Discover Your Keyword Universe

Tips on building a keyword universe for SEO campaign management

If you want to gain visibility for your website, it needs to have a variety of keywords that are search engine optimized. This group of keywords is often referred to as your Keyword Universe.

When a search is conducted in Google, the results are organic. The results of an organic search cannot be paid for like the advertisements located on the top or the right of the listings. Strong keyword usage and understanding is what determines the page ranking of the website within the organic search. Knowing how to create a Keyword Universe will potentially help you move up in the rankings.

Keyword Universe

A Keyword Universe is comprised of every word that can bring awareness to your website. These keywords need to be the phrases your potential audience is searching for, and ones that categorize the content on your website. If you add a keyword phrase into your Keyword Universe then you should have corresponding content about it on your website.

Primary and Secondary Keyword Phrases

The phrases in your Keyword Universe consist of two main types, which are known as primary keyword phrases and secondary keyword phrases.

Your primary keyword phrases, also known as keyword clusters, are typically based on your most broad keyword phrases. These keywords are usually topics or main categories on your website.

For example, a primary keyword for the Mequoda Daily is “Online Publishing”. It is one of the topics that we have filled with keyword-rich posts. Our “Online Publishing” topic currently has 252 articles within it that use “online publishing” as a keyword phrase.

Your primary keyword phrases or clusters could have hundreds of related secondary keyword phrases.

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Secondary keyword phrases are usually between 3-5 words long and are more specific than primary keyword phrases. Secondary keyword phrases will typically have smaller search volumes and less competition and will be more direct to your specific niche.

The more specific your secondary keyword phrase is, the better chance of getting ranked in Google, which as mentioned earlier, will help gain more visibility for your website.

For example, let’s say you have a publication about music, and “Jazz” is a primary keyword phrase. Within that cluster, one of your secondary keyword phrases might be “Contemporary Vocal Jazz”. This would be a more specific phrase with a smaller search volume, and much less competition, than “Jazz” itself.

Use your keywords in articles, free report titles and any other medium used for building traffic, such as social media.

How To Build Your Keyword Universe

The best part of building your Keyword Universe is that you can do it for free. You can use the Google Keyword Tool to compile your keywords. Then, you can export that list into a categorized spreadsheet.

Further Considerations

Researching keywords prior to creating your Keyword Universe is a smart thing to do. You will be able to see the popularity of the keywords, what the competition on the specific keywords is and you may even find phrases you hadn’t realized your target audience is searching for.

At Mequoda we created a Google Visibility Report. The Google Visibility (GVR) involves all the keyword research on a topic along with the identification of where your website ranks on all of your keywords. It also determines how likely you are to be found on a keyword, based on the number of pages that are already out there.

For more on Keyword Universe building, keyword research and reporting, attend our next webinar titled Keyword Research Step-by-Step.