Why You NEED to Create a Comprehensive Keyword List

I’m going to let you in on a secret.

Avalanche Creative has an SEO and Content Strategy and it involves 947 (and counting) keywords and over 5 million monthly searches.

Okay, that’s super vague. But, my point is, we have a large list of keywords that we’ve determined are important to our search engine visibility (i.e. they will get us traffic that could convert to sales).

We’ve got a long list and we use that long list to:

• Come up with new article ideas.
• Determine what content to create next.
• Come up with social media ideas.
• And much more…

With this list, we can use SEMRush to filter keywords by volume, how competitive they are, whether they show local results, and more.

Check it out below:

The above is a screenshot from SEMRush where we can filter our list by those that, for example;

• Show a video in Google’s search results
• Show an image in Google’s search results
• Are less competitive (both organically and paid)
• Have a “People also ask” snippet that shows up
• And much, much more…

Having this list helps us answer the question, “What’s Next?”

We can whittle down a large list of keywords into our next opportunity or the next optimization campaign.

So, what’s the point?

You need to have a comprehensive keyword list.

A comprehensive keyword list does more than just give you ideas of what content your audience will engage with, it can help you understand your (and your competitors’) current market position and search engine visibility.

Without it, you’re blind to where you are today and where you should be heading tomorrow.

Putting together a comprehensive list gives you something to shoot for—and remember:

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. – Wayne Gretzky” – Lance Beaudry