An Easy Keyword Classification Method

You have hundreds of keywords, and no way of knowing what to do with them.. I’m going to show you an easy way of classifying them. There are several benefits of doing this. The most obvious one is the ability to search your keywords when you’re in need for an idea to write about. It allows you to focus on the ones that will give the greatest yields. A less obvious, but very important, benefit is that this will allow you to see which types of keywords drive the most revenue. And it will allow you to have different strategies for managing keywords in different strategies (I will get to this one later). Let’s get started with the classification methodology!

Keyword Classification Criteria

There are two criteria that, in this methodology, each keyword should be judged against: Relevance and Stage In Funnel. When judging the keyword’s relevance, ask yourself: “Is the keyword related to a feature that my product/service has or a specific problem that it solves?” When judging the keyword’s stage in funnel, ask yourself “When someone googles this keyword, is it likely that they are just searching for information or are they looking for solutions to possibly buy?”

Keyword Classifications

When you have done this, you have classified each keyword into one of the following groups:

Good relevance + Late in funnel: “Here’s your solution”
Good relevance + Early in funnel: “Here’s info about the topic you’re interested in and how we can help you”.
Poor relevance + Late in funnel: “Here’s an alternative solution that might be better.”
Poor relevance + Early in funnel: “Here’s info about the topic you’re interested in. and by the way, we might have a software that’s interesting for your company.”

Some keywords might not fit into any of these classifications but they might still be interesting. Simply put them in a separate category called “Other keywords” so that you have somewhere to keep them in case you figure out what to do with them in the future. —- Example: You are a company who provides e-learning software. Your software enables your customers’ employees to learn internal courses in front of their computer at their leisure, rather than going to costly group training sessions. This saves them time, and you money. Below are keyword examples for each of the categories for this company: Good relevance + Late in funnel: enterprise employee training software, e-learning solutions Good relevance + Early in funnel: training employees in-house benefits, employee training expensive Poor relevance + Late in funnel: employee training courses, safety training outsourcing solutions Poor relevance + Early in funnel: employee safety training benefits, enterprise safety course best practices —- Keep these keywords and their classifications either in your dedicated keyword tool or a simple spreadsheet. As an example, Hubspot’s Keyword Grader allows you to rank each keyword from a scale from 1-5. You could simply define each of the above classifications as one of the numbers and keep track of them that way. Putting them in a spreadsheet will allow you to manipulate them in various ways, for example link them with performance or integrate them with tracking systems to see which keywords produce the best results. In my next post, I’ll go through how these classifications can allow you to have different strategies for the corresponding groups of keywords.