
If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.
This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.
Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.
The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.
Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.
These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.
The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.
Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.
These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.
The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.
The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling
There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.
- Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
- Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.
Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.
But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.
Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.
Using Meta Robots Or X Robots
The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.
From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”
Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”
And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.
Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget
Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.
If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.
If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.
Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.
If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.
In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.
If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.
The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.
With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.
Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.
Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency
Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.
The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”
In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.
You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.
Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.
Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.
How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient
The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.
You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.
If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.
Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.
These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.
Internal links include:
- Breadcrumbs.
- Menu navigation.
- Links within content to other pages.
- Sub-category menus.
- Footer links.
You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.
I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Ad Copy Tactics Backed By Study Of Over 1 Million Google Ads
Mastering effective ad copy is crucial for achieving success with Google Ads.
Yet, the PPC landscape can make it challenging to discern which optimization techniques truly yield results.
Although various perspectives exist on optimizing ads, few are substantiated by comprehensive data. A recent study from Optmyzr attempted to address this.
The goal isn’t to promote or dissuade any specific method but to provide a clearer understanding of how different creative decisions impact your campaigns.
Use the data to help you identify higher profit probability opportunities.
Methodology And Data Scope
The Optmyzr study analyzed data from over 22,000 Google Ads accounts that have been active for at least 90 days with a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.
Across more than a million ads, we assessed Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Expanded Text Ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen campaigns. Due to API limitations, we could not retrieve asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
Additionally, all monetary figures were converted to USD to standardize comparisons.
Key Questions Explored
To provide actionable insights, we focused on addressing the following questions:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How do pinning assets impact ad performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does creative length affect ad performance?
- Can ETA strategies effectively translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
As we evaluated the results, it’s important to note that our data set represents advanced marketers.
This means there may be selection bias, and these insights might differ in a broader advertiser pool with varying levels of experience.
The Relationship Between Ad Strength And Performance
Google explicitly states that Ad Strength is a tool designed to guide ad optimization rather than act as a ranking factor.
Despite this, marketers often hold mixed opinions about its usefulness, as its role in ad performance appears inconsistent.
Our data corroborates this skepticism. Ads labeled with an “average” Ad Strength score outperformed those with “good” or “excellent” scores in key metrics like CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
This disparity is particularly evident in RSAs, where the ROAS tends to decrease sharply when moving from “average” to “good,” with only a marginal increase when advancing to “excellent.”
Screenshot from author, September 2024Interestingly, Demand Gen ads also showed a stronger performance with an “average” Ad Strength, except for ROAS.
The metrics for conversion rates in Demand Gen and RSAs were notably similar, which is surprising since Demand Gen ads are typically designed for awareness, while RSAs focus on driving transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Ad Strength doesn’t reliably correlate with performance, so it shouldn’t be a primary metric for assessing your ads.
- Most ads with “poor” or “average” Ad Strength labels perform well by standard advertising KPIs.
- “Good” or “excellent” Ad Strength labels do not guarantee better performance.
How Does Pinning Affect Ad Performance?
Pinning refers to locking specific assets like headlines or descriptions in fixed positions within the ad. This technique became common with RSAs, but there’s ongoing debate about its efficacy.
Some advertisers advocate for pinning all assets to replicate the control offered by ETAs, while others prefer to let Google optimize placements automatically.
Image from author, September 2024Our data suggests that pinning some, but not all, assets offers the most balanced results in terms of CPA, ROAS, and CPC. However, ads where all assets are pinned achieve the highest relevance in terms of CTR.
Still, this marginally higher CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into better conversion metrics. Ads with unpinned or partially pinned assets generally perform better in terms of conversion rates and cost-based metrics.
Key Takeaways:
- Selective pinning is optimal, offering a good balance between creative control and automation.
- Fully pinned ads may increase CTR but tend to underperform in metrics like CPA and ROAS.
- Advertisers should embrace RSAs, as they consistently outperform ETAs – even with fully pinned assets.
Title Case Vs. Sentence Case: Which Performs Better?
The choice between title case (“This Is a Title Case Sentence”) and sentence case (“This is a sentence case sentence”) is often a point of contention among advertisers.
Our analysis revealed a clear trend: Ads using sentence case generally outperformed those in title case, particularly in RSAs and Demand Gen campaigns.
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen)
ROAS, in particular, showed a marked preference for sentence case across these ad types, suggesting that a more natural, conversational tone may resonate better with users.
Interestingly, many advertisers still use a mix of title and sentence case within the same account, which counters the traditional approach of maintaining consistency throughout the ad copy.
Key Takeaways:
- Sentence case outperforms title case in RSAs and Demand Gen ads on most KPIs.
- Including sentence case ads in your testing can improve performance, as it aligns more closely with organic results, which users perceive as higher quality.
- Although ETAs perform slightly better with title case, sentence case is increasingly the preferred choice in modern ad formats.
The Impact Of Ad Length On Performance
Ad copy, particularly for Google Ads, requires brevity without sacrificing impact.
We analyzed the effects of character count on ad performance, grouping ads by the length of headlines and descriptions.
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen Data)
Interestingly, shorter headlines tend to outperform longer ones in CTR and conversion rates, while descriptions benefit from moderate length.
Ads that tried to maximize character counts by using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) or customizers often saw no significant performance improvement.
Moreover, applying ETA strategies to RSAs proved largely ineffective.
In almost all cases, advertisers who carried over ETA tactics to RSAs saw a decline in performance, likely because of how Google dynamically assembles ad components for display.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorter headlines lead to better performance, especially in RSAs.
- Focus on concise, impactful messaging instead of trying to fill every available character.
- ETA tactics do not translate well to RSAs, and attempting to replicate them can hurt performance.
Final Thoughts On Ad Optimizations
In summary, several key insights emerge from this analysis.
First, Ad Strength should not be your primary focus when assessing performance. Instead, concentrate on creating relevant, engaging ad copy tailored to your target audience.
Additionally, pinning assets should be a strategic, creative decision rather than a hard rule, and advertisers should incorporate sentence case into their testing for RSAs and Demand Gen ads.
Finally, focus on quality over quantity in ad copy length, as longer ads do not always equate to better results.
By refining these elements of your ads, you can drive better ROI and adapt to the evolving landscape of Google Ads.
Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
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