Regularly, you may need to handle around tens or hundreds of thousands of keywords at a microscopic level, so that you don’t lose any single opportunity. The challenge only multiplies when you have more customers in your agency portfolio, still, there is so much you can do with your SEO retainer time for one client. You have to spend so many person-hours on routine campaign management and monitoring tasks. Instead, you could spend the time increasing the value of that account by discovering the next business opportunity. Learn more about the keyword management process.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
It’s obvious that you generate the most value by doing strategy for your clients — and tracking every development concerning their keywords is important for the campaign’s performance.
So you want a process that supports you in leveraging the agency’s resources and automates the most labor-intensive parts of the job while managing strategic interventions on execution.
What should you do before executing the Keyword management process?
1. Segmentmentaion your keywords strategically.
You can begin thinking about an efficient keyword management process from the planning phase — how you pick your SEO battles exhibits how you segment your keywords.
That involves categorizing them so you can:
- edit inappropriate and misleading keywords from the start,
- promptly scan your keyword groups and see how they grow,
- closely follow the keyword opportunities you’re actively creating content around,
- have an eye on keywords that your client requires you to focus on.
2. Eliminate malicious or misleading keywords for an effective campaign
Knowing and acting on your client’s SEO opportunities depends on the quality of keywords you prefer.
That’s why it’s necessary to filter signals from noise — focusing on the insights that would be helpful to the client’s expectations and doing away with the large volume of unnecessary data. Unfortunately, automated keyword research usually has deadfalls because keywords that aren’t relevant to your objectives or can waste your time and budget can inflate your list. Of course, we’re talking about such keywords as: let’s get into this keyword management process.
- Misspelt keywords — that can multiply your search volume data if they’re not covered in close aggregations.
- Low-relevance keywords — that can’t account for the user’s intent with your website offerings.
- Low search volume keywords (<50 searches per month) — that even at their ranking best will produce a low ROI for the campaign.
With the help of a rank tracker, separating the noise is easier than ever. Based on your website input, the platform can investigate for you and automatically group keywords into categories that make sense from an SEO perspective (e.g., high opportunity, keywords with issues, highly seasonal, etc.) while identifying or downright eliminating misleading or harmful keywords.
3. Determine the relevant keywords from the start.
You have to identify and leverage the high-opportunity keywords so you get the most out of your agency and your client’s resources.
Here segmentation becomes the act of translating the client’s business positives into actionable tactics through two critical lenses: the client’s website categories and target audience, and the business/SEO opportunities:
A. The buyer’s journey
Segmenting keywords based on customer journey (from the basic “awareness, interest, consideration” model) enables you to provide more targeted value for all types of customers. For instance, for buyers in the awareness stage, you need to create content that targets users with search intent that’s still slightly informational, giving them worthwhile insight into what they’re looking for—and driving you right to your brand.
You already understand the client’s business based on your comprehensive prior research and their key input on target audiences so that you can begin your reverse engineering based on the target’s search queries.
With retail and e-commerce, this is usually straightforward—you’d get the intersection of product category and search intent and immediately spot the opportunity:
- “What is business casual” will imply a content marketing tactic for your fashion client’s blog or digital PR efforts.
- “Best cocktail dresses” can give you a clue into optimizing a particular landing page for the user’s interest.
- “Short versus long cocktail dress” will highlight an urge to pick the right style for the user, which you can add to your client’s blog or product pages.
- “Buy H&M black cocktail dress” is undoubtedly a sign for consideration, so you need to make sure all the appropriate landing pages are in place.
B. SEO opportunities
It’s also necessary to recognize keywords that you could easily rank highly in but aren’t applying yet.
Low SEO difficulty keywords with high search volumes or high conversion data will be a good investment of your resources. For instance, your client’s website ranks in the top 20 for “dresses for cocktails,” but it doesn’t have “cocktails” in the title — this is a smart win and a straightforward task for you.
These are probably the keywords you should concentrate your attention on first.
Or you can see year-over-year search trends and recognize exploding keywords: keywords that display a clear ascending trend and that will be important to your SEO campaign shortly. For example, leveraging the “near me” search queries in the summer autumn of 2021. Finding a relevant keyword in the search landscape that none of your contenders are checking out is quite the competitive advantage
With a rank tracker, you can establish what we call smart groups. These are effective keyword groups that are automatically updated based on the conditional criteria you placed, such as landing page, conversions, conversion rate, opportunity, difficulty, revenue, etc.
Having the appropriate keyword groups at a glance makes it more comfortable than ever to manage a multi-faceted campaign targeting different segments and recognizing how things are performing.
What should you do while executing the keywords?
1. Optimize your daily routine.
The reality is, you only have a confined number of hours in a day that you have to prioritize as per your client portfolio. Therefore, to be productive with time, you have to optimize your daily routine as you enroll in the campaign management phase — the big part of your workflow, most probably. For better keyword management process optimization is the best way.
