Introduction

Keyword research is super important if you want to drive the maximum number of visitors to your website.

ContentPlanner makes it easy to centralize all your keyword research activities:

• Maintain lists of keywords
• Import keywords from different tools
• Link your content with your keyword collection

From an organizational point of view, you can create just one list with all your keywords, or you can create multiple lists where each list is for a specific topic, region, or language.

Imagine that we have a liquor store, then we could create separate keyword lists for the topics wine, beer, …

It is also important to note that you can grow your keyword list is two directions:

• Vertical: Add more quality keywords to your list
• Horizontal: Add quantitative data to your keywords

If you work on the wine keyword list, then you could add for instance the following keywords to your list:

• wine brands
• wine review
• wine bar
• wine rack

This grows your list vertically (direction V).

But, it’s also important to collect quantitative data (direction H) on your keywords because you need to know which keywords will have the most impact when planning content. You will need to use more specialized tools to collect these metrics, such as:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• UberSuggest

These tools can also help you to find additional keywords.

Examples of quantitative keyword data are:

• Volume: The search volume per month. You better focus on relevant keywords with a search volume of 10000 searches per month than keywords that only get 10 searches.
• CPC or Cost Per Clock: This is the price you pay when a user would click on an advertisement for this keyword. A higher CPC means the keyword is more valuable.
• Difficulty: Most SEO tools include a difficulty score between 0 and 100. The higher the difficulty, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword.

Now let’s have a look at how you can manage your keywords in ContentPlanner.io.

Create a Keyword List

In your ContentPlanner project dashboard, you will see a card named ‘Keyword lists’:

Remark: the dashboard is frequently updated, so it’s possible that you see a different layout when reading this article.

Now, let’s create a new keyword list: click on the plus button inside the ‘Keyword lists’ card (see label 1 in the image above).

This will open an empty ‘Keyword List’ form:

A keyword list is basically a collection of keywords. You can decide for yourself whether you want to work with one master keyword list or if you create multiple lists (per topic, region, language).

Do the following in the above form:

1. Give your keyword list a name (and an optional description)
2. Press on the save button

Next, open the ‘Keywords’ section by pressing the pen button (see 1 in the image below):

Now, the keywords section will be in edit mode as shown below:

There are 2 methods to build your keyword list:

1. Add the keywords manually
2. Import the keywords from another tool

We will briefly discuss the two options.

Add keywords manually

Adding a keyword is an easy 3 step process (see image below):

1. Enter the keyword
2. Select the source: where did you find this keyword? Select ‘Other’ if your source is not on the list
3. Press the ‘Add’ button

After you pressed the ‘Add’ button, the newly created keyword should be visible in the list:

As mentioned in the introduction, it is also essential to keep track of extra keyword parameters such as keyword volume, CPC (Cost Per Click), difficulty, … You can edit these values directly inside the grid by clicking on any of the cells:

Press on the pen icon (see label 1 in the image above) to configure more settings about this keyword. The following window will appear:

Here you can specify:

• Current ranking: you can find out this parameter yourself on Google or you can use a specialized SEO tool.
• Buyer’s journey stages: here you can specify during which stages of the buyer’s journey the keyword is important
• Relevance: how relevant is the keyword for your business or brand. A score from 1 to 5.
• Trend: is there a growing or declining trend for the use of this keyword? You can use Google Trends to get this information

Import keywords

You can also use more specialized SEO tools to speed up your keyword research efforts and then import them into ContentPlanner. You will be able to collect more relevant keywords much faster, and at the same time, you will also have more details about these keywords: volume, CPC, difficulty, …

We will illustrate this with a keyword import from UberSuggest. Start by going to the website of Neil Patel: https://neilpatel.com/

Then scroll to the footer:

And consecutively select in the footer (see image above):

1. Tools
2. UberSuggest (from the popup menu)

If you login for the first time, then I suggest you first sign up for an account (upper right corner).

Next you can collect keyword ideas and download them (see image below):

1. Select ‘Keyword Ideas’ on the left side menu
2. Enter your initial phrase/topic: we use the word ‘wine.’
3. Finally, export the results: press the button ‘Export To CSV.’
   Remark: CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values, so you will basically export all the data from the grid into a file with the same rows and where a comma separates the columns.

Now the exported file should be available on your local PC. When you use the Google Chrome browser you will see the downloaded file in the footer: in the next step, we will drag & drop this file into ContentPlanner.io.

It is very easy to import this file into ContentPlanner.io. Return to your already created keyword list and perform the following steps (see the image below):

1. Make sure the ‘Keywords’ section is in edit mode: you should see the close & save buttons (otherwise press the button)
2. Click on the ‘Import’ button: a rectangular upload area will appear.
3. Drag & drop the previously downloaded CSV file from UberSuggest into this upload area.

ContentPlanner should automatically recognize the CSV file as a UberSuggest import after you finished the previous procedure:

You just need to confirm the import in order to get all the keywords in your list. But before you press the confirm button, have a look at (see corresponding labels in the image above):

1. The number of keywords that will be imported. This amount can be limited by changing the two parameters below.
2. Minimum volume: only keywords with this minimum search volume per month will be uploaded
3. Import limit: the maximum number of keywords to be imported
4. Finally, press the ‘Confirm Import’ button.

Then you will see all your keywords in your list:

Notice that the extra data (Volume, CPC, Difficulty, …) is also imported from the external tool.

Conclusion

We illustrated how you could create keyword lists to organize your keyword research.

The benefits are:

• You have a central location for all your keyword research
• You can easily import keywords from external tools
• You can link your content topics with these keywords

Give it a try!