Once you have completed your initial keyword research, review your keywords to identify which are most relevant for your business and which have the highest volume:

1. Start by identifying your core set of target keywords, no less than 5 and no more than 10.

For example, if I were to pick the core keywords that best represent a post about SEO competition and have the high monthly search volume, they might look like:

2. Next, Google used to have a really cool tool called their Contextual Targeting Tool, which was used to find ideas that Google identified as contextually related to your keywords. I ran the above keyword list through and drilled down to the second tier, see below:

But, unfortunately, this has also now been [deprecated] and turned into the Google Display Planner, here's the output when I run it for the base query "SEO Tips"

So there's a few cool new caveats worth paying attention to:

1. The number of cookies created per week for these terms, representative of the number of search results related to these terms that resulted in ad impressions (and dropped cookies).
2. The relative mix between male and female audiences
3. And the ability to toggle on and off the "Available network inventory"

A few more important points to pay attention to

Clicking into individual targeting ideas will give you a nice list of related keywords, their relevance score, historical cost per click, and the weekly impression rates:

It's also very important to pay close attention to the filters, as these are the basis for the data you are being shown:

These have gotten much more granular since the contextual targeting tool, now including the specific ad formats, ad sizes, and even the specific mobile OS you would like to target:

Once you have gotten all of your target keyword ideas together, you will now want to run them through the Google Keyword Planner (set to exact match ) and export them to a CSV for some filtering.

3. Group your target keywords into 3 different buckets based on volume. This usually separates out head, body and long tail terms.

This gives you a sense of what kind of monthly search volume you can hope for if you are able to rank within the top 1-5 spots, with the #1 spot capturing on average 36% of clicks.

4. Optimize from tail to head.

For anyone just getting started with SEO this may be a new concept, but you may have also seen or read about ' the long tail of search .'

Essentially what you are doing here is focusing on long-tail terms which are highly relevant to your business and also offer opportunities to build content for the larger, more competitive head terms.

Let's take a closer look at this.