If you read our blog about using the Google Keyword Planner to start your keyword research, you already know how important it is to use keywords that will help people find your website when they’re searching. If you’re ready to take your keyword research to the next level, we recommend using Moz. Moz is an exceptionally useful tool that provides great insights into your SEO efforts and focuses your attention on opportunities you may now have known were there. Read on to see how using Moz can help you narrow down your keyword list even further by using keyword rankings.
All About Moz
Moz is an online platform that tracks key inbound marketing metrics, produces reports and makes recommendations for improvement and opportunities. This tool includes analytics for search, social, links, brand and mentions, reporting, and more.
While there are a number of uses for Moz, when it comes to using the tool for keyword research one of the best features is the keyword ranking feature. After choosing keywords from the Google Keyword Planner, you can plug them into a new campaign in Moz. When you set up the campaign, you can also choose three competitors to add. Then, after crawling your sites (allow up to a week for this to happen), Moz returns information about how you and your competitors rank on keywords, shows you which URLs specifically rank (if any), and provides you with insight into changes in rank over time. Getting this valuable information will ultimately help you decide what keywords you want to be sure to track and optimize for SEO purposes.
Setting Up Your First Campaign
After setting up your Moz account, you have the option to create a new campaign.
Once you select New Campaign, you’ll be required to enter your business name, landing page, and campaign name. Then you’ll have the option to select a Google Analytics account to track. After that, Moz will prompt you to walk through the other setup steps, which include options such as linking your campaign to your social media profiles and entering the URLs of your chosen competitors. When you’re prompted to enter keywords, that’s when you’ll input the keywords you’ve chosen from the Google Keyword Planner.
Then it’s time to start tracking. Depending on how many keywords you entered, your results may not show up for a day or more – so I typically leave my campaign alone overnight to start out. Once your data has crawled your site and your competitors’ sites (this may take up to one week), you’re ready to click on Rank Tracker on the left sidebar of your campaign.
A dashboard will show up that shows all of your keywords being tracked, the URL ranking for each keyword (if there is one, whether it’s your own or your competitor’s), and each website’s numeric ranking for the keyword.
You’ll then be able to download a CSV report of all of the ranking data. Keep in mind: the lower the numeric rank number, the higher your website is ranking in search results, which is exactly what you want. For adding keywords to your keyword strategy, we recommend starting by analyzing the top ten keywords you rank for to determine if they’re keywords you want to be ranking on as part of your keyword strategy. Then, do the same for each of your competitors’ rankings. If there are keywords your competitors are ranking on and you aren’t, those are keywords you might want to add to your keyword strategy. And if there are keywords you’re ranking on that your competitors aren’t, those are keywords you’ll want to keep pursuing and optimizing for on your website.
Note: If some of your keywords come back with a rank that says Not in Top 50, that means your keyword didn’t rank in the top 50 results.
Start Your Own Keyword Strategy
Are you ready to start your own keyword strategy or take your strategy to the next level? Let us help! We have experts who are excited to give you the tools you need to have a successful strategy. Reach out to us today.
