Monthly Keyword List Maintenance

Purpose

Keyword rankings can fluctuate depending on a number of factors. It’s important to the health of the SEO campaign to monitor and maintain our clients' keyword lists to ensure we’re tracking the most valuable, relevant, and up-to-date keywords in those lists.

As such, every month, SEO reps need to assess and evaluate each of their clients' keyword lists in AccuRanker to determine if there are any necessary updates to make. This means adding new keywords or removing old ones in order to target high-impact keywords.

Grooming Your Keyword List

A good understanding of a website’s SEO opportunity, as well as its current performance and trend, depends on the list of tracked keywords. Therefore, it’s important to make sure we are tracking relevant keywords that define the target market of our dealers. Having a solid keyword list not only allows us to accurately report to dealers how their website is performing, but it also allows us to accurately select a proposed work focus for the coming month. 

The number of keywords you’re tracking will depend on your dealership: How many units of inventory do they have? Which manufacturers or vehicle types are important to them? Are they getting a new brand or are they getting rid of a vehicle type? 

Ideally, you should be tracking keywords with search volume for each major focus (vehicle type, category, manufacturer). 

What factors should you keep in mind when selecting keywords to track

• Relevance: Is it relevant to the client, products, or services provided?

• In-stock inventory: Does the dealer consistently have this vehicle type/manufacturer in stock? And there should generally be a correlation between # of units and # of keywords.

• Intent: Is it associated with user intent? (i.e., for sale, dealer near me, parts, rentals)

• Search Volume: Are people actively searching for the keyword?

Finding Keywords

It’s important to add to and modify keyword lists as an SEO campaign grows and search engines take note of our work. Initial keyword lists primarily focus on individual terms related to a dealer’s inventory (i.e. travel trailers for sale). As a website becomes more relevant for those individual terms we can begin to find more semantic keyword variants that help us focus our optimization efforts on more broad topics (i.e. camper sales near me). 

In AccuRanker, there are a few tools that can help uncover keywords that could be valuable to track. Keep in mind that one method is not better than the others and all can be used to find valuable keywords, so test them all out and see what works best for you!

{More about the discover tab}

Keyword Planner

Find new keywords by entering into Keyword Planner and finding high-value keywords based in the dealership’s region.

1. Enter your secondary SEO Chrome profile for either Dealer Spike or ARI.

2. Select the Keyword Planner tab in the bookmark.

3. You’ll then be presented with a list of accounts from which you can find and select the specific client, or find an inactive account, designated by the red X.

4. From there, you’ll be given 3 options to select. Click on the Discover New Keywords.

5. Enter several keywords (i.e., if you wanted to find keywords for “travel trailers,” enter “travel trailers for sale,” “travel trailer dealer,” etc.) for which you wish to find variants for. This helps refine the search to provide only the most relevant keywords to your query. When you have entered in your keywords, select Get Results.

6. Once you reach the screen with the keyword list, select the location tab at the top of the page that says United States. This is the default search radius, but you will need to apply your client’s primary target location to get only the most relevant keywords to the dealership.

7. Once your location is selected, the keyword list will refresh and you will be presented with the most relevant keywords to your client. Examine each keyword carefully to find candidates that have search volume, low competition, and are relevant to the keyword group you wish to expand on.

8. Record the most valuable keywords, based on your determination, in order to add into AccuRanker.

Add Keywords

1. Log into Accuranker and locate the correct domain by making use of the search bar in the top-left corner of side navigation.

2. Once the domain specific dashboard loads, you will see an orange “+ Add keywords” button near the top left of the dashboard. Click it.

3. You will paste your keyword list into the keywords field on the top-left of the popup.

4. Ensure your Search Engine, Locale, and Location setting are all correct

5. For now, it should be:

   1. US or Canada depending on location

   2. Mobile Google as the search engine

   3. Locations should match the target locations from the intake.

6. Click “Add Keywords” in the bottom right

7. It will reload and you’re ready to move on to grouping.

Deleting Keywords

Deleting keywords should be done in conjunction with adding them. As you add keywords that have search volume and have more relevance to your campaign, consider deleting keywords that fall under the categories below:

There are a few instances when you may consider deleting a keyword:

• The dealer no longer carries the related vehicle type or manufacturer.

• The keyword rank has been 99+ for several months in a row and should be replaced.

• The keyword is long-tail with a search volume of 0.

• Misspellings and close variations of your keywords.

Now that we know how to view all hidden variations of keywords, it’s time to start removing some of them. The first step should be changing the date range you have set. The default is the past 30 days, but you may want to change to the past 90 days or an even longer date range. This way the rank change can be a more accurate reflection since we don’t expect keywords to change all that much in a 30 day period. And also keep in mind that our monthly reports are set to the past 90 days.

For close variations of keywords, it’s easiest to compare them side by side. Looking at the current rank and rank change would be the recommended approach. If one variation is ranking worse than the others, you can remove it or look into why it might be ranking worse. If you have two close variations of keywords that are ranking similarly and are struggling with which you should remove, reach out to your Team Lead.

Examples: 

• “rv dealers” and “rv dealerships” 

• “rvs for sale” and “rv for sale”

If a keyword has been 99+ for several months, you’ll want to evaluate why it’s been ranking poorly before you decide to delete it. 

If it’s a high search volume phrase that has been 99+, perhaps there is a performance issue we can address. Maybe there are keyword cannibalization issues that are preventing this keyword rank from improving. Maybe a relevant landing page hasn’t been created yet. Do some of your own research and even reach out to a senior rep or team lead for advice before deleting these keywords.

Example: tracking “atvs” as a keyword. If “atvs” is ranking well. that’s a win for the SEO campaign. You’ll definitely want to keep it and explain to your dealer why that’s a significant accomplishment. If you’re not ranking well, but you have other variations such as “atvs for sale”, “atv dealer”, “atvs portland”, you may want to remove “atvs” since it’s so broad and competitive.

Keep in mind, we still want to have a positive reporting experience for our dealerships so you don’t want to go and delete all long-tail keywords with 0 search volume. Keep some that have specific units or locations that the dealer wants and expects to see in the report, especially if they are ranking well.

FAQS

Here are some questions that may arise during the keyword list maintenance process:

This SOP is a work in progress. If you notice anything that is out of date, could be more clear or could be more efficient please update the SOP or add a comment to start a conversation.