A couple of videos ago, we dug into how to identify 25 long tail keyword ideas in under 10 minutes. So in today’s video, we’re going to take the next step in our content creation process, which is going to be prioritizing and making these count.
So in order to prioritize your content ideas, it’s really going to come down to three things. Taking a look at what the keyword difficulty is then looking at what the keyword volume is, as well as taking a look at what the context is in terms of the search intent for that phrase.
Once you take into consideration, these three elements will know which sort of ideas that we should prioritize in our content calendar.
Keyword difficulty
So digging right back into our spreadsheet, you can see here are 25 ideas that we went through in our last recent article. But the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to sort things based off of search volume.
The reason why I want to sort things based off of search volume is because it’ll give me a clear understanding of what generally is getting the most monthly visits every single month. So to do that, all we need to do is just go ahead and go into the search volume column, select all of our data rows and then we’re going to go ahead and sort from Z to A.
And from here what’s going to happen is you can see that the first top response here is why do soccer players fake injuries. That is getting about 720 monthly search volume. The next thing that we want to do though, is we also want to sort based off of keyword difficulty. And the reason why we want to do that is because it’s going to help us identify which phrases might be a little bit easier than other phrases.
How to apply conditional formatting
But how might we do this? Well, rather than just sort things based off of keyword difficulties, since I’ve already chosen to sort things based off of search volume, what I’m going to do is I’m going to apply some conditional formatting based off of what the average keyword difficulty score is for these 25 ideas.
To figure that out, all we need to do is go ahead and look at that column. And then from here, we can go ahead and run an average formula. And when we run that average formula, it’s going to tell us that the average keyword difficulty is a 28. What I like to do from here is I like to think about things in terms of percentages, in terms of what is 25% higher than 28, what is 25% lower than 28 and then from there, come up with a gauge for really hard keywords, as well as really easy keywords.
So to figure that out, all I need to do is think about the number 28 and then multiply it by 1.25 or 125%. And what that’s going to tell me is that a keyword difficulty that is slightly higher than my baseline is about 35 or more.
And then if I want to look at it from another quadrant of the bell curve, I can go ahead and multiply 28 by 0.75, which is going to equal 21. So what this tells me is that my conditional formatting is going to be set up between 21, 28 and 35. And anything below that is going to be super great for me because it’s going to be super easy. Anything between 21 and 28 might be something that is yellow for me. And then from there, anything from 28 to 35 might be a different color, like an orange followed by 35 plus, which might be even harder keyword to actually go after.
So in order to apply this, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and select my column F which is for keyword difficulty, go to format and then conditional format. From here, what you’re going to do is if it’s less than or equal to 21, we’re going to set that to green. If it’s between 21 and 27, we’re going to call it yellow or something like that. So let’s go ahead and choose a yellow. If it’s between 28 and 35, we’re going to select a darker yellow or something like that. Select this one. And then if it’s greater than 35, we’re going to, or equal to 35, we’re just going to go ahead and select red.
Creating a color-coded system for keyword difficulty
So just like that, what we’ve done is we’ve created a sort of color coded system for us to start to take a look through the keyword difficulties while also keeping into consideration the search volume of these respective phrases. What I can do from here is I can start to look a little bit more intently into some of these search phrases and see what the search intent is all about. That is the third factor of what we’re looking for.
Remember, we’re prioritizing by volume, then keyword difficulty, and then the actual search intent behind the phrase. So to do that, what we do is we just go ahead and go into one of these respective search phrases. And then what we’re going to do is we’re just going to go ahead and go into Google and search this.
So I’ve gone ahead and done that. And what you can see right off the bat, if you were to zoom in here, is that overall, this is something in which a lot of the top ranking posts are not necessarily videos. That’s a good sign for us. Generally speaking, when you are doing these sorts of searches, what you’re looking for is whether or not text-based content is winning in terms of these sorts of content that Google is ranking around here.
In this case, you can see a ton of text-based content is winning. And so this is something that’s interesting to me because it means that if I’m building a content website, then I won’t necessarily need to create a really dynamic video in order to rank for the top three spots here.
So right off the bat, I’m going to say that this is definitely a yes situation in terms of prioritizing this respective idea. I also love to see that it’s a 28, because it means that it’s on one of the more tangible sorts of realms in terms of keyword difficulty. As I move on, what I can see here is what AFC stand for in soccer. The keyword difficulty is greater than the 25% point past the average. That being said, though, let’s go ahead and take a look at what the actual search intent is saying here.
Looking at the search intent
So what we can see by looking at the search intent is that this sort of search phrase is typically a very quick sort of pity answer. Here you can see that there’s an immediate sort of reference to what it stands for. And so this is something where I’d be a little bit more cautious about making content because you have a people also ask phrase that is being shown to you that is just simply the quick answer to this sort of abbreviation.
So I might be a little bit more cautious when thinking about this potential idea, just because it’s not necessarily that clear that long form content is the sort of thing that Google wants from you in this particular example. And this is the same sort of approach you take for every single keyword phrase.
Now, what else might you be looking for when you are trying to prioritize your content pieces? So if we take a look at the example in which it’s asking the question of how to lock your ankle in soccer, what you can see here is that the top result is not actually a text based post, but it’s actually a video that’s going over that sort of point of how to lock your ankle.
What this means is that over the span of maybe a hundred people searching for this particular phrase, Google found that people were naturally going to YouTube more often than other places to learn about this particular query. So that is why it is prioritizing YouTube content as the top sort of result here.
And as you work your way further down the post, you can see what else Google’s telling you here. What it’s telling you is that aside from that top result, that it just showed you that was a video. It’s also showing you a couple other videos related to what they think goes over, how to lock your ankle.
You’ll notice how the top three to four surf rankings are all referencing videos. So what this will tell me is that if I’m building a soccer website and I’m writing a post about how to lock your ankle in soccer, I likely need to create a video in order to actually compete with the other sort of pages that are ranking well on Google. It is not really in my best interest to prioritize this in my content calendar. If, for example, I am just focusing on content pieces that I can cover with just text space posts.
These are the sorts of important questions to ask yourself. If you can figure out which sort of long tail keywords are specifically looking for text based content, then you’ll know which ones that you naturally want to prioritize, because Google is telling you what they’re looking for. So what you do from here is you’d simply go through the 25 ideas that you worked your way through from our last article and then you’d run through this sort of same analysis with every single one.
By the end of the time that you’ve gone through your 25 ideas, you should typically come out with anywhere from five to seven great ideas that you would then want to prioritize. From here, the next natural steps would be to go ahead and start writing content briefs for either yourself or for your content writers to start creating content on your website.
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