The Power of Moz's Keyword Explorer

This slide deck walks through Keyword Explorer, Moz's tool for keyword research, designed by Rand to help with many of the pernicious problems inherent in the keyword discovery and prioritization processes.

1. Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | [email protected] The Power of Keyword Explorer How to use KWE to solve the most frustrating and time consuming tasks in SEO-focused keyword research

2. Slides online at bit.ly/ KWEtutorial

3. Building a keyword list from multiple sources takes FOREVER #1

4. Standard KW Research List Creation Process: STEP 1: Start with AdWords Keyword Planner STEP 2: Expand each broad keyword with a manual search to get Google’s Suggest and Related STEP 3: Use Ubersuggest or Keywordtool.io or another Suggest scraper to expand further STEP 4: Go to SEMRush , Spyfu , Keycompete , etc. to get keywords the same URLs also rank for STEP 5: Get semantically related keywords via AlchemyAPI or a topic m odeling t ool (e.g. Stanford’s )

5. Standard KW Research List Creation Process: STEP 6: Put it all into Excel or Google Spreadsheets via manual copy/paste or lots of exporting/importing Ugh. Such a pain.

6. Keyword Explorer Makes This WAY Better

7. Starting with KWE is easy. Just enter any term or phrase in the search box to get suggestions, metrics, and analysis.

8. KWE’s suggestions include every type of term/phrase you’d get from all of those other sources.

9. Suggestions similar to what you’d find in Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, and Related Searches combined, e.g.:

10. Broader, expanded match terms like those you’d find from drilling into other keywords, e.g.:

11. Topic-modeling & semantically related keywords, e.g.:

12. Keywords the pages & sites in Google’s results also ranked for, e.g.:

13. 1 Creating a List in KWE is as Easy as:

14. 2 Creating a List in KWE is as Easy as:

15. 3 Creating a List in KWE is as Easy as:

16. Adding Keywords to a List is Equally Easy: Check Select

17. Adding Keywords to a List is Equally Easy: Boom. It’s on my list.

18. All the keywords I want to target for this project can be saved in one convenient spot – my list.

19. Adding the metrics needed to prioritize keywords is like pulling teeth. #2

20. How popular is this KW? How hard is it to rank for this KW? What % of searchers will actually click on organic web results? How important is it to my business/ campaign? Need a metric that combines these scores to help me prioritize

21. Every column is frustrating to get, and no two come from the same source, which means setting up multiple scrapes or APIs or manual retrieval processes 

22. Keyword Explorer Makes This WAY Better

23. Every keyword I add to a list gets all these metrics… AUTOMATICALLY!

24. It’s easy to copy or move keywords to other lists I know when metrics were collected, and if they’re stale, I can update.

25. Changing importance is easy, and KWE lets me increase relative importance by 3X+, or reduce by up to 2/3rds Modifying importance scores affect the overall “Potential” which I can use to priority-sort my keyword list.

26. KWE exports beautifully into CSV, so you can add/modify data in Excel to your heart’s content.

27. ONE CLICK TO RULE THEM ALL! Perhaps the most beautiful part of KWE’s lists is the ability to update all your metrics, for every keyword on your list, all at once…. With just one frickin ’ click!

28. Metrics quality & consistency is a pernicious problem for keyword researchers #3

29. Every SEO knows that AdWords’ volume numbers can be way off reality. But there’s never been an alternative, so we’re stuck with it 

30. e.g. there’s no way the organic competition for “presentation tools” is “Low”  AdWords’ “Competition” is fine for PPC, but it doesn’t correlate to the difficulty or ease of ranking in the organic results.

31. Ranking #1 in the organic results for these two queries will result in VASTLY different click-through-rate due to the SERP features

32. Keyword Explorer Makes This WAY Better

33. In our research samples, these ranges accurately captured the prior month’s true volume with 95%+ accuracy. We use AdWords numbers, combined w/ clickstream sampled data, to produce a more accurate and often more up-to-date volume range score. Moz’s Russ Jones covered our unique process here .

34. The updated, more accurate Keyword Difficulty score takes into account the strength of the sites and pages ranking on Google’s first page of results to provide a true, relative sense for how hard it might be to rank.

35. This keyword has one AdWords ad at the bottom, but is otherwise all organic results hence, a “94%” CTR Opportunity

36. This keyword has 3 AdWords top ads and Shopping Results in the right-hand column, hence an “82%” CTR Opportunity

37. Comparing lists of keywords w/ aggregate metrics is important, but because it’s a pain, we all avoid it #4

38. I’m not even sure how to start combining, averaging, and distributing the metrics in order to create comparable list metrics…

39. How do I figure out if lots of the keywords I care about have opportunity in other, non-organic-web types of result features? Should I look at targeting through Google News? Image results? Maps/Local?

40. Keyword Explorer Makes This WAY Better

41. At the top of every keyword list is a graphic distribution of all the metrics about each keyword on the list.

42. Comparing keyword lists to each other is fast and easy, too – every metric is automatically totaled and/or averaged. Just click this comparison view

43. Keyword Explorer records 16 of the most common kinds of SERP features, and shows a distribution of those that appeared in the keywords present on any list. For this list, tweets, videos, and news results are all popular in the SERPs

44. #1: Go to http://moz.com/explorer & get 2 queries/day entirely free. 5 Ways to Try Keyword Explorer: #2: Sign up for a free Moz community account & get 5 more queries/day entirely free. #3: Buy standalone Keyword Explorer starting at $600/year. #4: Subscribe to Moz Pro at $149/month+; KWE is included. #5: Already have Moz Pro? You already have Keyword Explorer!

45. Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | [email protected] Keyword Explorer FTW!