Back in 2015, we had an epiphany. Every day, via every channel, you — our readers, subscribers, community members, and social followers — would ask us really good questions. (You're an incredibly intelligent, friendly, inquisitive bunch, you know that? It's humbling.) A lot of those questions were about how to accomplish your SEO goals, and it got us thinking.
Moz is an educational resource, it's true, but we also offer a suite of tools (both free and paid) that can help you achieve those goals. Why not provide a space for those two things to converge? And thus, the idea of the Daily SEO Fix was born: quick 1–3 minute videos shared throughout the week that feature Mozzers describing how to solve problems using the tools we know best.
It's two years later now, and both our tools and our industry have evolved. Time to revisit this idea, no?
Today's series of Daily SEO Fixes feature our keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer. Perhaps you've heard us mention it a couple times — we sure like it, and we think it could help you, too. And you don't have to be a subscriber to check this puppy out — anyone on the whole wide Internet can use it to research two queries a day for free. If you're logged into your Moz community account, you get five free queries.
Open Keyword Explorer in a new tab!
Queue it up in another browser tab to follow along, if you'd like!*
*Keep in mind that some features, such as lists, are only available when you're also a Moz Pro Medium subscriber or above. If you're bursting with curiosity, you can always check out the 30-day free trial, which features everything you'd see in a paid subscription... but for free. :)
Fix #1: Nitty-gritty keyword research
Let's get down to brass tacks: your keyword research. Janisha's here to walk you through...
- Researching your keyword;
- Determining whether it strikes the right balance of volume, difficulty, and organic CTR;
- How to quickly analyze the SERPs for your query and see what factors could be affecting your ranking opportunity;
- Finding keyword suggestions ripe with promise; and
- Organizing your newly discovered keywords into lists.
Fix #2: Finding question keywords to boost your content & win featured snippets
When you answer the questions searchers are actually asking, you've got way more opportunity to rank, earn qualified traffic to your site, and even win yourself a featured snippet or two. Brittani shows you how to broaden your page content by speaking to your audience's most burning questions.
Fix #3: Updating your keyword metrics on a whim
If you're hot on the trail of a good ranking, you don't have the time or patience to wait for your metrics to update on their own. Kristina shows you how to get that sweet, sweet, up-to-date data after you've organized a list of related keywords in Keyword Explorer.
Fix #4: Moving curated keyword lists to Moz Pro for long-term tracking
If you're interested in tracking the overall SEO progress of a site and digging into the nuts and bolts of your keyword data, you'll want to pay attention. Kristina's back to explain how to import your curated Keyword Explorer lists into a Moz Pro campaign to track long-term rankings for a specific site.
That's a wrap for Week 1!
There you have it — four ways to level up your keyword research and knock some to-dos off your list. We'll be back next Thursday with more fixes from a new group of Mozzers; keep an eye on our social channels for a sneak peek, and maybe try a free spin of Moz Pro if you'd like to follow along.
Curious about what else you can do with Keyword Explorer? Here are some fab resources:
- Keyword Research in 2016: Going Beyond Guesswork – A thorough explanation of keyword difficulty, organic CTR, importance, and priority — the key ingredients to Keyword Explorer's secret sauce.
- Generate 100+ Blog Topic Ideas in Seconds – Research keywords and save yourself a headache when brainstorming headlines and topics to write about.
- Diving for Pearls: A Guide to Long-Tail Keywords - Next Level – Uncover those hidden long-tail gems that will inform your keyword strategy and capture very specific audience interest.
And if you're fairly new to the game or looking for ways to grow your team members' SEO knowledge, be sure to check out our classes on introductory SEO, keyword research, site audits, link building, reporting, and more.
See you next week, friends!
Hey all, thanks for reading! Truth be told, we filmed all these videos weeks ago, but I'd love to hear if you're interested in us covering any particular topics later on. Is there something specific you'd like to see in future Daily Fix videos?
Hi Felicia great content! I heard about this but never used. Thank you for the discovery.
Related to this topic, it would be interesting to know strategies to overcome the difficult value for our keyword/s. In my case, working mostly locally, my main keyword got a 12 difficulty. So what strategies would suit better for these kind of keywords compared with more generic keywords with 40 or 50 or 80 difficulty points?
Regards from Spain :)
Thanks, Juan, I'm glad you liked it! Let me know if you check out the tool and figure out any cool tricks yourself. :) Love the idea of delving into different strategies based on keyword difficulty -- this kind of feedback is priceless to me as the blog manager, so truly, thank you!
I'd love to read a guide on how to find WHAT, WHY, WHEN, WHO, HOW keywords on specific topics. I work in ecommerce with a lot of brands so I'd love a way to type a brand name in and get some question keywords back quickly.
Hi David, I am pretty sure that Moz's keyword tool does now allow for question based results. If not - both of these do:
Luckily, you actually can find "question" keywords and phrases with Keyword Explorer -- it just lives in the Keyword Suggestions filter :D Let me know if this is along the lines of what you're thinking of, David and Brendon:
https://www.screencast.com/t/53xlnLfbf3t
A super simple example, but I plugged the brand name "zappos" into the search, went to Keyword Suggestions, and filtered by "are questions" to find a few how/what/when/why/who keywords. Next, I sorted by volume to see what was most popular. Answering questions like "do birkenstocks run big" could make for some content fodder (and from my own experience in college selling Birkenstocks, I could write a whole post on how they run wide but it really just depends on your toe shape and your arch. ;) I can foresee a few different ways to combine that simple workflow with some other tools and processes to achieve your goals, but that's a start! Let me know if that makes sense!
Ooh I've just found that, thanks. Only got Moz Pro a couple of weeks ago - was using ahrefs before. This is brilliant.
