How To Do Quick Keyword Research for Multiple Clients

Keyword research is the biggest rabbit hole for marketers. We start with a target that we need to hit — usually something like “we need to write four articles for Client X this month that has something to do with Service Y.”

We pull up the tool of choice at the moment and start plugging away — expecting to spend a few minutes, maybe an hour at most.

Then, a few hours later, you are tired, frustrated, hangry, and ready to do anything else.

Why is it so freakin’ hard to get just a few good keywords?!?

The internet is saturated with content. You are looking for the magical unicorn of keywords that nobody else has thought of writing content for, but that everyone is searching for.

You’ve set yourself a nearly impossible goal, so it’s no surprise that keyword research drains all your mental calories and sucks away your profit margins.

That’s why I’m sharing my secret sauce.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use two free tools to:

Do months of keyword research for clients
Plan all the lead funnels
Plan all the marketing material for that content
AND do it all in less than four hours.

Sound impossible? Keep reading...

Start the Timer — 4 Hours

Step 1: Fill in the Silo Planning Workbook (60 Mins)

MAX TIME: 1 Hour — Stay Focused!

This workbook should NOT take you more than an hour to complete. Run through it quickly and bring your client in if you need to. You’re going to be setting the focus for the next 10+ articles, 2 conversion offers, 30 social posts, and 16 emails. Don’t let yourself go down rabbit holes!

This will help you quickly run through the key points of effective content that are a little harder to nail down. We have intentionally streamlined many of the more complex areas of marketing funnels and personas to make an all-in-one resource for planning content faster.

Click Here to download our Free Silo Planning Workbook.
Complete pages 2 through 10.

QUICK NOTE

When you get to the section of the workbook where you plan the blog articles, stop there.

We want to research blog topics, not pull them off the top of your head.

Step 2: Search Your Topic in Ubersuggest (15 Mins)

MAX TIME: 15 Minutes — Keep Going!

To start with, you need to head over to Ubersuggest.
Look at your workbook on Page 2: Silo Planning - Topic Strategy. At the top of the page, you wrote in your target topic. For this example, we’re going to say the topic is “Lead Generation.”
Type your topic into Ubersuggest, set your country, and click search.

The first page that comes up will help you do a quick check to ensure this topic is a good one.

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You can see the:

Search Volume
SEO Difficulty Score
Paid Difficulty Score
Cost Per Click (CPC)
A quick note next to Neil Patel’s smiling face tells you what the average web page that ranks for this topic is all about.
How well this page is performing in search results (number of people that click on SEO results)
The average age of people searching this topic — you can compare that against your avatar/persona.

QUICK NOTE

If the overall stats aren’t as high as you’re looking for, it doesn’t mean this is a bad topic to shoot for. You aren’t looking for direct traffic for this topic. You’re looking for content related to this topic that you can write about to build authority on this topic.

Step 3: Keyword Ideas (30 Mins)

MAX TIME: 30 Minutes — You’re almost there!

We’re going to go fast! Don’t get lost, don’t go down rabbit holes. This should take no more than 30 minutes.

Follow along and get some keywords jotted down quickly. We’ll do some deeper dives on them to make sure they fit in a bit.

To start, click on Keyword Ideas in the left menu in Ubersuggest.

Note: This is where you’re going to start encountering your first paywall prompts from Ubersuggest. You can continue with the free version; you just won’t see as many keyword suggestions as you go through each step. Most of the time, I can find enough keywords using this process to be okay in the free version. However, you can upgrade to paid if you want to, or if you already have a keyword tool that you like, you can probably do a similar research process with it.

Suggestions

Scroll through the list of suggested keywords and do a “gut check” to see if any of the keywords make sense.
Put a checkmark next to any that make sense.
When you’re done, click the Export to CSV button.

Scroll through the list of related keywords and do a “gut check” to see if any of the keywords make sense.
Put a checkmark next to any that make sense.
When you’re done, click the Export to CSV button.

