Top 4 Keyword Grouping Principles to Lift Your Search Ranking

Keyword grouping has been around for a long time. Since the early days of SEO, marketers have been categorizing their keywords into clusters.

Back in the day, marketers used Excel sheets to group keywords into relevant categories – and this grouping is a sure way of optimizing the websites for the best possible performance.

In this guide, you’d discover what keyword grouping is, the principles of keyword grouping, how to group keywords, and the benefits of keyword grouping for the twenty-first-century marketer.

What is Keyword Grouping?

Keyword grouping involves organizing keywords into groups or categories of semantically-related keywords. It’s a vital piece of search engine marketing as it helps position your website as an authority in the industry. It also helps you to create relevant content that will resonate with your audience.

When it comes to keyword grouping, you need to understand that some keywords have to appear in some content, while other keyword types have to appear in a different piece of content. Back in the early days of SEO, people performed keyword grouping manually using Excel sheets.

However, times have changed, and there are more efficient ways of doing keyword grouping. And these ways eliminate the grueling hours it will take to perform some activities with the Excel tool.

What are the Principles of Keyword Grouping?

Just like search engine optimization (SEO), there are some steps you need to follow for a robust keyword grouping strategy. Here are some steps you need to consider.

1. Do Keyword Research:

The first step to an effective keyword grouping is in the collection of a large number of related keywords within a niche – and that includes long-tail keywords. For instance, if you’re researching the “order pizza online” search term, you’ve got to run the keyword through a tool. And when it comes to keyword research tools, you have to consider the PPCexpo Keyword Planner.

The PPCexpo Keyword Planner is designed for marketers who desire superb productivity, intelligence, and value from their research process. Unlike other competing software in the market, you get to have lots of premium features with the PPCexpo Keyword Planner.

With the PPCexpo Keyword Planner, you can easily pinpoint the right keywords to help you generate the most conversion and traffic for your business. Furthermore, the tool helps you get a rough estimate for ranking for your preferred keywords.

You get to see the volume, high bid, and low bid of your keywords. These data are obtained from the Google search platform. Here’s a screenshot of what the user interface looks like.

The tool helps you select long-tail keywords. To start grouping the long-tail keywords, you’ve got to click on the Keyword Type button as shown below.

There is the option of visualizing your keyword groups. To do that, you have to click on the chart option.

After that, you’d be presented with two chart options – Scatter Plot and Bar Chart. The image below shows what the scatter plot looks like.

2. Create High-Level Keyword Groups:

These keyword groups are typically created around your product or service offering. Let’s say you sell Italian foods, the high-level keyword groups will be similar to queries like “pizza delivery”, “Italian food delivery”, and “order risotto online”.

3. Make Sub-Groups:

Separate high-level keyword groups into shorter keyword clusters under the same category. For instance, the keyword group for “pizza delivery” may have “Italian roll”, or “cheese pizza” as shorter keyword clusters.

4. Work Through Sub-Groups Until They Are Small & Targeted:

You have to keep working on sub-groups until the keywords within the sub-groups are somewhat similar, narrow, and targeted.

All these steps may be cumbersome, especially if you’re manually performing the keyword grouping. However, you can avoid the heartache that comes with such stress by automating the process.

How Many Techniques are in Keyword Grouping?

During keyword grouping, two techniques are primarily used. These are hard clustering and soft clustering. Here’s a brief overview of these keyword grouping techniques.

Soft clustering involves analyzing the top ten search results of a keyword from your list. This way, you get to know if there are other similar keywords from your lists that are found with the target keyword. If there are any, they will be added to the group. Soft clustering pretty much involves similar keywords that are found in your search results.

Hard clustering is somewhat different. The cluster contains keywords that are found together in a common URL.

When it comes to the usage of these keyword groups, soft clustering is ideal for less competitive keywords while hard clustering is the best fit for more competitive keywords.

What is the Value of Keyword Grouping in Keyword Research?

• Effective keyword grouping is a sure way to help your website become more relevant to search engines like Google
• Keyword grouping helps you to save more resources, especially for marketers who would be acquiring paid traffic via PPC campaigns. With compact ad groups, you get to boost your clickthrough rate (CTR) and improve your quality score
• Keyword grouping helps in enhancing your copywriting efforts so you get to publish more compelling content that resonates with your audience and ranks well on search engines
• To save more time and effort, you’ve got to automate your keyword grouping
• Keyword grouping is a great way of eliminating keyword cannibalization. It also helps in structuring the site and setting the keywords for better SEO performance.

How to Group Keywords and Optimize in SEO?

It’s important to emphasize that keyword clusters are not a one-and-done route to website optimization. It takes more time and resources to get the most out of it. Aside from the time and resources you’d put into it, you’d have to undergo some intense content creation and keyword research process. This will, in turn, translate to more work for your marketing and SEO teams.

But the hard work will pay off as robust keyword clusters is a sure way to build a user-friendly and Google-friendly website. Here are some benefits of keyword clustering.

• Higher organic traffic
• Better opportunities for internal linking
• Helps establish a brand as an expert and authority in a niche
• Strong long-tail keywords ranking
• Better short-tail keywords ranking
• Faster ranking improvements in search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you’re skeptical about how to perform keyword grouping, here are some easy steps to follow.

• Make a list of keywords
• Segment the keywords into groups
• Create and optimize pillar pages for the keyword clusters
• Reinforce the keyword clusters using blog content.

When you’re on a page, look out for the keyword tab (KW) and type in the primary keyword you’re looking to rank for. If you’re using the PPCexpo Keyword Planner, you’d get to have a list of relevant keywords that are similar to your target keyword. To rank high on search engines, you’ve got to add these keywords to the page. After that, you need to optimize your keywords in SEO.

FAQs:

What is the purpose of keyword grouping?

Keyword grouping involves creating clusters or groups of similar keywords. You have the option of using these keyword groups to optimize your content for multiple search terms. To do that, you get to use several similar terms that are found within your keyword group from your pages or posts.

What are the 3 keyword selection principles for SEO?

Before performing your SEO keyword research, you have to consider factors like:

• User intent
• Search volume
• Keyword relevancy

These factors will help you determine the kind of audience you’re targeting and pretty much help you create engaging content that will resonate with them.

What is the benefit of grouping keywords into different lists?

Grouping your keywords into different lists helps you ascertain that your content piece thoroughly covers a specific topic. And that can help boost your SEO efforts. It’s also a sure way that helps you eliminate issues like keyword cannibalization.

Why is keyword clustering important?

Keyword clustering is a sure way to boost the SEO strategy of your website. With the evolution of search engine platforms, you’ve got to put several pieces like context and keyword synonyms before a piece of content ranks high on search engine platforms.

Wrap Up:

Keyword grouping helps each web page to stand on its own even while generating lots of traffic from search engines. With a keyword group in place, you get to reduce the time between planning and execution. This way, you get to flawlessly execute your marketing strategies in no time.

To get started, you get to collect large data of related keywords for your preferred niche. And such data should include long-tail keywords. If you’re unsure of an automation tool, you need to consider the PPCexpo Keyword Planner. With the PPCexpo Keyword Planner, you get to perform comprehensive keyword research and also filter out the long-tail and short-tail keywords.

To get the most out of your keyword grouping, you need to consider factors like bidding strategy and volume. Keyword intent is another factor that’s worth considering as it helps you eliminate any form of wastage.

Now you have a good grasp of keyword grouping, how would you launch a more converting marketing campaign using the strategy?