Home » SEO » Strategies » How to find the right keywords – Part 2

Pruning the comprehensive list to arrive at the best keywords

In part 1, you have seen how easily a comprehensive list of keywords can be prepared. However, this list is still quite big and needs some pruning down in order to be become usable.

If you have not done it already, you should format this comprehensive list in the form of a table containing the following columns – ‘Keyword/ Key Phrase’, ‘Number of searches’, ‘Priority’ and ‘Overall Rank’.

The next task is to assign a priority (on a scale of 1 to 3) to each of the keywords / key phrases in your comprehensive list. While assigning the priorities, you should hide the ‘number of searches’ column in order to avoid any kind of biasing in assignment of priorities. The priorities, of course, will be based on the relevance of each keyword to your website / products / services.

But the “Overall rank” column is still blank. If your top priority keywords are also the ones that have the most number of searches (or for which the number of searches are within a 20% range of the keyword with most number of searches), you already have your final list that can become a part of your SEO strategy. You can easily gauge this by simply observing the numbers. However, if the differentiation is not visible through simple observation, you must calculate the overall rank. Mostly, ‘priority 3’ keywords are discarded unless there is a real dearth of keywords; so, the comparison is between ‘priority 1’ and ‘priority 2’ keywords.

Sometimes you might actually go ahead and compute overall ranks. For this, you have to first compute the percentile score (for number of searches) for each keyword. This involves considering the highest number (‘number of searches’) across all keywords as 100% and calculating the relative percentile for others (by dividing their numbers by the highest number and multiplying the result by 100). Jot down this number in a temporary column (say ‘search percentile’). Next, create another temporary column – ‘priority percentile’. This will have the value 33.33 for priority 3, 66.66 for priority 2 and 100 for priority 1. The total of these 2 temporary columns will give you the overall score and if you arrange them in ascending order you will get the overall rank. If you use a spreadsheet, these calculations will be much easier.

Now we are all ready. Just pick the top 15-20 keywords (based on their ranks) and use them as part of your overall SEO strategy.

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