Questions

Scroll through the list of questions to do a “gut check.” You want to see if the questions fit with anything from your brainstorming session in the workbook on Slide 3.
Put a checkmark next to any that make sense.
When you’re done, click the Export to CSV button.

Prepositions

Scroll through the list of prepositional keywords and do a “gut check” to see if any of the keywords make sense.
Put a checkmark next to any that make sense.
When you’re done, click the Export to CSV button.

Comparison

Scroll through the list of comparison keywords and do a “gut check” to see if any of the keywords make sense.
Put a checkmark next to any that make sense.
When you’re done, click the Export to CSV button.

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Step 4: More Keyword Ideas (30 Mins)

MAX TIME: 30 Minutes — Hang in there!

Now you’re going to repeat what you did in Step 3, but with more keywords:

Try some of the keywords that you exported in step 3.
Try some of the questions from the workbook on Slide 3.

Keep doing this until you feel like you’ve probably grabbed hundreds of keywords.

Step 5: Merge and Sort (15 Mins)

MAX TIME: 30 Minutes — Don’t quit yet!

This is a little tedious, but necessary if you want to use free tools like Ubersuggest. (Paid tools have some more streamlined options that can bypass this.)

Create a master Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet.

Open each CSV that you exported from Ubersuggest and paste in the keywords that you exported.
Sort your entire spreadsheet to get the keywords with the highest search volume at the top.

Now you have to do some manual review. Make sure not to delete the keywords that don’t make the cut; we’re going to use those in the next step.

The goal of this step is to identify the top 10 keywords that:

Have the highest search volume
Make sense (some keywords are just weird and wouldn’t make good articles)
Are unique enough to be a standalone article — example: you wouldn’t keep both “cost of lead generation” and “lead generation costs,” you would just pick the one with the highest search volume

QUICK NOTE

It’s possible that you didn’t get enough keywords. If that’s the case, go back to steps 3 and 4 and keep trying to identify more keywords.

Honestly, the first few times you do this, it might take longer, but eventually, you’ll get faster at grabbing up a good initial list of keywords.

Step 6: Fill in the Worksheet (60 Mins)

MAX TIME: 30 Minutes — This is the last step!

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to go finish up the worksheet.

Starting on Slide 11, you’re going to begin filling out the information for your ten blog articles. You can copy the two slides that relate to a blog article to do more than ten articles if you have enough keywords and budget from the client.

Keywords:

Enter the primary keyword that you identified in step 5

Review your keyword list and look at the ones that didn’t make your top 10. See if they are related to this primary keyword. If they are, add them as a supporting keyword. This combination strategy can help each article rank for multiple keywords and get the collective traffic from them all.

Type of Content:

Type your primary keyword into Google and look at the page 1 results. This is how you discover what Google wants to show to visitors for that keyword.
Describe what you see in the “type of content” box.
For example, if I search “Lead Generation Tools,” I see list posts with around 20 items on average. If I search “Lead Generation Process,” I see posts that are mostly How-To and Guides.

Value to Avatar:

You know what you’re writing about. You know what Google wants to see. Now think about what this piece of content will mean to your avatar or persona. What are they going to get out of reading it?

Call-to-Action:

What is the logical next step for them to take based on the previous answers you submitted for this article? Do you think it would make sense to send them to the Subscribe Stage Offer or the Conversion Offer?
Why is that step a logical and valuable step for them to take after consuming this post?

The Title:

You are finally ready to give your article a title.
It should convey the value to the avatar.
It should align with the type of content (list, how-to, etc.).
It should contain the target keyword.

Email Blast and Social Posts:

This section of the worksheet is for planning the promotional aspects of your content. You will send one email blast and schedule 3 social media posts after the material is written.

Personally, I recommend giving these notes to the writer and having them write the social posts and email blast when they write the article. Our Content Ninjas can provide that service when they write your articles.