What are the right keywords?
The "right" keywords meet three criteria: enough search volume (people actually search), difficulty matches your domain authority, and intent aligns with your offering. A keyword with 100k monthly searches is worthless if the top 10 all have DA 80+.
Reading search volume vs. difficulty
In the "Keywords" module, you see four metrics per keyword. Understand each one before making decisions.
- › Search Volume — average monthly searches. Realistic for new sites: 100-1k/month.
- › KD (Keyword Difficulty) — 0-100. <30 = easy, 30-60 = medium, >60 = high authority only.
- › CPC — cost per click. High CPC = commercial intent = potentially valuable traffic.
- › Trend — 12-month curve. Upward = future-proof topic, downward = caution.
Identifying long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords (3+ words, often questions or specific phrases) are your lever as a small site. Example: instead of "backpack" (KD 78), target "sustainable hiking backpack women 30L" (KD 18). Lower volume, but actually rankable and higher conversion.
Using A-Z Expansion
A-Z Expansion takes your seed keyword and prepends/appends each letter of the alphabet — similar to Google Autocomplete. "backpack" becomes 100+ concrete phrases like "backpack ar15", "backpack camping lightweight".
Heads up
An A-Z Expansion costs 50 credits and runs 2-3 minutes (background job). Save credits by only expanding serious seed keywords.
Turn keywords into a content plan
Sort keywords by intent into four buckets: Informational (how-to, what is), Navigational (brand names), Commercial (comparison, review, best), Transactional (buy, price). Plan distinct content formats per bucket: guides for informational, comparisons for commercial, product pages for transactional.
Tip
Star selected keywords and export as CSV. Reuse the file directly for Bulk Generation — see the "Bulk Generation" tutorial.
What you learned
- ✓ Read volume, KD, CPC, and trend individually rather than in isolation
- ✓ Identified long-tail as realistic ranking opportunity
- ✓ Used A-Z Expansion for 100+ concrete phrases per seed
- ✓ Sorted keywords into four intent buckets
- ✓ Prepared export workflow for Bulk Generation