Overview

Use the Keywords tool when you want to:

• Get more traffic to any of your website pages
• Find a variation of a keyword that’s easier to rank for
• Brainstorm a new blog post title
• Discover opportunities to overtake competitors in search

Instructions

1. Understand what a long-tail keyword is

Before you get started with the Keywords tool, it's important to understand the difference between broad keywords and long-tail keywords. Here's an example of each:



When you're first getting started, you definitely will want to start by targeting long-tail keywords, which are easier to rank for and bring in the most relevant traffic. In this article, you will learn how to use the Keywords tool to find these long-tail keywords.

2. Go to the Keywords tool

You can find the Keywords tool under Optimize > Keywords.


 

3. Add keywords to your Keywords tool

First, you'll want to add keywords that are relevant to your business. Click on the Add Keywords tab.



If you already have a list of keywords you'd like to add to the Keywords tool, you can paste them into the text field (one keyword on each line), add them to a campaign by clicking Add Campaigns (read more about campaigns in Step #4), and then click Add Keywords.

If you'd like some help brainstorming keywords, click Get Suggestions.



Just enter one of the following into the text field:

• A keyword - get a list of keywords that are similar to the keyword you entered
• Your URL - get suggested keywords from your own site
• A competitor's URL - get suggested keywords from your competitor's site to try to overtake them in the rankings

When the suggestions populate, they will be sorted by low monthly search volume to high, meaning that the ideal long-tail keywords will be near the top. Select any keywords you would like to add, and then click Continue.

Now you'll have the opportunity to modify any of these keywords, or add keyword variations, such as the plural version of each keyword, or any synonyms you can think of.



Your selected keywords will then appear in the Add Keywords text field. Instead of just clicking "Add Keywords," let's take a look at how to add these new keywords to a campaign by clicking Add Campaigns.

4. Add keywords to a campaign

Campaigns allow you to group your keywords according to topic. You'll have a different campaigns for different topics, such as different products you offer, different audience segments that you target, or problem vs. solution-based keywords. For example, if your company has a product that targets the healthcare vertical, and another product that targets the education vertical, you'd set up a different campaign for each of those verticals. You can read more about managing campaigns in HubSpot here.

Here's an example of how we might break out keywords for HubSpot:



So we would want to add the suggested keywords from Step #3 into an "Inbound Marketing General" campaign. Upon clicking Add Campaigns, you'll see a layover where you can select an existing campaign or create a new campaign. Once you're finished, click Save Campaign List. 



Then click Add Keywords. You'll then see a message that we're adding your keywords now. When your keywords have finished uploading, refresh the page to see the new keywords in the tool.



You'll then be prompted to refresh the page to see the keywords you've just added appear in your keyword list. Click Refresh Now.

5. Choose keywords to target on your site

Now go back to the Your Keywords tab to see the list of all of your keywords. You can also filter by the campaign you just created to see only the data for your new keywords.



First, here's a breakdown of what each of the columns mean:

• Visits - how many visits via organic search you had after the user searched for this keyword. This is updated every 24 hours.
• Leads - how many leads via organic search you had after the user searched for this keyword. This is updated every 24 hours.
• Rank - your site's approximate ranking for this keyword in the Google search results. Anything between 1-10 would be page one, between 11-20 would be page two, and so on. Note that you may observe a different ranking in Google; every user's results are different based on location and personalization settings. The number here is an approximation.
• Searches - the global monthly searches for the exact match of this keyword. Note that this will be different than Google's keyword tool because they give you global monthly searches for the broad match of the keyword.
• Difficulty - how hard it will be to rank well for this keyword on a scale of 0-100. Any keyword with a difficulty above 70 is considered extremely difficult to rank for. When you're first starting out, you'll want to target keywords with low difficulty (between 0-40) and then work your way into medium difficulty keywords (40-60) when your site starts getting more traction, and so on.
• CPC - the approximate cost per click if you had been running a Google Adwords campaign targeting this keyword.
• Campaigns - how many campaigns this keyword is assigned to. Click on the number to see the campaigns.
• Created - the exact date on which you added a keyword to the Keywords tool
• Actions - easily delete a keyword using this column. You can also check multiple keywords and click delete under Bulk Actions below the chart.

Now that you understand how to read the data, remember that you will want to target long-tail keywords that are very relevant to your business. Long-tail keywords generally have a lower difficulty score, and are easier to rank for. The low-hanging fruit that you should target are the keywords with a higher number in the Searches column and a lower number in the Difficulty column. This means that the keywords are easy to rank for, but a decent number of people are searching for them.

6. Get recommended keywords to target

We've done some of the work for you in terms of finding these low-hanging fruit keywords. Click on the Recommendations tab, and then Low Ranking to see what we consider "rankable" keywords. Not only will these keywords be easy to rank for (high number of searches and low difficulty), but you're also already ranking for these keywords on pages two through six of the Google search results, so there's a great opportunity for you to move onto page one. Select one of these keywords and click Blog This to write a blog post optimized for this keyword right away.




Again, these recommendation are those "sweet spot" keywords where you have the opportunity to get on page one sooner because you're already ranking somewhere in the first seven pages (besides page one). Keep in mind that you will still want to go after keywords that have a low difficulty and higher search volume in which you're NOT already ranking on the first seven pages, and you'll be able to find these by looking at the data in the Your Keywords tab.

7. See where you can overtake your competitors

You can see which keywords you have the opportunity to beat out your competition by going to the Recommendations tab, and then clicking the Competitors button.



By default, this chart is sorted by your Competitor's rank. Find keywords that they are ranking well for, and the difference between your rank and their rank according to the Difference column is minimal. Then focus your SEO efforts on those keywords to try beating out your competition!

Next Steps

• Add at least 300 keywords to your keyword list using the instructions above
• Create a blog post for each of your target long-tail keywords
• Search engine optimize (SEO) each of your website pages around a long-tail keyword

Need help creating your keywords list? Contact a HubSpot Certified Partner to do your keyword research and improve your SEO for you.

Related Links

How to create and manage campaigns in HubSpot Keywords tool FAQ