Your keyword universe is a business asset, why not treat it like one?

Have you ever wondered how much time is wasted across your team and agencies researching, compiling, and analyzing the same keyword data in different ways? 

Or how much knowledge is locked away in various departments, drives, and computers and not shared with others?

What nuggets of gold are waiting to be found in your keyword data? 

It’s a bit crazy. Keywords are the foundation of all search marketing, yet the processes typically followed are highly flawed and inefficient. 

Key takeaways: 

• Keyword research is constantly being  performed for new paid search campaigns, SEO, and content marketing campaigns
• It’s a flawed process: There is so much data, overlapping keywords, and different metrics from different tools. The data exists in too many spreadsheets, in too many places, and it likely isn’t shared amongst your teams
• A shared database of keyword knowledge is immensely valuable to your inbound marketing campaigns. It can guide your content development, refine and reduce costs on Google ad campaigns, improve landing pages, eliminate duplicate work, identify gaps, and improve SEM results overall

“A Keyword Universe is a strategic compilation of all your keywords, metrics, and knowledge. It’s crucial for guiding your SEO, content marketing, and PPC strategies.” 

The Problem with Keyword Research

If you manage performance on search engine marketing campaigns, either paid, organic, or both, you’re already familiar with keyword research.

Your agency, content team, and marketing lead are all involved in your SEO/PPC and content program, either working on the research or reviewing the data.

There are so many tools for getting data—Ahrefs, Semrush, Answer the Public, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Search Console are just some of the most popular. 

The problem? 

First, none of the data matches—search volumes vs. impressions, sessions vs. clicks, and match types on keywords. This makes it hard to compare one tool to another and raises many questions. 

Second, the data is all over the place. It’s in spreadsheets, in content briefs or outlines, and locked in various tools where there is constantly changing data against the keywords.

To make things worse, the data is in silos. Your Google Ads technicians are looking at their data. Your SEO team is doing their own research, and your content team often fends for themselves when tasked with a new post.

Often, this results in the same research being done repeatedly, at best creating redundant efforts, and at worst, creating contradictory data which can lead to misalignments throughout the development process. This is because learnings fromone channel or team aren’t shared or made common knowledge across all of them.

Enter the Keyword Universe 

A Keyword Universe is a compilation of all relevant keywords from all data sources into a single place— including both your own site data and third-party data. A Keyword Universe will typically contain thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of keywords. 

We use keyword universes extensively in our own processes, using key metrics to inform critical decisions about content development that can be backed by evidence. 

Example: A view of Organic targeting data, including website data,
third-party data, topics, targeting, and keyword clusters 

Types and sources of keyword data

The keyword is the key, literally. 

The keyword connects all your data sources together. You can pull many types of data and metrics into a keyword universe and connect across that common key – the keyword. 

Some of the data you can pull into your keyword universe

So, let's take stock of what you have so far:

You have organic search metrics, paid search metrics, website traffic and outcomes, competitive data, and marketing attribution.

Then you have all the data sources: your own collected data, which you alone have, as well as data from third-party tools, which can also provide market and competitive intelligence. 

Some of this data will overlap, and most won’t match up, but that’s OK. 

Each data point provides a little more knowledge that can be used to paint a fuller picture. 

Add a little knowledge

Finally, there is the knowledge and outside expertise that your team brings to the table, which can be captured and communicated within the keyword universe through comments, scoring, and categorization.

Our standard practice categorizes keywords by topic, subtopic, topic cluster, paid campaign and ad group, funnel phase (top or bottom), and intent, such as Job to Be Done (JTBD). 

Where applicable, we’ll add notes and comments, such as search intent, comments from subject matter experts (SME), or whether we or competitors have created similar resources.

Keywords are also scored by their likelihood of driving conversions, based on the historical data of related keywords or from other channels, and whether or not they make good primary or secondary target keywords.

And, ideally, a good keyword universe is constantly growing and being updated from live data sources. 

When your Keyword Universe is constantly being updated from multiple live sources, it’s not a single one-and-one effort or a side project; it’s the ultimate database for your entire search engine marketing and content marketing programs. 

