Written by Amandine Akbaraly
Once you have done the basic configuration of your SmartKeyword, you will have to move on to a crucial step: generate your keyword list. The Academy chapter and the methods (link to another page) described here can help you in this process.
Depending on your site and your previous work in SEO, there are several possible cases:
Case 1 : Site under construction with few pages and you have not worked much on your SEO (or not at all) ➡️ You follow all the steps as follows
Case 2 : Large site, with more than 50 pages but you have only worked a little on your SEO ➡️ This step will be a little different : everything is specified further down :)
Case 3: Large site and you have already worked internally or with an agency on your SEO ➡️ You already have well optimized pages and a documented tree structure? You can go directly to step 4 on importing keywords (link to another page).
Now that you know which case you're in, you're ready to do your keyword research. Just follow the instructions in this documentation ( link to another page) on how to use the tool and you will have your list!
The specifics:
CASE 1:
Always work on the same excel file and combine all your searches by doing an export each time. This will make your work easier.
You can also use this video demo on SEO tools (link to another page) available to you on SmartKeyword.
take 5 to 10 star ("golden") keywords and search on the Google SERP for your SEO competitors. These are sites that offer roughly the same products/services as you and rank on the first page for each of your star keywords. They can sometimes be different from your real life competitors (direct competitors).
go to your SmartKeyword account and choose the search by "intersections of sites" (see: Keywords research (link to another page) ) to inspect and recover the keywords of all your competitors. The goal is to analyze the keywords that appear on their sites to see if it is interesting to position yourself on the same ones.
Once this first research is done, you will already have a lot of ideas and will be able to test the research by "similar keywords" or even "recover volumes" for other keywords.
CASE 2:
You will start from your keywords already worked in the past to establish your new list.
There are two possibilities:
if your keyword research is detailed enough, it will be enough to recover the search volumes of these to analyze their relevance via the "recover volumes" functionality (see: Keyword research (link to another page) )
if you think that there are missed opportunities then you can reset a new search with the same process with the golden keyword (cf. case 1)
TIPS:
Feel free to sort through this list to remove duplicates, uninteresting keywords for your industry and identify which ones will be your priority.
Here is an example of a format that is ideal for working on your keyword list (this will be very helpful when categorizing):