Enriching Data and Results in Keyword Research

How to combine multiple data sources to produce deeper, high-intent keyword research datasets.

Speakers: Yiğit Konur

Content author

25 May 2017

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⏱ 14 min read• 2,401 words

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Hey to everyone following ZERO. Today we're covering something a little different. One of SEO's foundations is keyword research. Ozan already shot a great video on that. It's in our archive. But today I want to talk about something else. So, we've got the keywords. But how do we actually pick them? We're narrowing a huge data set down through a funnel. How do we filter it right? At the end of the day, here's our methodology. I take every keyword I can find, from every data source. And dump it all into one funnel.

But that funnel has several different filters. First, the relevance filter. Are these words actually related to me? Then the conversion filters. Will this data actually drive conversions for me? AdWords data helps a lot here. Next up: are these keywords really at the volume I want? And am I strong enough to compete for them? Are these the right words for me? The order can vary. But you always have to run every one of these filters. You narrow the list down. Hundreds of thousands of keywords become the X keywords you want.

As you know, SEO isn't simple enough to run on 10, 15, or 20 keywords. You can't just set targets on a few word groups. By SEO's own nature, users don't search one or two words anymore. They search a lot of words. If you sell cell phones, users don't just find you through the "cell phone" search. Honestly, people typing "cell phone" aren't sure what they want to buy yet. So it's much, much harder to push them toward buying a phone from you.

Sure, plenty of our clients and competitors rank first for those keywords. But I want to point you to a few spots that can actually drive sales. I built a three-part structure here: produce, enrich, and evaluate these keyword groups. The "produce" part is about feeding as much input as possible into that funnel. To feed it, we need to generate a really wide pool. I think there are three basic approaches here. First, producing keywords based on competitors. We know vendors like Semrush and Searchmetrics have tracked thousands of keywords for years. On the Semrush side it was 400 thousand. I think it climbed to a million. Searchmetrics reportedly has close to 3 million keywords.

That means you can download every keyword where you and your competitors rank. You can pull all of it and upload it. So you can get a lot of keyword data from Semrush and Searchmetrics. But in 2016, Ahrefs made an incredible move and built its own organic search module. Inside this organic search module, you can find which keywords a brand ranks for. I mentioned this in another video. For Hepsiburada, that number is around 1.5 million. If I'm not mistaken, the same number in Searchmetrics should be around 450 thousand.

So just for the hepsiburada.com example, Ahrefs finds about 3 times more keywords. That shows us how large the keyword database really is. The best part is this. I can pull my own organic keywords, meaning every keyword that brings me traffic. And I can pull my competitors' keywords too. There are several ways to load all that data. Then there's the Content Gap module. This section is genuinely a great one. Inside Content Gap, I put myself and all my competitors side by side. Up to 10 competitors. And I see my rankings against them.

Or say I sell eyeglasses. I can pull every keyword two other optical shops rank for. All in one Excel file, straight from Content Gap. That gives me a chance to read where each one is strong. And where each one is weak. As you can see, both methods build keywords off my competitors. On the other hand, I can also generate keywords from seeds I provide myself. Take the cell phone example. There are sources where I just enter the keyword "cell phone" and get keywords back.

So what did we cover? When you type "cep telefonu," Keywordtool.io is a well-known tool. It's an alternative to Ubersuggest. It gives you a list of every searched term around mobile phones. But our real focus here is different. When I say "cep telefonu," I want a broad Keyword research tool that also triggers iPhone and Android. Here we have SEO Monitör's Topic Explorer. They launched it at our conference Digital Zone, back in late 2016. It's a completely free product. Just go in, type your own keywords, and find every related term.

So when you type "cep telefonu" here, you don't only get mobile phone terms. It triggers a ton of words from adjacent niches. That gives you a very wide index. And you can export all of those terms. You can even pull them out along with your own rankings, easily. On the other hand, Ahrefs has a Keyword Explorer section. That section works incredibly well. It gives you really nice data. For example, say you run a search for glasses. It lists every term containing "glasses" from its own database.

Yes, that's what we'd expect anyway. But when you type "glasses," something else shows up. Your competitors like Atasun Optik, Edel Optik, Yiğit Optik rank for other terms too. You can see all of those through the Also Rank For module. So these are the sites ranking for eyewear keywords. These are the domains. But what else do these domains rank for? Beyond eyewear, I mean. I'm talking about a module that gives you that level of detail. And you can tap into that huge Ahrefs Keyword data right here.

You can also work off your own data. Yes, on the Google Analytics side you'll see "not provided" 80-90% of the time. But there are workarounds. Especially with very large sites. Even the 10% that isn't not provided is a huge variety of keywords. You absolutely have to pull all of them. Analytics Edge, which I covered in another talk, is a great add-on for exporting keywords. Then there's the Search Console side. Search Console lets you download up to 1,000 keywords through the interface.

Use the API service and that number jumps to 5,000. There's also a new tool from Mihai, who I met at Digital Zone. It's called Search Analytics for Sheets. It's an add-on that runs inside Google Sheets. It pulls thousands of keywords out of your Search Console and hands them to you. Really nice tool for that. Now, the data I collected from those three main groups built a massive pool. If we're talking about a large e-commerce site, that's a pool of 200-300 thousand keywords. So how do I filter these keywords? How do I group them? How do I shape them around my needs?

