The features from the Research module described in this article are available only for Tracked Campaigns. Learn more.
The SEO Research platform
Research involves bringing together semantically related keywords under a topic, searching for new keyword opportunities, knowing your competitor's top keywords, and analyzing gaps.
In our Keyword Explorer, you can input a keyword to discover new relevant ones. You can also input a URL or a domain (typically, of a competitor) to see their top keywords and analyze gaps. In both cases, we give you key metrics such as SERP features and search volume, Year-over-year trends, and ranking data for the new keywords.
Having a large list of keywords can aid your research but it can also be demanding in terms of time and effort. So, we carefully select keywords based on our curation criteria, so that you get a smaller, manageable list of curated and quality keywords. This saves you the time and effort of working with lengthy spreadsheets and/or filters.
We do this by maintaining curated databases of non-navigational keywords that pass our criteria, updating them every month and giving you unrestricted access to them, with no additional fees. The monthly updates keep our costs affordable, giving you full data ownership at the same time.
How do we manage the databases?
Adding new keywords:
We search for new keywords to expand our database on a daily basis. We find new potentially relevant keywords, from multiple sources we use to gather ranking and search volume data. We then filter out the ones that don't meet the curation criteria.
Updating data for the keywords:
We also update all the keywords that passed the curation criteria with fresh search volume and SERP data on a monthly basis. When a keyword stops meeting the curation criteria, we archive it and don't update its data in the database anymore.
Accessing the database:
Quite a few of our systems are powered by this keyword database of millions of non-brand/non-navigational keywords, but the most important one is the Research Platform.
The Keyword Explorer is the "gateway" to our keyword database that allows you to retrieve data from it through a keyword, a URL or a domain.
When you input a keyword, you get a list of relevant keywords, but only those that have passed the curation process. When you input a URL or a domain, you get a list of the top keywords for the website you're researching, and they too, come from our curated database (having passed the curation process). This makes the list particularly accurate and reliable.
Note: At the moment, keyword research is powered by databases available for 3 markets: the US, the UK, and Romania. As we continue to grow with users from different markets, we'll include databases for those as well. Until then, for all other markets, we rely on data from third-party tools, which is not curated. As we cannot guarantee the quality or authenticity of this data derived from third-party tools, we recommend that you use it as a starting point to discover new keywords and add them to Keyword Vault to get high-quality data for them on a monthly basis.
How do we curate the keywords?
Keywords must meet these curation criteria to be added to the database and updated with fresh data every month: they must be non-brand and must have at least 40 monthly searches. We achieve this by segmenting non-brand keywords and removing keywords with very low search volume.
Segmenting non-brand keywords:
We segment brand and non-brand organic traffic to uncover the only SEO traffic you can directly impact. Then, we exclude brand keywords because they are not SEO opportunities.
Here is an example:
This is a navigational keyword. It has millions of searches per month, but most, if not all of those clicks are going to the first result, which is audible.com. If you are Audible, you already rank as the Top 1 organic search result. But if you are not, then ranking anywhere below Audible will not bring you any clicks, as the intent of the search is to visit the Audible website.
Either way, from an SEO perspective, this keyword is not an opportunity.
We use the brand rule to identify and label brand keywords and set them aside automatically, so that you have only the keywords that truly make an impact.
Note: You can adjust the brand rule in the Organic Traffic Configuration menu.
Removing very low search volume keywords
We consider a keyword to be low-search-volume when it has fewer than 40 searches a month. They don't meet our curation criteria and we automatically exclude them to save you the whole process of setting aside/weeding out keywords that can't lead to a significant number of clicks.
Aggregating close variants
We also aggregate the search volume of all close variations of the main keyword. To maintain the relevance and accuracy of our data, we group the keywords precisely as Google Ads does. We express the combined search volume of close variants under one main keyword, so that search volumes are not duplicated.
For example, for "beach," we will show the sum of the search volumes for "beaches," "beach," and their misspellings ("beches," "bech," etc.), but we only list the main keyword.
In this case, see the close variations by clicking on the "+3".
In short, we maintain a curated keywords database, expand it with new keywords every day, and update it with SERP Features and search volume data every month. We use the curation criteria (keywords must be non-navigational with monthly search volume >40) to expand the database and provide you with unrestricted access to this curated list through Keyword Explorer. This gives you a smaller, manageable list of relevant keywords, making your research more efficient.