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Getting Started with Keyword Research
Getting Started with Keyword Research
Updated over a week ago

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is your go-to tool for creating an entire content strategy plan: Use it to:

  • analyze your organic competitors’ content structure

  • discover new topics and find secondary keywords to rank for multiple target phrases on one page

  • build topical relevance and authority, and get keyword difficulty and relative difficulty for your domain.

How to create a query

All you need to do is create a query by selecting your keyword and location:

Choosing the right keyword is crucial. Choose a relatively broad keyword, and don't waste your queries on narrow, long-tailed ones, as they will generate very few suggestions for your website. A good keyword doesn't necessarily have to be your target keyword. It can be a category of your blog, business, the main topic of your blog, etc.

Here are good examples to use in Keyword Research:

  • Examples of broad keywords that you may or may not want to target: toys, kitchen furniture, dentist, online marketing, outdoor fashion

  • Examples of categories, e.g., for business, cooking classes, and traveling. For SEO blogs, influencer marketing, social media

Selecting your target location is also important. Right now, you can only choose a country in the list of target locations you see in Keyword Research. This tool is based on databases and not API, which is why we are limited to the list and currently cannot add new countries/cities.

Patience is key! 🔑 Creating a Keyword Research query may take up to five minutes because we're scraping data from the most relevant sites to the keyword you used and digesting topics they write about. Once the query finishes running, you will be directed to a results page which is a summary of different keyword metrics.

What’s on your Keyword Research results page?

You will find multiple topic clusters of grouped, closely-related content pieces. As a whole, those pages should offer comprehensive coverage of the main topic. An example of a topic cluster can be a blog category and articles you can include inside of it.

A solid topic cluster not only consists of multiple, topically connected pages. It's important those pages link to each other, letting Google know they create the whole group.

Connect Google Search Console to find missing clusters and Relative Keyword Difficulty

You can cross data from your Google Search Console with Keyword Research to reveal all the critical clusters that you are not ranking for yet and to learn about your relative keyword difficulty. We sort the topics by their relevance to your domain.

The "Missing" tab is your prioritized list of articles you should consider adding to your website.

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Creating a Content Editor for a topic of your choice

To identify the most attractive topics for your site, you can find the following data for the URL-level topic clusters:

  • Main keyword

  • List of secondary keywords

  • Total monthly search volume of all keywords (MSV)

  • Monthly search volume per single keyword

Go into the detailed view to see the monthly search volume per a single keyword. From this place, you will be able to create a multi-analysis Content Editor query. By default, Surfer selects all keywords to run the multi-analysis but you also have the option to exclude some keywords if you choose to.

Once the Content Editor is ready, you will see 3 dots in your cluster details and in the main view of the domain-level topic cluster. Then select the 3 dots and "Open Content Editor", you should be directed to the respective content editor where you can start optimizing your content!

You can access the new Content Editor query from the main Content Editor dashboard as well:

Do you still need help? Don't worry! You can contact us at [email protected] or via live chat by clicking the icon in the bottom-right corner.

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