Seed keywords

Before beginning any keyword research process, you need a starting point. Or several starting points. These are called “seed keywords.”

Your seed keywords are used to grow the list that will become your keyword strategy.

When coming up with seed keywords, you often start with your best guess. Here are questions you can ask yourself to help you brainstorm:

1. What’s my website about?

2. What do I sell?

3. What keywords do I think I want to rank for?

4. What keyword ads would I buy?

5. If someone were just beginning to research the topic of my site, what words would they use to start?

Write your answers down. You’re going to use them really soon.

When choosing seed keywords, it often helps to get specific. If you run a motorcycle shop in Ohio, you might think “motorcycle” would be a great keyword, but in reality, it’s so broad and so competitive it likely wouldn’t do you any good. Instead, try being more specific.

Poor seed keyword: motorcycle

Good seed keywords: motorcycle repair manuals, used motorcycle parts

If you have an existing website, a powerful place to find seed keywords is uncovering keyword phrases that your website already ranks for. These are those phrases that Google already finds relevant to your website, so you will have an easier time ranking for phrases related to these seed keywords.

Note: If you are building a new website and/or don’t have any ranking keywords yet, see the section on seed keywords for brand new sites and topics.

There are two quick ways to find seed keywords you already rank for.

1. Seed keywords via Keyword Explorer

One of the more powerful uses of Keyword Explorer is its ability to show you the ranking keywords for any website, subfolder, subdomain, or page, including your own.

1. Navigate to the Ranking Keywords tool in Moz Pro

2. Choose root domain, subdomain, subfolder, or exact page, depending on your needs.

3. Enter your website or URL

4. Select keywords ranking #4-20 (adjust this based on your preferences)

5. By default, the United States market is selected, but Keyword Explorer also supports the UK, Canada, and Australia

6. Click “Analyze”

When you get results, the next part is very important: Sort the results by “Monthly Volume” (highest to lowest).

In this example, we used a site that sells motorcycle parts. Now we can select those high-volume, ranking seed keywords that are most relevant to the website.

Note that we selected keyword phrases ranking #4-20, meaning we’re filtering out keywords we already rank highly for, i.e. ranking #1-3. It’s fine to adjust this filter to any setting you want. By using this process, we hope to find seed keywords:

• with a good amount of search volume

• that are relevant to our site

• that we don’t already rank highly for

In this case, we found terrific seed keywords such as “motorcycle accessories” and “bell helmets.” We also want to ignore ranking keywords that may be irrelevant to our business such as “arai helmets” (assuming we don’t sell them).

2. Seed keywords via Google Search Console

You can also find your ranking keywords in Google Search Console. Simply navigate to the Performance Report to view all your ranking queries.

Here are some top-ranking seed keywords for Moz.

Pro tip: Filter for Positions 1-10 and sort by impressions to find your most valuable seed keywords.

3. Seed keywords from your competitors

You can also easily grab top-ranking seed keywords from your competitors.

There are two different sets of competitors you want to research:

1. Your current, actual competitors

2. Your desired, future competitors

In other words, we want to research competitors for 1) keywords we already rank for and 2) keywords we want to rank for in the future. (If you’re a brand new site, or entering a new market, you might want to focus specifically on number two.)

You might think you know who your competitors are in search, but do you know exactly who competes for every keyword you rank for? Fortunately, there’s an easy way to find out.

First, head to the Free SEO Competitive Analysis tool.

Simply enter your URL, scroll down, and see the top competitors that compete for the same keywords as your domain, ranked by Domain Authority. Below are the top search competitors for Moz, be sure to note down competitors that cover similar topics, for Moz those could be Ahrefs and Semrush. This tool will also show you keyword opportunities, these are your competitor’s top keywords. This feature will help you to spot keyword gaps between you and your competitors.

From here, you can find more top-ranking keyword opportunities for each site, by simply entering these competing domains or subfolders into Keyword Explorer (like you did earlier in step one).

If you’re planning content for a brand new website, or want to branch out into new topics on your website, then you’ll be getting most of your data from third-party sources.

Never fear — this is a terrific place to start.

