SEO Keyword Hound - General Usage

General Usage

The SEO Keyword Hound has many powerful features, and each user can craft his/her own strategy when using it.

The plugin works by analyzing and monitoring individual pages, and then providing more general statistics. This guide provides a suggested roadmap to boost the SEO of a page, from the basics to some advanced features.

Setting Up
Analysis - Finding Opportunities
1. Compare your own page to other / top competitors
2. Work your content based on data

Setting Up - Building the Foundations

The first step is selecting a page you are going to work on.

Inside it, you should tell the plugins who are your competitors for that page and which keywords should it monitor.

Important: You must save or publish the page/post before The SEO Keyword Hound panels appear.

1) Choose Search Phrases

What do users type to find your website on Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc.? And how do they reach your competitors?

The answer to that question is what we call search phrases. Select at least three of them where you would like your page to rank well.

Search phrases are terms typed as a search query on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. For example, "Best way to find cheap flights".

If you are already ranking well with these search phrases, that's great! But even so, there's always room for improvement.

You can add these search phrases by going to the SEO Competitors metabox and choosing the Search Phrase Manager menu option.

This will trigger the Search Phrase Manager Pop-up:

There you can add and manage your search phrases for that page. You can add up to six search phrases.

Tip: Use Google Trends to find related phrases and topics

2) Find Your Competitors

Next, we'll take a look at the websites that rank well with these search phrases.

They are our competitors and the plugin will help us to analyze what they are doing right. You can consider pages in your domain as competitors too, of course.

Competitors are pages that rank well within the search phrases.

Quick Way

The plugin can automatically fetch competitors from Google's results. For that, click on Find Competitors for Phrase (note that the API settings must be properly configured).

Search Phrase Competitor Search Pop-up

You will see the Search Phrase Competitor Search Pop-up

Select a phrase and click on the Find Competitors button to get the results. Check the competitors and click on Add Selected Competitors.
This screen is very important.
1. You will see a list of 10 competitors fetched, in rank order, from Google Search. Note that they have different colors - blue for new, green for competitors that have already been added and purple for your own page.
2. Check the checkbox of those that you would like to add as a competitor.
3. Mark the star of the most important competitors. These will be grouped as the Top Competitors.
Optionally, add new search phrases for the competitors you are adding.
Finally, click on Add Selected Competitors.

That's all! These competitors will be automatically inserted into the metabox.

Tip: You should add your own pages as competitors as well - this way, you will find their strong and weak spots.

Manual Way

Alternatively, you can manually add competitors by clicking the + Competitor button.

The following pop-up will show:

Is this a top competitors - Mark it as a top competitor or not. When comparing yourself to other sites, you can check the overall stats or that of the top competitors.
Competitor URL - The link to the specific page.
Competitor name - The name of the competitor.
Search Phrases - Which search phrases you used to reach it.
MOZ PA and DA - Input the Page Authority and Domain Authority values calculated by MOZ.
This can be done manually or automatically by clicking the button (note that the API settings must be configured)
Learn more about PA and DA from Moz.

Add as many competitors as you like. The more you enter, the more data the tool will have to analyze with you.

3) Analyze Keywords

Find the relevant keywords of the page. There are many methods for this step, but usually it involves a sum of automated analysis tools and personal experience.

Keywords are the important words and phrases that form the search phrases. For example, in the search phrase "Best way to find cheap flights", "cheap" and "flights" are the most important keywords, as they narrow down the search to a certain theme (plane tickets).

It's more important to have a small list of relevant keywords than a huge list of unrelated ones.

Tip: SEOQuake provides a free tool that generates CSV files with keywords from a given page.

4) Insert Keywords

Once you have a list of keywords, insert them into the tool. Head to the SEO Keywords metabox and you will see two options.

Get Sample Keywords - Fetches suggestions based on tags. Only appears if no keyword was added.
+Keyword - Click to add keywords.
1. In this New Keyword Pop-up, you can add one or multiple keywords (by separating them with a comma). Don't worry about capitalizing words, as all content will be standardized to lower case.
  
  An example: the list "flight, United States" will add the keywords "flight" and "united states".

With CSV Importing

You can also add keywords by importing a CSV file:

This will trigger the Keywords CSV Import and Export pop-up:

In it, you can choose between to types of import:

Overwrite existing keywords - Wipes out all your current keywords before importing the keywords in the file.
Add new - Does not remove any keyword. Instead, only imports new keywords found in the file.

CSV File Format

Note: it's important that the CSV file follows the following structure:
Column 1: KEYWORD
Column 2: ALTERNATE KEYWORD
Column 3: NOTE

Different patterns will result in errors.

Tip: If you are unsure on how to prepare the CSV file, use the export function to generate a sample CSV file. It will serve as a template for you.

Congratulations! You have provided enough information for SEO Keyword Hound to provide extremely useful data for you.

Learn more: SEO Keyword Hound - Metaboxes - SEO Keywords.

Analysis - Finding Opportunities

Now it's time to use the plugin's tools to find room for improvement in the page's SEO.

5) Compare your own page to other / top competitors

You can compare your page's keywords with a specific competitor, the top ones or all of them. This is toggled in the SEO Competitors metabox , as shown: The SEO Keywords metabox will be updated with the analysis. In the following image, the small purple numbers are the competitors' score.

The scores are highlighted (in yellow) when a keyword is present for your competitors, but not for you. These are the opportunities.

6) Work your content based on data

This step is heavily dependent on your own strategy. Adjust your content using the knowledge about which keywords your competitors use and where.

Making the Most Out of the Tool

These features, while not part of the core process, can save you a great deal of time.

Notes/labels

Working with SEO involves a great amount of data. To help you track your work, the plugin provides notes for each keyword, competitor and the general page. An example view of the keyword note preview on mouse hover:

And its content:

Some actions, like keyword creation or update, can be automatically inserted. This is configurable in the plugin's settings (#link)

Snapshots

A snapshot is a saved analysis of the Keywords incidence.

You can create as many as you want:

And compare them.

Pin Opportunities

You can make show only pinned keywords in the SEO Keywords by choosing the following option:

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