The problem with a keyword list
A list of several hundred keywords sorted by volume looks like a plan and behaves like a distraction. The largest numbers usually sit beside the vaguest intent, and the terms that precede a purchase are often too small to notice in the export.
Volume also describes the past behaviour of everyone, not the future behaviour of your buyers. It cannot tell you whether the people searching can buy what you sell, whether you can realistically win the result, or what a visit would be worth if you did.
Start with opportunities, not keywords
Group related queries into opportunities: a single buyer need that one strong page, or a small set of pages, could satisfy. Comparison searches for your category are one opportunity. Pricing questions are another. Each will contain many phrasings.
Working at this level keeps the plan short enough to prioritise. Twenty-five well-defined opportunities are more useful than two thousand keywords, because each one can be given an owner, a brief and a measure of success.
Score four things
For each opportunity, make a judgement on four dimensions and record the reasoning.
- Intent: how close is the searcher to a decision?
- Fit: do these searchers match the customers you want?
- Value: what is a customer from this route typically worth?
- Effort: what would it take to deserve the result, given who holds it now?
Use your own data for value
The value estimate should come from your business, not from a tool. Look at which existing pages precede enquiries, which enquiries became customers, and what those customers were worth. Even a rough mapping from page type to revenue changes the order of the list.
Where there is no history, borrow from paid search. A term that converts profitably in a paid campaign is a strong candidate for organic investment, and the campaign can keep supplying evidence while the organic work matures.
Write down what you are leaving out
The output is a ranked list with a line drawn across it. Everything above the line gets resourced. Everything below it is recorded with the reason it was not chosen, so the decision can be revisited when circumstances change and does not have to be argued again every month.
