How to Prioritize Keywords for Better Traffic [Free Template]

Do you need help to get your website to rank higher on search engines? Have you tried optimizing your content with keywords but still not seeing results from your target audience? It’s time to consider prioritizing your potential keywords effectively. Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization (SEO), but determining high-quality keywords can be a complex process.  Using relevant keywords in your content can increase your website’s visibility and attract more traffic. However, it’s crucial to prioritize your keywords to ensure that your content is optimized for the right terms.

Get the free template here.

Transcript:

Hey, what’s up? Welcome to Hack My Growth. In this video, I’m sharing with you a keyword explorer template that you can use to help you prioritize the keywords you want to go after.

In the past, I created a free keyword research template using Google Sheets. Well, a lot has changed since that original video, and today I want to help you, not with keyword research per se, but with how to qualify the terms you’re going after to make sure that you’re focusing on relevant keyword ideas.

How Do You Define Priority Keywords?

A lot of times, it’s easy for us to want to just go after the term with the highest search volumes, but in reality, it’s not always going to work out for us, depending on how strong our site is or where we sit within the industry. With some Sheets formulas, we can help narrow our focus to make sure that we’re going to target terms that we may be able to get some traffic on. I will use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer for this, but you can use this sheet with any keyword research tool with difficulty, volume, and SERP features.

All right, let’s take a look at some data in our keyword tool. In Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, I have a preset keyword list for increasing organic traffic for a motorsports shop. The first thing I need to do is export this data to start working with it in Sheets.

Keyword Research Process With the Keywords Explorer Template

From the exported list, I don’t need every column. I only need target keywords, keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and SERP features. I can delete everything else and copy and paste this into my template. I’ve got it copied, and I’m going to paste it here into the template.

Now that we’ve pasted this information here, you’ll notice it’s starting to fill out the data. It shows the number of SERP features. This will allow us to see how many potential ranking positions we have within the search results. This is something you want to take into consideration when you’re going after a term for organic search. For instance, the term “UTV for sale” has four additional SERP features. It shows the SERP features: site links, shopping results, thumbnails, and People Also Ask.

The length tells us how long the keyword is. Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for, but that’s not always the case. Let’s take a look at the math.

This will run a ranking system to tell us easy, medium, hard, very hard, or extremely hard difficulty scores, and then it will give us some results. Then, it ranks these specific search terms.

Here we’re going to organize them from easiest to hardest. As you can see now, we’ve got a list of terms we can go after and some that are easy or medium. And then, notice that the hard ones will appear at the bottom.

The hard terms are high-volume keywords, and they may have some good traffic potential, but they will be more competitive. It will make a lot more sense for me to target a term with less competitiveness but a lot of traffic as well.

This demonstration is something for a localized dealership. There are a lot of other factors at play here, but at least now we have a list of keywords with a priority that we can use to implement our content strategy instead of just trying to go after the one with the highest volume. But going after ones with high volume and low difficulty and having an eye on the different SERP features available to us.

This is a quick video, but I hope you find this template helpful as you implement Keyword prioritization into your SEO strategy. If you have any questions about keyword strategy or content creation, please contact us. We’d love to continue that conversation with you. And until next time, happy marketing.