What is Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is one of the Topical Explorer features. 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 your domain's keyword and relative difficulty.
How to create a query
1. Go to Topical Explorer and select the Explore new topics option.
2. Choose your keyword and location, then hit "Enter" or click "Find New Topics" at the bottom.
3. You can now go back to the list and wait for the query to load, run a new query, or completely close the page - the query will finish loading on our backend.
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 include 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 from the list of target locations in Keyword Research. This tool is based on databases and not API, which is why we are limited to the list and 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 their topics. Once the query finishes running, you will be directed to a results page that summarizes 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 is a blog category and articles you can include inside it.
A solid topic cluster consists of multiple topically connected pages. It's also important that those pages link to each other, letting Google know they created 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 you are not ranking for yet and 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.
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 can 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 three dots in your cluster details and in the main view of the domain-level topic cluster. Then select the three dots and "Open Content Editor." You should be directed to the respective content editor, where you can start optimizing your content!
You can also access the new Content Editor query from the main Content Editor dashboard.
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.