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🟢 Difficulty: Super Simple
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Dear Tech SEO 👋
Today I will show you a small simple tool that is quite addictive (with free credits).
Transform your keywords into a map
The hardest part of doing keyword research is to have a visual cue of the topic relations. The tool I’m using helps me to prioritize visually the areas I should focus on my content pipeline.
The whole point is to create a network of topics instead of a plain keyword list.
Something like this:
Network of topics of a side project I’m working on
It does not take much effort to build such a network. Let me show you how.
Ready? Let’s goooo
Keyword Lists Are So 1999
Do not get me wrong, there is zero SEO strategy not using a good keyword list. But when you have +20k, +50k keywords it gets virtually impossible to prioritize.
Here are the steps to create a network of topics from your keyword list. I will be using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer but any keyword tool would work.
Step 1 - Get your keyword list
This keyword mapping works best when you have a rather large set of keywords, let’s say over 5k. Then the tool can actually build a powerful visual map.
Let’s get the keywords.
Do your regular keyword research > Go to Ahrefs and get all the data (the search volume per keyword is for advance visualization, more of this later).
Core data needed for keyword data visualization
Step 2 - Download and transform the data
The tool processes only .txt files. Ahrefs only gives Google Sheets or CSV formats with all the data. Let’s prepare the data for the tool, it takes 2 mins:
Get the keywords:
Set them on a separate sheet and download the sheet as CSV, once downloaded just transform the file format form CSV to TXT
To transform the data into a TXT file it is enough to “Save as…“ the file and then change the actual format:
3 - Get your keyword mindmap
Go to:
This is the actual tool that transforms texts into topic networks.
Upload your TXT file with all keywords and click “Analysis“ (do not change the setting for now):
To get the visualization click the option “VOS Viewer“. To me this is the most clear visualization compared to the other options:
You will get something like this:
4 - Tweak and win
The initial map can be confusing when your research is focused mostly on one vertical for example here you see “marketing“ a the biggest topic, which makes sense as my research was all related to “ai marketing”
With the sidebar you can tweak the visual and find groups of related networks
This mapping tool is basically taking all the given words and building relationships between them based on the co-occurrences per term. I actually asked the developer if he could add something like “keyword volume“ to provide even more context to the map. And he did!
I am testing right now that feature:
You can actually add the “term count“ as a separate file. I tested and it did not change the network visual that much so I am checking with the developer how to tweak the tool to give us a network map that considers the search volume accurately.
Get the tool
Easy to use, freemium option quite affordable credits.
That was it for today. Enjoy.
Until next time 👋
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