Why You Need To Be Using Keyword Matrices
Think of this scenario:
You manage an eCommerce website that sells high-end camera’s and camera equipment.
Two visitors come into your site using the search term “SLR camera accessories,” they both searched Google using the same body term with commercial intent.
They are both looking for the exact same product, a Noktor 50mm lens, but here’s where it gets interesting, and where alignment between keywords and your content becomes critical to conversion – one visitors click’s into the category “SLR Accessories,” while the other clicks into “SLR Lens.”
Do they both find the Noktor 50mm lens they’re looking for?
It depends on if you have listed the product in all of the intent-based locations where it’s relevant.
The separation is between product versus function, one user is looking for a product specific attribute, a lens, where the other is looking for a functional attribute, an accessory.
Keyword research is one of the first places to find consumer pain points – by nature, they are looking for answers to their questions. So, it’s a great place to do research. But finding the keyword is not enough – you must also do a competitive analysis to determine whether or not your solution can be the best, or the cost-benefit may not be worth it.
For example, we built a marketing checklist and did comparative research: are there any other checklists out there? Do they compare to our proposed solution? What competitive advantages do they have? After determining we could create by far the best solution (not a requirement), we moved forward in building it.
In the scenario above it’s not as much about the pain points as it is how different brains approach solving the same problem, and how content needs to be structured as a path toward a solution, regardless of which path is taken.
How to Build a Keyword Matrix
Initial keyword research is the first step toward building an informative keyword matrix.
So fire up keyword snatcher (or whatever keyword mining tool you fancy), drop in your head term (just one), and send it off to the races. The Excel file is designed to handle *any* keyword data, as it uses a natural language macro to look for signaling words (that you can manage in the key) to tag searcher intent.
Export to CSV > Filter out illegal characters > cut into lists of 10,000 keywords > Save CSV.
Upload into Google Keyword Planner > Get Ideas > Export to CSV.
Use keyword combiner to join all of your individual research files.
Open in Excel > Sort descending by search volume > Add a column for intent > Add a column for “Best” > Save.
Tagging For Intent
Tagging for search intent is critical, this is where effective prioritization starts to really come into focus. Here is how I approach tagging for the 4 top-level buckets of user intent:
Informational – a specific question where the results are the information the searcher is looking for, may contain phrases such as: info, more information, details, features, benefits, etc.
Navigational – contains the name of the brand, product, service, or a person at the organization.
Commercial Investigation – easiest to identify and least ambiguous, these queries contain specific parameters for researching a purchase, such as sizes, colors, versus, best, price, pricing, etc.
Transactional -indicative of shopping behavior further down the conversion funnel, at this point the searcher knows what they want – so look for terms like buy, purchase, sale, coupon, discount, or locations.
You manage an eCommerce website that sells high-end camera’s and camera equipment.
Two visitors come into your site using the search term “SLR camera accessories,” they both searched Google using the same body term with commercial intent.
They are both looking for the exact same product, a Noktor 50mm lens, but here’s where it gets interesting, and where alignment between keywords and your content becomes critical to conversion – one visitors click’s into the category “SLR Accessories,” while the other clicks into “SLR Lens.”
Do they both find the Noktor 50mm lens they’re looking for?
It depends on if you have listed the product in all of the intent-based locations where it’s relevant.
The separation is between product versus function, one user is looking for a product specific attribute, a lens, where the other is looking for a functional attribute, an accessory.
Keyword research is one of the first places to find consumer pain points – by nature, they are looking for answers to their questions. So, it’s a great place to do research. But finding the keyword is not enough – you must also do a competitive analysis to determine whether or not your solution can be the best, or the cost-benefit may not be worth it.
For example, we built a marketing checklist and did comparative research: are there any other checklists out there? Do they compare to our proposed solution? What competitive advantages do they have? After determining we could create by far the best solution (not a requirement), we moved forward in building it.
In the scenario above it’s not as much about the pain points as it is how different brains approach solving the same problem, and how content needs to be structured as a path toward a solution, regardless of which path is taken.
How to Build a Keyword Matrix
Initial keyword research is the first step toward building an informative keyword matrix.
So fire up keyword snatcher (or whatever keyword mining tool you fancy), drop in your head term (just one), and send it off to the races. The Excel file is designed to handle *any* keyword data, as it uses a natural language macro to look for signaling words (that you can manage in the key) to tag searcher intent.
Export to CSV > Filter out illegal characters > cut into lists of 10,000 keywords > Save CSV.
Upload into Google Keyword Planner > Get Ideas > Export to CSV.
Use keyword combiner to join all of your individual research files.
Open in Excel > Sort descending by search volume > Add a column for intent > Add a column for “Best” > Save.
Tagging For Intent
Tagging for search intent is critical, this is where effective prioritization starts to really come into focus. Here is how I approach tagging for the 4 top-level buckets of user intent:
Informational – a specific question where the results are the information the searcher is looking for, may contain phrases such as: info, more information, details, features, benefits, etc.
Navigational – contains the name of the brand, product, service, or a person at the organization.
Commercial Investigation – easiest to identify and least ambiguous, these queries contain specific parameters for researching a purchase, such as sizes, colors, versus, best, price, pricing, etc.
Transactional -indicative of shopping behavior further down the conversion funnel, at this point the searcher knows what they want – so look for terms like buy, purchase, sale, coupon, discount, or locations.
Written by admin
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