In the fast-paced world of SEO, staying ahead of the competition requires efficiency and precision. Automating your keyword research process can significantly boost your productivity and help you uncover valuable insights faster. Let's explore how you can leverage automation to streamline your keyword research and improve your overall SEO strategy.
Automating keyword research offers numerous benefits:
Here are some key steps to automate your keyword research:
First we will need to select some starter keywords. These will be broad search terms that covers the industry or niche as a whole.
I simply chose snowboard to try to catch as many related keywords and accessories as possible. Note: It is often wise to include both the singular and plural form of your keyword. For this example, you could also include "snowboards" in your keyword research, but for simplicity we will be sticking to just "Snowboard".
Next, we'll be using SEMrush's keyword magic tool. Here’s how to do it:
Once our keyword report is ready, click on "Broad Match" or ("Terms Match" in Ahrefs) to see all results with our seed keyword in them.
SEMrush will find all keywords/search terms that have our seed words in them. In this case, we have 298,975 keywords with the seed keyword "Snowboard" in them.
We need to curate our list of matching terms for the best result and to git rid of some unnecessary keywords we don't care to target. You’ll notice that some of the matching terms aren’t relevant. For instance, we end up with the terms "ride snowboards" and "how to snowboard". While we could promote a product through informational content we are focusing on commercial and transactional keywords for now.
We're going to want to refine our results to eliminate any unwanted results. The easiest way to do this is create list of includes. Includes are any words that should appear in the search terms along with our seed keywords. Since we’re an affiliate marketer, we are focused on commercial or transactional intent keywords.
Anything like "best", "top", "review", and "reviews" and one of my favorites "beginner". These are all great ways to narrow our results down. Remember to choose "Any Word" when you create this filter or it will require every word in the list to be in the search term.
This narrowed our results down to 25,812 keywords, this is a lot better but we can narrow this down even more to refine our results a bit more.
We want to narrow our list down even further and we can do this by adding some exclude keywords. An exclude word is any word that we don’t want to appear in our search terms. In this case, we don’t want our list to include terms like "best places to snowboard" or "snowboard shop near me".
So, we create an exclude list. My list has the following words in it: "place", "places", "near me", and "shop". Add your list to the Exclude filter and click Apply.
Our list has now shrunk to 24,818 keywords. We could group these now, but this would use quite a lot of resources and include a lot of very low volume keywords so we're going to narrow it down until we have a list of around 500-10,000 keywords depending on the size of our niche.
Let’s see if we can narrow our list down a bit more.
Click on the Volume filter, and add a minimum. In this case I decided anything under 20 volume wasn't worth targeting. This will narrow our keyword list down quite a bit.
This narrowed our list down to 4,711 keywords, a much more reasonable number, we could narrow this down more by adding more include/excludes or tweaking our volume further but I'm going to stick with this list.
Now we’re going to use a keyword grouping tool to help us understand how we can best use this keyword list. Hit the Export button. Remember to export all the rows as CSV, or UTF-16 (Microsoft Excel CSV). You’ll end up with a file that looks something like this.
But we’re not done there, this file isn’t particularly helpful to us. We’re going to use a keyword clustering tool to make it more useful to us.
Once you’ve got your exported list, head over to our Optiwing Dashboard.
It should look something like this:
Finally, choose your geography and device. For this example, I’m leaving it as the United States and Desktop.
Click on Launch Job.
What does Optiwing actually do?
Optiwing takes your keyword list and runs every single keyword through Google. It will group any keywords that share at least 3 ranking results the first page of organic Google results.
Basically if a set of keywords have 3 or more ranking pages that are the same, we know that we only need one article to target that set of keywords because the same pages rank for different variations of those keywords. Once our job is complete, we can take a look at the results.
We will see a list of keywords, and the number of variations in each grouping. Each button is a topic that requires it's own article.
Each button has the primary keyword as the title. We can click on the button to see the keywords in that group.
We can also see the aggregate volume, the Keyword Difficulty (How hard it is to rank for a particular keyword on a scale of 0-100), as well as of all of the keywords in each group.
So how can we use this to improve our SEO and content strategy?
When writing an article, we try to keep the primary keyword in the title, meta description, and first paragraph. We’ll use keyword variations as H2's and organically sprinkle them throughout our content in a way that doesn't detract from the content but is consistent with normal speech or conversation.
Next you can restart this process with a new seed keyword, generating new recommendations for your content strategy using AI keyword suggestions.
To get the most out of your automated keyword research:
Automating your keyword research process can significantly improve your SEO efficiency and help you stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape. By leveraging advanced tools and following best practices, you can uncover valuable keyword opportunities and optimize your content strategy more effectively.
Ready to take your keyword research to the next level? Try Optiwing's automated keyword research tools today and experience the power of efficient, data-driven SEO.