I'm sure that big data pile has irrelevant keywords in it now. Stuff that has nothing to do with me. So I need to enrich this data a bit more. Ahrefs has great data enrichment modules inside its own Keyword Explorer. The credits there are a little pricey. But the data is really good. Say you pulled part of your data from Search Console and Analytics. What's missing? You don't know the monthly search volume. You don't know what position you rank in. You don't know how the keyword ranks and gets searched globally. Pull data like this from those sources. Make your Excel as rich as you can. Your decision process gets way faster. And a lot less painful.

It gives you a keyword's search volume. Plus the global search volume. Why does global search volume matter? Say you have a client in the Saudi market. This was an actual problem we ran into. Most tools give me search volume data at the country level only. But if you work across the Arab region, think globally. The Arab world mostly speaks one language, aside from Persian: Arabic. Maybe you care about Arabic search volume in many countries, not just one. Then this data really matters for you.

And you can see this data broken down by country. You've got the search volumes. You've set your priorities. But is this a keyword you're actually strong enough to rank for? Ahrefs did some really deep research here. They built their own metric on the Keyword Difficulty side. The KD metric. It tells me clearly how hard a keyword is to rank for. It does that by analyzing the top 10 sites. Then there's Search Features. That's the variety inside the search itself. Here's a simple example. We bring it up in our other talks too.

Take a site ranking first for "Istanbul weather." Now take one ranking first for "laptop prices." Their click-through rates probably differ by about 10x. Someone searching laptop prices is way more likely to click the top result. Someone searching Istanbul weather just reads the weather off the page. Then they leave. So the click-through rates are completely different. That's what Search Features gives you. It shows whatever might steal attention on that keyword. Is there a position 0? Okay, people will click there more. Those are the boxes that show up on top.

So the second result's click rate drops even further. It shows me every search feature on that keyword. That means it analyzes my potential clicks beautifully. It basically tells me: Yiğit, even if you rank for that weather keyword. This is the max number of clicks you can get. This data matters a lot to us too. And with the data they collect from internet service providers and so on. They tell you when a person will run that search again. How many clicks that search generates. How many of those searches actually turn into clicks.

Most of us know that nearly 20% of searches never produce a click. Either the user doesn't like the results. Or they find what they need right there in the top 10. On this side you can pull a really wide data set from Ahrefs. Credits get a bit pricey here, so I'd save your final list for this step. On the other hand, SEO Monitör is my favorite part of all this. Sure, Search Features and Difficulty are things you already know. But look at the Opportunity Score.

SEO Monitör basically tells me this. It tracks my ranking positions really well. So it says: Yiğit, yes, you're 13th for cauliflower recipes. But cauliflower is in season right now. Cauliflower gets 40,000 searches a month on average. In February it'll hit 70,000. You're sitting at 14. With a pretty small effort you could move up to 9. That would get you a much higher click rate. That's what the Opportunity Score is telling you. When I sort by Opportunity Score. It lists the keyword groups where minimal effort gives maximum return.

It can even break this down to the page level. So it gives you incredibly useful data. You'll know which pages to optimize first. That's the SEO Monitör side. Last up is the evaluation part. At this point I've pulled my data. I collected it in one Excel file. I enriched it. Now I'm slicing it into pieces to get the result I want. We have two main tools for this. The first one is Zeo's Keyword Grouper. You can find it under our Tools tab. This tool gives you three options. First is Eliminate. That's for cutting words out of your existing list. Say you dropped 200,000 keywords in there. You tell it: strip out anything with "prices" or "cheap," Yiğit. But keep anything with iPhone, Android, or cell phone.

That Eliminate filter alone can cut 200,000 down to 30,000. You know which words you want. You know which ones you don't. Filter on that and you've got your first result. Then I move to the Filter section. Here you can filter your keyword group in different ways. Include certain words or exclude them. Set a minimum search volume or skip it. So this isn't just cutting specific words. It helps you cut words based on specific rules. And here you can set up all kinds of rules. Numeric ones, text-based ones. Last up is Grouping. With this tool's grouping feature, you can create custom groups. Groups that contain certain words. Groups that exclude certain words. Then you can track your rankings by group. Or run whatever work you want on them.

Now say you've created a couple of groups. You're trying to figure out which ones have higher search volume. But you've got way too much data. If you want to see it all weighted in one view. Our Keyword Visualizer is exactly what you need. It shows me squares inside one big rectangle. Bigger square means more search volume for that keyword group. The human brain isn't great at reading raw numbers. So this visual layout tells me which group is bigger. It just scales up the triangle, sorry, the rectangle for that group. That's a really nice advantage.

On the other hand, you can use SEO Monitör's Competitor Research module. Say you're done with your groups. You have a final keyword list. These are the keywords you actually want. But you're curious which sites rank well for them. That's where Competitor Research comes in. It shows you which competitors are strong. And which ones are weak. Finally, you've got your data in a usable shape. Now you want to put it to work. You need to bring these keywords together with a system we call Keyword Mapping.

There are great templates for Excel and Google Sheets. Search a bit on Google. Look up Keyword Mapping and Keyword Scoring. You can sort keywords to optimize specific page groups. Then score each keyword's value for you out of 5. Making your strategy more data-driven gets you much better results. One last thing. Planning to produce content on this topic? Then definitely use HubSpot's Content Planner and Make My Persona tools on the pages you build. That way you know your target audience the right way. You'll have the tools to publish consistently, based on their needs. Like I said, Keyword Research is treated as SEO's first step. But it's really an inseparable part of the whole SEO process. You always need to define these keywords well, group them, and track them continuously.

That's all from me for now. See you in the next video. Thanks.

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