Keyword Clustering
Without further adieu
Part III of "Launch Pad" Method - Keyword Planning Without KW Planners
Forward note - this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for some SEOs to hear, and I don't expect everyone to agree with this process.
With that said, let's jump in!
Ever wondered how Keyword Planners actually work? Why they show 250,000 for some keywords and 10 for others?
Well, here's what you probably don't know!
Keyword planners are what is known as "Packed" queries. When you head over to your favorite keyword planner and dump in your "Seed" money keyword of "Financial Software", your keyword planner is not showing you results for "Financial Software", it's showing you any search that contained "Financial Software"
Pretty neat right?
With that in mind, it's important to remember that Keyword planners were initially created to make you spend money, not separate keyword queries for you, or help you build a comprehensive cluster.
So - how do we "Unpack" these queries and is there anyway to interpret organic keywords, rather than depending on keyword planners that are derived from ad software, or that also pack these keywords?
Note: Keyword planners pack queries because the computational resources needed to show you every query under a seed query, without a direct search is a lot, and quite honestly it's a lot of data to process, even as a human trying to create a strategy.
Well here's how we treat our keywords like a moving company, and unpack them (bad pun hun lol)!
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Head to Google Search
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Type in your seed keyword and add an asterisk, like this: Financial Software*
What this does is unpack the most relevant and highest searched terms in Googles Organic Search, which is why you will now see these key-phrases as auto suggestions, because Google has aggregated the data and is suggesting to you what the highest searches are.
Neat right?
Let's keep going!
Now that you have the next highest organic search terms from your seed query, you can also begin to unpack these. Example:
financial software and systems*
Now take it a step back, back to financial software* and then select the second highest organic unpacked result. Example:
financial software for small businesses*
Now let's do it one more time, and we get:
financial software developer*
Do you realize what we just did with all our queries that have been unpacked from the seed keyword?
We created silos of content, that Google recognizes as silos, through an unpacked organic strategy. So now we have three categories that stem off our seed keyword, and at least 9 blogs/articles for each category through auto suggest.
Well, let's take it even further...why stop here?
Ever heard of the part of speech known in English as an interrogative?
Most people haven't, but they are simply the "Who, What, When, Where, Why and How" parts of speech that are appended to subjects and topics.
Can you guess what we're going to do next? Let's jump back up to our silo of "Financial Software and Systems" and add an interrogative of "How". Example:
what financial software for small businesses*
Now we have an additional tertiary silo of at least 4-8 more topics we can fit into our main silo
Now imagine you built a website that covered the who, what, when, where, why, and how's of every major secondary key-phrase, leading back up to your seed keywords
In data sciences, we call this "Agglomeration Hierarchical Clustering" and congratulations, because if you do this, you just communicated to Google that your website answers every query that Google has deemed 1000% relevant to it's users and searchers in this niche by using a reversed engineering process.
Interlink all those together the same way Google does on your website, and watch your rankings begin to "Launch Pad"
Credits for this to Schieler Mew.