Keyword Lookup - powered by SEMrush

Ahhh keywords. The foundation of every great digital marketing campaign.

When done right, keyword research helps you:

Understand your industry and target audience better.
Deliver content that your target audience craves.
Increase relevant organic traffic to your website.
Provides insight into your competitors strategies.

Despite this laundry list of upsides, a lot of companies make the mistake of not performing thorough keyword research before creating content - which is why around 90% of pages on the internet don't get any traffic from Google.

And considering around 93% of all web traffic comes via a search engine, it's important to make sure you're creating content that the people want.

Which is why when creating content, it's more important than ever to bake SEO into the creation process.

To help out with that, we partnered with SEO leaders SEMrush, to bring keyword research inside Mark.

In this article we're going to cover how to use Mark's new Keyword Lookup Tool.

Step 1: Select the Keyword Lookup Tool

From the menu on the left hand side of the dashboard, click on the Tools section, and select Keyword Lookup.

It should look something like this:

Step 2: Enter your seed keyword

A "seed" keyword is a broad keyword related to your industry that can be used to generate more keyword ideas.

Keyword research starts with identifying what these "seed" keywords are.

They define your area of expertise, and help you find out who you are competing against. Generating seed keywords is pretty easy - just think what terms would people type into a search engine in order to find your products or services.

For Mark, a seed keyword might be something like "AI SEO". Let's use this as an example.



Here we see a bunch of information on our keyword, as well as keywords that are related to our seed keyword.

Yassssss!

But wait - how do we know which keywords to prioritize? After all, we're talking about potentially thousands of keywords here?

Once upon a time this required you to be master of Excel spreadsheets, but now we can use SEO tools to quickly analyze keywords, and prioritize them based on:

Competition: Competitive density on this keyword to win a bid for pay-per-click ads. The higher the value, the higher the competition (maximum is 1).
Search Volume: The average number of times users have searched for a given keyword per month over the last 12 months.
Keyword difficulty: An estimate of how difficult it would be to rank well in organic search results. For SEO purposes, this metric is more interesting than the competition metric.
Trend: The interest of searchers in a particular keyword during the last 12 months.
Intent: The reason why a searcher was looking for a particular topic.

For more on finding, analyzing, and targeting keywords, check out our full keyword research guide.

Step 3: Create a topic cluster

Topic clusters are groups of content around a central topic or theme.

They're essential for helping search engines recognize the order of pages on your website and to recognize your expertise on a particular topic.

A topic cluster typically consists of 3 parts:

A central Pillar page that provides a comprehensive overview of a particular topic. These normally target general, high volume keywords.
A Cluster of sub-pages that take a deeper dive into the sub-topics. These topics focus on specific, long-tail keywords.
Hyperlinks that connect the pillar page and the cluster pages to each other

You put all 3 elements together and you have a tasty web of SEO goodness.

To create a cluster in the Keyword Lookup Tool, hit the blue save button to the right, then select Create Cluster.

It should look something like this:



And that's it!

Add your keywords to your topic cluster, and you're good to go!

You can create add as many keywords to a cluster as you like, and create as many clusters as you like - ready to be used across our SEO Blog Post, Product Description, and Website Builder workflows.

Happy writing! 🤖

Updated on: 23/05/2023