Hotwords FAQ
A hotword is a term in a keyword phrase.
For example, the keyword phrase “how to lose weight” has 4 terms in it: “how”, “to”, “lose”, and “weight”.
By analyzing the occurrence of hotwords within all keywords we find during keyword research, we are able to assess the most frequently occurring terms within our list of keywords so that we can organize and group relevant keywords into keyword clusters.
This exercise provides us with a handful of the best performing terms for traffic and relevancy, which can then be used to create the best content strategies — content that will rank highly and, in turn, help us reap traffic rewards for your site.
We look at a number of your competitors when developing our hotwords list. We identify the highest frequency and most relevant most highly-occurring terms from a large range of keywords used by several of your highest-performing competitors to generate their traffic, and these become “hotwords.”
This list is derived from our keyword research. We primarily find keywords using Google Analytics and Google Search Console Data, competitor analysis data, keyword tools and a number of other enterprise SEO tools
Once we have our keyword collection complete, we analyze all keywords and put them into a word frequency counter. We have our own dedicated formula to indicate if a hotword or a phrase has a high frequency. By analyzing this data, we determine if we want to consider these terms or phrases as hotwords.
We do this in order to cluster keyword groups naturally and to ultimately help you identify which keywords to use when:
- Writing new content
- Keyword mapping (creating title and meta descriptions)
- Finding new content ideas
Why are some of these keywords seeming meaningless to me (e.g. – “how” or “fee”)? What is their use?
Some keywords may seem meaningless in the beginning, but they become more relevant when they are later clustered into a main keyword group or when used to create content ideas. For example, if your business sells construction plans for chicken coops, “diy” and “how” may be indicated as hotwords that sound strange on their own, but they become more obviously relevant when grouped with other words, like this:
| Keywords | Monthly Search Volume |
|---|---|
| diy chicken coop | 8100 |
| how to build a chicken coop | 9900 |
In this case, you would rate “diy” and “how” relatively high (maybe a 5 or a 6) because they could be used in ways that are directly related to your business. Conversely, if you only sell fully-built chicken coops instead of construction plans, you may rate “dyi” as a 0 because it’s not relevant to your business.
If a keyword is rated 0, then it is considered as a “negative keyword” and we usually delete every occurrence of that keyword in our keyword collection.
Yes, we will look at all hotwords you have rated as relevant and incorporate them into our keyword grouping.
High-intent means keywords which have a high chance of converting. “Buy t-shirt” is a high-intent keyword as opposed to “green t-shirt”.
Negative keywords help us understand which keywords you DON’T want people to find you for. For example, if your business only sold t-shirts then you would have hats, necklaces, etc as negative keywords. Indicating negative keywords will ensure we waste no time focusing on irrelevant keywords as we progress with the keyword grouping stage.
Here is an example of the work we do after you give us your hotword feedback: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nGZFjjitw9E5CeDpqdyshustV2ysmd61qt4sWCdE6AI
