If you haven’t completed day 3 of the SEO course, you can review: Qualifying Your Keywords before starting this post.

“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”

- B. C. Forbes -

Congratulation to you on your hard work

Today, we are going to use the nicely refined Keywords list we build yesterday and start to sort our keywords into different groups.

This task will give us a great head start as to how our site should be designed and which keywords should be optimized for, so be very serious with this task too.

Sorting Your Keywords by Search Volume

The very first step you should do with your list of Keywords, is to sort them by Volume.

In order to do that, just copy your keywords list into another spreadsheet with just the “keywords” and “Searches” columns as the picture on the next page.

The easiest and quickest way to sort your keyword is by using the sort & filter function of Excel.

Your keyword list should now be sorted from the keywords with the most search volume to the ones with the least search volume.

We now are going to create a new spreadsheet with 4 columns based on their search volume and copy our keywords in each of them accordingly:

• Over 100,000 – The main keywords for your site should be
  within this category.
• From 10,001 to 100,000 – The keywords that will define the
  different categories for your site should be in this category.
• From 3,001 to 10,000 – This category should contain potential
  primary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.
• Less than 3,000 – This category should contain potential
  secondary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.

Now I understand that some niche will still be viable with a much lower traffic volume, if this is your case, just scale down proportionally the numbers.

Deriving Categories for Your Site

Look at the list of Keywords you have in your second category, and group them thematically as follows:

Through this process, we just found out what are the main categories of our site.

Now, if you look a bit closer to the list, you’ll see that it is possible to refine it a bit more just look at the Nail Color Category:

As you can see, there are some colors listed there, obviously those should not be categories despite their high search volume, however they certainly must be some of your top pages of content to optimize for.

• “Nail Color”, “Nail Colors”, “Nail Polish Color” and “Nail Polish
  Colors” are one and same category.
• “OPI Color” and “OPI Colors” are one and same category.

Through what I see for the moment, my nail polish site would have the following categories:

• Nail Polish Color(s)
• OPI Color(s)
• Fingernail Polish
• Nail Polish Remover
• Nail Hardener

This is not a definite list, but a great start already.

Predefine your site content for each category

Repeat the same process for each column of keywords you have by grouping your keywords under each of the categories you just defined.

We now have a gross overview of what content should fit under each category for our site.

In the process of adding more keywords under the categories, you may come across some keywords that don’t fit in any of your primary categories, at this point; you may just have to create a new category just for them or consider whether or not they really are relevant to your site.

Exercise

Today’s task will require a lot of thinking on your side, as well as organization!

If all is well, by the end of the day you should have all your keywords sorted in such a way that you already have an idea of what your site structure should be since you already know your main theme, your site categories, and the primary content for each of those categories.

We are not going too deep in details about the keywords for each post as this will be further discussed in a later lesson. Right now, we are trying to build a solid and sound base for our site.