If you haven’t completed day 2 of the SEO course, you can review: Building Your Keywords List before starting this post.

“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”

- Charles Kettering -

It’s now time to refine your keywords list

Yesterday, you have collected a list of keywords as per the suggestions of different tools and software. That’s good, but not enough.

There’s a fact that a machine is nothing more than a machine in the end.

Only you will truly be able to tell whether or not a keyword is relevant to your site or not.

Reality Check

The real success of a site doesn’t come from traffic, it comes from targeted traffic.

There’s no point to optimize your site for a keyword that has nothing to do or very little with your site, you may get some one time traffic visitors alongside suffering a loss of relevancy and credibility as per the quality of your content.

If you are offering medicals services in Denver, there’s no point optimizing for “medical services in New York” just because it’s suggested by a keyword tool.

Why Qualifying Your Keywords?

There are two major reasons as to why you should qualify your
keywords:

1. As I just explained, to prevent time wasting by optimizing for irrelevant keywords.
2. To reassess your “real” potential traffic volume within your niche.

How to Quality Your Keywords?

Start by opening the keyword list you built yesterday, remember your list should look like that:

For today, we are going to add 2 columns to our keywords list template:

• Site Relevancy
• Adjusted Traffic Volume

Your keyword list spreadsheet should now looks like this:

For each of your keywords, ask yourself honestly how relevant the keyword actually is to your site.

To simplify the work, we’ll divide them in 3 categories:

• Relevant– the keyword will be attributed a 100% relevancy.
• Somewhat Relevant– the keyword will be attributed a 50% relevancy.
• Irrelevant– the keyword will be attributed a 0% relevancy.

Now for each of your keywords, in the column “site relevancy”, add either “100”, “50”, or “0”.

Once you are done, your list should now look like that:

Here’s the logic behind those few keywords examples:

Nail Polish – This term is what I want to sell in my online store, so I consider that it is 100% relevant to what I’m doing, or planning to do.

Fingernail Polish – This term is a variation of the term “nail polish” and one of the primary products I’m planning to sell, so I give it 100% relevancy.

Nail Polish Remover – This is another product that I’ll be selling on my site, so it’s 100% relevant to what I’m going to do.

Free Nail Polish – All what I’m going to do is about selling products
and not getting them for free, so this term is not for me at all, I’ll give it a 0% relevancy.

Wholesale Nail Polish – My primary objective is to retail nail polish, but if opportunity comes, I may consider wholesaling some of my stock, so I would say that it is somewhat relevant to what I’m doing, and give it a 50% relevancy.

Finally, on the last column “adjusted traffic volume” use a basic formula (or compute it yourself) now returning the weighted Keyword search volume, where if the keyword is 100% relevant, then 100% of the search volume will be carried over; if the keyword is only 50% relevant, then half of the search volume will be carried over; lastly if the keyword is considered irrelevant, none of the search volume will be carried over.

Once you are done, your keyword list should look like this:

Niche Viability Second Check

I now want you to sum up the weighted search volume of all the keywords in your list with exception for the actual niche term and any of its broad term components.

In my case, my niche term is “nail polish” I will then exclude this term, as well as “nail”, “nails”, and “polish”, as being broader, they certainly carry more volume but also much less relevancy and are outside of our niche.

With that new weighted search volume do a second check with what your minimum search volume for the viability of your site should be.

If you pass the test, then you are doing a good job, if you fail the test, you may want to reevaluate your niche choice from Day 1.

Exercise

Today’s task consists of qualifying your keywords in your niche following the different steps as explained in today’s lesson.

In addition, you’ll have double check the viability of your niche, and restart the entire process in case of failure.

Lastly, sort your keywords in the 3 categories of relevancy; you may keep somewhere the keywords that where somewhat relevant for later use, however you can discard the ones that were considered as irrelevant during the qualification of your keywords.

In the next lesson, we’ll be working with your now refined list of 100% relevant keywords.

Keep in mind that it’s much easier to write content for keywords that are relevant to your site and niche than trying to produce content for keywords that are irrelevant to what you are doing or offering, even if within the same industry.

Tomorrow, we’ll learn how to group the keywords within our refined list in order to make them more usable for us.