2. Quickly check critical insights.
The first thing you have to make it an effective process is to set key performance indicators and a system for efficiently controlling campaign progress toward SEO goals
A. The SEO objective status
Can you instantly answer how the overall performance of a specific campaign is growing?
If you set an aim from the start and track your agency’s performance against it, you will get a precise picture of where you’re heading. This, in turn, will increase your efficiency in managing that campaign — are you on track, or is it at risk?
An agency dashboard that gives a holistic view of every campaign and all your campaigns across the portfolio might come in helpful here. Based on your campaign data, you can set up an operational dashboard to give you the essential data at a glance:
- The overall campaign Visibility and its trend on desktop and mobile.
- The client’s objective status tracking.
- The client’s business health is based on sessions and conversions data.
B. The visibility trend
Rank changes are simple to understand and trust. Group-level metrics are not. And manually checking the visibility for every keyword would be insane.
So it would help if you had a Visibility metric that is consistent and reliable. Calculated as an impression share, weighted against search volume, this metric will encourage your team to understand how each target group is faring on desktop and mobile.
Still, you need to explain what changed without being deceived by non-SEO performance actions like adding or removing keywords from your campaign and so on.
That’s why they rank tracker automatically explains the keyword-level causes behind the changes in a group’s visibility, based on performance, while the algorithm guards against involving your administrative actions.
However, all this automation can only make things more comfortable, not complete the task by itself. You still have to look at the data and apply your intuition and experience to identify a cause.
C. Keyword issues and alerts
SEO is a continually shifting battleground, and you have to stay on top of developments in real-time if you need to maintain competitive rankings. Yet, without automation in place, you’d have to check these manually at frequent intervals, spending time on tiresome tasks without the guarantee that you’ll discover a significant change as it happens.
With excellent tools, you can initiate email alerts for when the visibility changes or check critical insights in the overall campaign view on your dashboard, categorized as:
- Issues: missing landing page for a target keyword, keyword cannibalization, etc.
- Victories: keywords are performing their best rank, SEO objective overachieved, etc.
- Losses: Visibility drops on particular keyword groups or across the SEO campaign.
- Opportunities: new keywords that are making clicks but need to be tracked in your campaign.
- Competition trends: competitors outranked or, on the contrary, a competitor’s Visibility improved or decreased, etc.
- Market trends: YoY trend for All keywords, seasonality trends, etc.
No matter the system you want to use, don’t forget to make it streamlined and repeatable, with the nudges in place to encourage you to work smarter.
3. Block time for reporting and leverage automation
To stimulate your monthly reporting process, think about it during your campaign management, not just when you’re getting close to the actual report deadline.
If you make it a process on its own, with insights saved as you get them, annotations on essential changes, and faster data curation, you’ll get the time needed to craft the narrative — and better explain what happened to your client.
Let’s take a look at each of them!
A. Use the power of annotations.
As we’ve seen until now, categorizing keywords is essential, as they’ll give you group-level metrics that:
- The report which categories have shifted
- Monitor the keyword sets you’re building content around
- Observe the keywords your clients are looking to optimize
So you already have key metrics to assess during your daily or weekly processes. In addition, you can leverage this process to include quick saves and annotations on Visibility changes, ranks achieved, etc.
Once you have the insights you deem relevant, you can manually annotate the findings — adding notes as to why you think something has increased or dropped. Then, should something happen frequently, you can look back at your notes while writing your monthly report to backtrack accordingly.
B. Automate your monthly report building where it counts
As we’ve already mentioned, data gathering is a hassle when you need to open 3-4 tools, many spreadsheets, create screenshots, etc.
To go even deeper with efficiency, aside from saving crucial information as you see it, you can leverage data curation with tool integrations.
For instance, once you’ve decided to include such inputs as SEO objective status, group Visibility trends, fundamental ranking changes, competitors’ status, etc., you can think about automating the data extraction process — with API, Google Data Studio, or even Google Sheets.
Then, you should define an agency template to make the process streamlined across the organization and keep your message clear. You’ve already established the expectations with every client, understand the KPIs to report on, and other important tasks included.
Bottom Line
The end purpose is to achieve an efficient keyword management process from the start, leaving room for developing strategies and thinking creatively—the factors that will boost client satisfaction and retention.
Build an efficient system by:
- Optimizing your daily routine
- Picking the right keywords to focus on
- Segmenting your keyword strategically so you don’t dissipate resources
- Blocking time for reporting
- Using automation for insights gathering and monitoring.
Consider Leveraging Rank Tracker and Reporting Management systems to save time and resources with effective campaign management. Keep track of everything occurring in client campaigns without painstakingly going through every contributing factor every day.
