Now that you have a huge list of new keywords that you've just found, it's time to get rid of
those that will never bring you any traffic or conversions.
As any filtering job suggests, you need to first decide on what set of metrics you'll be
relying on. To cut off those that are not representative, let's boil down our list to the
three major metrics:
keyword difficulty
search volume
keyword length
Practice shows that keywords with search volume below 50 (too rare), keyword difficulty over
66 (too hard to rank for), and those that consist of more than 5 words (too long) should be
excluded.
Now, let's see how to apply these filters in Rank Tracker:
Jump to Keyword Sandbox under the Keyword Research module. This
is the place where all your found keywords are stored.
Click on the funnel icon
in the top right corner.
Hit Add filter and select # of Searches > Less than > 50, then
Keyword Length > More than > 6, and finally Keyword Difficulty > More
than > 66. Once you click OK, the tool will display those keywords
that are not worth your effort.
Now there are two options to pick from. You can either delete these keyword
phrases for good (Ctrl + A in a filtered view > right-click the selection >
Remove Keywords) or label them with a tag to your liking (right-click the
selection > Add tags to selected records > enter how you like to call
them).
As a bonus for today, here're some more filtering tips that will help you leave only the most
cost-effective keywords in your arsenal:
Avoid the highest competition. If you are just starting out with
your website's SEO, you'll probably want to remove all keywords with extreme
competition values — at least for now. With millions of sites competing for rankings
for a given keyword already, it'll take you a good while to rank high for it.
Select keywords with the best KEI out of the remaining ones, and
ignore the ones with the worst — these are the terms with high competition and
not-so-many monthly searches, so optimizing for them is hardly worth the effort at
this point.
That's all for today. Now you know how to filter your new keywords and leave only those that
do count. If you have any questions, make sure to drop them in the comments section below.
Up next
Tomorrow you'll learn how to map keywords to the relevant pages of your website. We'll
shoot you a notification via email so that you won't miss this very important part of
your daily SEO plan.