SEO Strategy Guide: Prioritize Keywords on right landing pages with Search Console & Data Studio

Most often when we do keyword research, our strategy probably ends up at using the Google keyword planner tool, finding out the keyword search volume, and calculating the difficulty of the keywords. This keyword research method is through organized but does not guarantee a fruitful result. So, here is an SEO keyword strategy guide using which you will not only be able to find the right keywords for you but also, you will able to find the right landing page and prioritize your keyword.

Keyword SEO Strategy

This keyword SEO strategy is divided into 6 parts. I would advise you not to skip any of these steps so that you can achieve the maximum out of this keyword strategy guide.

  • Keyword variation and brainstorming
  • Finding keyword volume and difficulty level
  • Assigning importance weight to the targeted keywords
  • Calculating the keyword priority & keyword mapping template
  • Making a query by landing page data studio table from search console data
  • Finding the right landing pages for your targeted keywords. So, let’s go.

Keyword variation and brainstorming

Grab an excel sheet and make different categories of the keywords that you want to target. List out as many variations, synonyms, call words, short names etc. under each category and multiply these columns to generate a list of all possible keywords. If you cannot do it in the excel sheet, then here is an online tool for keyword multiplication for you.

Keyword brainstorming and multiplier example

Let us say, I have a travel blog and I want to write blogs about four islands that I recently visited in Thailand. Here is what my different keyword categories will look like.

keyword brainstorming and multiplicatin

Now, go back to the keyword multiplier tool listed above and multiply all these keywords. You will get a series of unending list of keywords. Many of the keywords would not make sense. Just leave them as it is.

Finding keyword volume and difficulty level

Next step is to grab all these keywords and put them in the google keyword planner to find their monthly search volumes and difficulty level. I know that Google Keyword Planner gives you the keyword volume of the paid keywords and difficulty is there for the keyword bidding. But, I am referring to keyword planner here because that is the only most popular tool that most of us use.

If you have access to other popular keyword volume finder tools such as Moz or SEMRush, it will be much easier for you to find the organic keyword volume and their difficulty level in terms of making them rank organically on Google. But for now, we continue with the keyword planner idea.

Assigning importance weight to the targeted keywords

This is the step where a human intervention comes into the picture and that is assigning importance to each of the keywords. No one knows your idea and your blog better than you know. So, in this step, you look at each of the potential targeted keywords and assign them a value.

You can do so on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is the least valued keyword and 5 being the most valued keyword. Though it looks like a tedious job, even with thousand keywords, it would not take you more than an hour and with keyword importance assigned, your sheet will look something like below.

Assigning importance to individual keywords

Keyword priority & Keyword Mapping Template

Calculating keyword priority is another important part of this process. If you look above there are three metrics important to a keyword:

  • Monthly volume
  • difficulty level and,
  • importance by the owner

So, there has to be a calculated formula which can consider these metrics and finally come up with a priority number. But before we do that, you have to add another column right beside the difficulty column and call that column as easiness column. Calculate easiness by substracting difficulty value from one hundred.

Why Easiness column?

If you look at the pattern above, it is:

  • monthly volume – higher the better
  • importance – higher the better
  • difficulty – lower the better

So, the difficulty was not aligned to monthly volume and importance. So, we created another column called easiness which will be aligned to the property of monthly volume and importance. Now, all higher the better.

The formula for Calculating the keyword priority

This is another trickier part that in the formula which field you want to give the most weight on. I have given most weightage to different fields in this order:

  • Importance – highest weight because the owner decided it
  • easiness – second highest eight because of the SEO effort that has to be put forward
  • Monthly volume – Least weight

So, let us calculate the formula now. Take a look at the formula in the screenshot below and look at different fields as well.

Calculating final keyword priority

If you look at the formula above, “Importance” field has been multiplied with 1000, “Easiness” field with 100, and “Keyword volume” field with 10. You can multiply with a different number to get different priority value but as I mentioned before, I like to give the highest weighting to importance followed by Easiness and then finally, search volume.

 Calculating the final priority for the targeted keywords:

If you just look at the priority fields, you can see that the value ranges here from as low as 15,000 to as high as 58,000. Categorizing these targeted keywords for SEO based on these value ranges will be tough. So, I need to bring down the range so that the highest and the lowest range lies within one to ten.

To do that, I divided the priority field by 10,000. By diving, I shrunk the range in between one to ten in where fields with higher values are more important and lower values having fields are lesser important. I have also captured this entire process up to the previous step in a YouTube video for further help.

Making a query by landing page data studio table from search console Data

This another video which you need to watch in order to create a data studio table which uses your search console data to fill up the table. The process is simple and quite intuitive. The entire process should not take more than ten minutes if you have the right access.

Finding the right landing pages for your targeted keywords

This is the most crucial part of the step because this step determines the final execution of your SEO strategy. After we have imported search console data in a table using the Google data studio. There are three cases to the keyword strategy and tactics. How to execute the tactics video guide has been given at the end of this article. You can watch the video and always come back to refer to this section.

Keyword strategy: Case 1

  • The base & broad Keyword match of the targeted keyword is found in the query.
  • Select that keyword. Select the most relevant landing page
  • Remove the query filter so that the table can show you all ranking keywords for that landing page.
  • You can optimize this page around the targeted keyword without disturbing other ranking keywords as per your discretion.

Note for Keyword strategy case 1:

  • If the landing page has already a lot of ranking keywords, then you do not want to disturb the entire content of the landing page or disturb the prominent SEO elements such as title and headers.
  • Still, if you think that your targeted keyword is very important and you can start with minimally invasive SEO.
  • Minimally invasive SEO tells that you should just sprinkle the targeted keywords in the areas not occupied by  prominent SEO elements such as headers, title, and description
  • If you are still unsatisfied then you should create a new landing page for that particular keyword.

Keyword strategy: Case 2

  • The base & broad Keyword match of the targeted keyword is not found in the query.
  • Look for the keyword in any of the landing pages and ask is this landing page relevant to this keyword? If not then go to case 3.
  • Look at all ranking keywords for this landing page.
  • You can optimize this page around the targeted keyword without disturbing other ranking keywords as per your discretion.
  • Follow the note again from case 1 before making any decision.

Keyword strategy: Case 1

  • The base & broad Keyword match of the targeted keyword is not found in the query or the landing page.
  • Create a new landing page.

Basics of optimizing a page around a targeted keyword

  • If the keyword is very important then put the targeted keyword in title, header, meta tags etc. but be sure not to disturb the messaging and originality of the already ranking keywords on that page.
  • Create some backlinks, internal as well as external, putting targeted keywords as the anchor text.

Here is the video which talks about all the above three Keyword strategy tactics:

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