With all this data, the Keyword Universe becomes an invaluable marketing and business asset.

“It’s the ultimate database for all of your search engine marketing and content marketing programs.”

Extracting Value from your Keyword Universe  

Keyword Universes provide critical benefits to different marketing disciplines:

Organic Search

• Access an endless source of ranked ideas for content generation, including keyword clusters that can be targeted with a single article
• Identify trends and patterns to develop topic clusters, then strategically create content hubs that will help you establish topical authority and, thus, your long-term ranking potential and ability to target long-tail keywords at scale
• Evaluate content priorities, determining how to expand, update, or consolidate existing content to maintain or improve its SERP ranking
• For more advanced use cases: Connect your keyword universe to your content calendar so that you can see what keywords are targeted and triggering your articles, with an endless source of optimization opportunities

Paid Search

• Consistently refine high-ROI Google Ads campaigns, and identify opportunities for new potentially high-converting, high-value keywords
• Identify new negative keywords you can add to your campaigns to reduce waste 

Paid and Organic balancing

• Identify gaps and opportunities between paid and organic search, using the two to bolster each other 
• Get a single source of truth for developing your short-term and long-term SEO strategies

Example: Combining Google Ads search terms and Organic Impressions data, it’s easy to find new positives and negatives for Google Ads, and new ideas for Organic content 

By building the initial keyword universe upfront and maintaining it over time, you can see all the relevant keywords at once. Over time, you can make smarter decisions on organic and PPC campaigns by comparing them apples-to-apples, even while factoring in historic performance. 

Considerations for your Keyword Universe 

Creating and maintaining a Keyword Universe is no small feat, but it’s central to the work in developing high-performing search campaigns. As a result, we develop a Keyword Universe for each client who hires us for ongoing SEM campaign management. 

When creating each Keyword Universe, we consider the following:

Business and Objectives 

What products or services are you selling? Are you focused on generating leads and your sales pipeline, or also brand awareness? What is your current product marketing focus? 

Competition and Marketing Forces

Who are your top competitors?

This information should come from multiple sources: your sales team, the booths at the conferences you attend, who’s advertising in Google Ads, and who’s ranking in the organic search results. 

Review all their websites and understand their content strategies. Check the metrics in third-party tools. Pull all this into your universe.  

Current Ranking Potential & Long-Term Strategy

Companies with low starting domain authority rankings won’t be able to rank for more competitive keywords, so it’s important to consider what you can realistically rank for now and the steps that can be taken to help rank for those competitive keywords later.

Relevant Search Intent & Likelihood of Conversion 

Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) keywords are typically where the money is for search engine marketing. At the same time, top and middle-of-funnel content can create topical authority, build relationships with readers, and attract new visitors to your site. 

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) keywords are also an important consideration. How are people trying to solve problems similar to those your product solves without using your product? These keywords can be harder to identify but typically provide more value than top-of-funnel keywords. 

Comparison keywords are often overlooked but are a key segment of Bottom or middle-of-the-funnel keywords. “[Competitor] + alternatives”, “[Competitor] + competitors,” or “[Competitor] vs [Competitor]” are extremely valuable if you can create content to rank for them. These visitors are often closest to making a decision to buy.  

Want to learn more about how search intent and BOFU keywords can help scale a business? Check out how we helped Content Camel achieve 3x traffic growth with organic SEO alone.  

Bottom Line? A Keyword Universe Helps Generate More Value

Search engine marketing should never involve throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. It’s time-consuming and requires investment in both funds and effort, but it can yield outstanding results with the right research, strategies, and testing. 

A thorough and exhaustive Keyword Universe is a difficult but powerful way to begin tackling your search engine marketing campaigns, including organic content, site optimization, and PPC ads. 

It will help you create stronger individual campaigns, and you can use it to create coordinated campaigns across multiple platforms and involving diverse touchpoints to increase your success.

We’ve been helping clients increase their inbound generated sales pipeline for over 20 years, and we’re ready to help you. 

Request a demo to learn more about our SEM services and software today!