The easiest first step when gathering seed keywords for a new topic is simply to Google the specific keyword phrases that you want to rank for. In this case, we’ll search Google for “motorcycle repair manuals.” You’ll see some ads and other SERP features at the top of the results. Right now, we want to look at organic results, so scroll down until you see those, similar to those below.

You can learn more about why SERP features are also important for a winning keyword research strategy in Moz Academy’s Keyword Research Certification.

If you can, try to ignore large sites (like Amazon or Wikipedia) that rank for everything, and try to find sites that specifically focus on your keyword topic.

Next, we’ll simply punch these sites into Keyword Explorer’s “Ranking Keywords” report. This report shows you all the keyword phrases the site or page ranks for.

There are several ways to use this tool – by domain, subdomain, subfolder, and exact page – and each report will produce actionable insights.

• For example, if the products on your website are structured by subfolder, you may want to organize your keyword research in this same structure. This will allow you to focus on niche markets within your industry, and strategize accordingly. Your goals, ranking keywords, competitors, and audience may differ considerably amongst your subfolders.

• Another example – you may host your products on a large eCommerce site, such as Etsy. Searching your ranking keywords by subfolder allows you to focus on the keywords your store – and your store only – is ranking for.

Try looking at the metrics in Ranking Keywords feature by subfolder or subdomain, and notice how your results change dramatically. The below screenshot shows the results for Moz’s blog.

To get the most out of this report, click on your Top Ranking Keywords, it often helps to limit results to keywords ranking in the top 1-10, and to sort your keywords by volume (high to low).

Using this technique, we start to find some amazing keywords we might not have thought of otherwise, such as:

• seo meta tags

• moz analytics launch

• website migrations

• … and more

At this step, you’ll typically want to ignore most site-branded terms. For example, if you were looking at “Moz” as a competitor, you likely don’t want to try ranking for any branded keyword that contains “Moz.”

Be sure to export a CSV of your seed keywords, or record them in a spreadsheet.

Seed keywords are everywhere. You often have to get creative to find them, but the better your initial seed keyword list, the better your final keyword strategy will be.

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Here are a few terrific places to discover seed keywords.

1. Google related searches

Search any keyword phrase, scroll to the bottom, and Google will show you a list of related keyword phrases.

These are gold.

We also recommend this nifty Chrome extension to extract even more Google related searches.

2. People also ask

While these tend to be a bit more specific, you can also harvest seed keyword ideas from Google’s “People also ask” boxes.

3. Google Keyword Planner

Google’s own keyword planner tool for its profitable Adwords platform provides a wealth of keyword ideas.

One caveat: many of the metrics are geared towards paid search ads, and not extremely reliable for organic campaigns.

4. Answer the Public

The always popular Answer the Public is a favorite starting point for many keyword research projects. The free plan is so generous, we had to include it here.

5. Google Trends

Google Trends is another Google tool that provides interesting insights and related queries for any keyword, it will even show you historic keyword data and break interest down by geographic region.

Invariably, when hunting for seed keywords, you’re going to find a lot of VERY competitive keywords — keywords you may not be able to rank for.

To save time down the road, it’s helpful to select seed keywords that fall within your site’s keyword difficulty potential. This means you might actually have a shot at ranking.

To find your site’s keyword difficulty potential, simply run a ranking keyword report for your domain. Use the following settings:

1. Search using “Root Domain”

2. Set “Ranking” to 1-3 (keywords you rank highly for)

3. Set “Volume” to anything over zero (in this case, greater than 101 searches per month)

4. Sort by “Difficulty” (high to low)

5. Ignore any branded terms

In this example, we can see that our highest ranking keyword difficulty score for semi-competitive keywords is 54 for “cheap cycle parts.”

This means we might set our keyword difficulty potential between 45-55, meaning these are keywords we could potentially rank for. Any seed keywords that fall above this range we’d typically ignore, as they would be too difficult to rank for.

How many seed keywords do you need?

At this point you should have a nice list of 5-50 seed keywords to work with, depending on how deep you want to go.

Your seed keyword list might look like the one above.

Don’t worry if you don’t have enough — you’ll discover more as you work through the process.