Initial keyword research is the first step toward building an informative keyword matrix.

So fire up keyword snatcher (or whatever keyword mining tool you fancy), drop in your head term (just one), and send it off to the races. The Excel file is designed to handle *any* keyword data, as it uses a natural language macro to look for signaling words (that you can manage in the key) to tag searcher intent.

Export to CSV > Filter out illegal characters > cut into lists of 800 keywords > Save CSV.

Upload into Google Keyword Planner > Get Ideas > Export to CSV.

Use keyword combiner to join all of your individual research files.

Open in Excel > Sort descending by search volume > Add a column for intent > Add a column for "Best" > Save.

Here's where you should be at:

Now You Need to Tag For Intent

Tagging for search intent is critical, this is where effective prioritization starts to really come into focus. Here is how I approach tagging for the 4 top-level buckets of user intent:

• Informational - a specific question where the results are the information the searcher is looking for, may contain phrases such as: info, more information, details, features, benefits, etc.
• Navigational - contains the name of the brand, product, service, or a person at the organization.
• Commercial Investigation - easiest to identify and least ambiguous, these queries contain specific parameters for researching a purchase, such as sizes, colors, versus, best, price, pricing, etc.
• Transactional -indicative of shopping behavior further down the conversion funnel, at this point the searcher knows what they want - so look for terms like buy, purchase, sale, coupon, discount, or locations.

To make this easier on you, I've built an Excel macro that, with a bit of keyword specific tweaking, automates much of this process for you. You can watch a quick video of it in action here ›

Don't Feel Like Learning Visual Basic?

Well, you probably should if you're doing much enterprise SEO, buuut, I'll help you out.

If you don't feel like going through the time and pain of getting that snippet working, instead of wrestling with someone at Fiverr, you can grab a copy of the actual file I used (complete with all my sample data) for free.

PLEASE DON'T SHARE THIS LINK - I usually charge money for this template and it is only free for subscribers to this guide.

Grab a Copy of My Search Intent Excel Template ›