EDIT: Might have spoken too soon, I'm being held back by the lack of data.
Ooh, great intel -- that would be an awesome guide. And I've already got some ideas swirling around about how KWE and some other tools might handle that... Verrrry interesting. :) Thank you, David, and definitely give a shout if there's anything else you'd like to see!
Yeah I found the tool you suggested. It works great but really held back by a lack of data. Perhaps I could export the list and upload to Google's Keyword Planner? But doing that for each brand might be a long process...
Ooh, yeah, I know what you mean. It is tough to make a call when there's no volume data (I assume it's the volume data, but LMK if it was something else :). You might get some value out of plugging in competitors and seeing what suggested question keywords pop up there; I was just fiddling around trying to come up with a workaround and that seemed to have some cool results for a couple of brands I tested with!
[Edited to add]:
I also poked some of our SEOs for advice here; Rand says it helps to start by researching the broadest keywords possible and narrowing down from there, because it's easy to miss some real gems hidden in some of the suggestions. Sorting by volume can also help ID what's getting the most searches, and we're probably biased (probably? ah, we definitely are ;) but Russ Jones did some research back in Dec '15 that showed how KW Planner data can sometimes be a bit off -- so when you *do* get that volume data in KWE, it should at least be closer to what's actually getting searched: https://moz.com/blog/google-keyword-unplanner-clickstream-data-to-the-rescue
Thank you again for the great question & puzzle! :)
What a great write up! This will really helpful for selecting keyword for your content.
Thanks, Rakesh! Let us know if you try out the tool and any questions pop up about how to do something with it, we love solving a good problem. :]
Thanks for all the amazing advice, Felicia! I am going to rewatch these videos again (maybe two more times, lol) to really make sure I digest all the insights you provided. I can't wait to implement what I've learned from these videos into my clients' campaigns.
Thanks again!
Appreciate the keyword videos. Short and easy to understand. Thanks.
Thanks very much for taking the time to post these videos! I'm definitely going to be coming back to them every once in a while. In the daily grind of work, you sometimes forget that you need to review old work and try to spice things up every once in a while to keep things effective and relevant and some of the tips here might be really good to implement when you're stuck for some good ideas every once in a while!
I think researching keywords in getting to the top of search is the most important thing. Thank you for sharing useful.
The local ranking suggestion is also a fantastic feature request -- something that's currently totally possible in a Pro campaign, but that would be incredibly helpful to see when you're doing keyword research in Explorer. I'll send that one to our product team for sure -- gosh, thank you so much for all the great feedback. :)
Thanks, Felicia.
Once you add your keywords into a list and it gives you all of your metrics, is it possible to see exactly which keywords show up for each kind of "serp feature" I see that it provides you info on how many keywords fall into what type of feature, but is there any way to see which keywords exactly?
Thanks!
A-ha, that is a fantastic question, and the answer is yes, you can! It's just a two-step process that involves a campaign in Moz Pro where you're tracking your site long-term. If you've got access to lists in KWE I'm guessing you have a Pro account set up, too, so I made a quick screencast for you showing how:
https://www.screencast.com/t/clWlDipz
1. Click into your curated list in Keyword Explorer and choose "Add to campaign" in the drop-down
2. That list will be added to your campaign; here I cheated a little, because I added my list into my Moz campaign a while ago so it looks like I have data available right away. Usually you'll get the data for newly added keywords with your next weekly campaign update. Think of this example like those magic ovens on cooking shows ;)
3. Click into Rankings > SERP Features, scroll down a bit, then organize the list by which keywords have SERP Features. It'll show you what kind of SERP feature each keyword has captured, from the image pack to sitelinks to featured snippets and more. :)
Having that data accessible directly in KWE lists is a really interesting point, though, and I'm going to ask our product folks to see if that's a possibility or already on the roadmap. Thank you so much for asking this!
Felicia,
Yes please let me know what you find out when you ask your team. Also, not sure how hard this would be to integrate, but within that same metrics screen, after your keywords have been added and analyzed, and metrics have been populated, when I add my domain to check my rankings on these terms, would it be possible to check local rankings? Seeing how I rank locally on those terms would be a great feature as well.
Thanks again!
I spoke with our product manager for Keyword Explorer and we actually do have it on our roadmap to show which keywords show which SERP features right in KWE -- no need to hop it over to your campaign! Nothin' like a little good news -- it's being actively worked on as we speak. (Type?) :)
The local ranking suggestion is also a fantastic feature request -- something that's currently totally possible in a Pro campaign, but that would be incredibly helpful to see when you're doing keyword research in Explorer. I'll send that one to our product team for sure -- gosh, thank you so much for all the great feedback. :)
Very useful quick tip videos! I know you can export results to csv, but how great would it be to export the overview page straight to a nice PDF that could be quickly sent to a client asking about a particular word or phrase. Probably not the right place to mention it, just saying :)
I love that idea, Lynn! The old cliché is true -- a picture's worth a thousand words. This is a perfect place to mention it, and I'll pass this along to our product team :) Thanks!
Thank you for sharing Felicia Crawford and nice thought in expressing. I knew about Moz explorer previously from an article but it is not that extent as this.
Hello Felicia! Thanks for sharing the tool. The keyword analyzer looks really helpful and I have already added it to my list of strategies. Customer interaction is truly necessary for boosting organic traffic. Let me start playing with this tool and see what more it can bring to the table.
Great stuff here! Very insightful to say the least.
Very Good Content and video felicia, That's why i always love to spend time on MOZ, Its the best part of my job
Wow it's really awesome. I thinks it's really effective for new like mine. If you want you can see marketers Blogs for more information. I visit the site. It's specially friendly for beginner....