Accidental Keywords – what they are and what to do with them.

Accidental keywords are queries your site appears for in Google’s search results but you are not necessarily targeting.

These generally appear in positions 100-300, so a long way down.

Taking a look at these can help generate some new content ideas and keywords you could target.

SEOTesting.com has two specific reports that can help you find new accidental keywords.

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are search queries that usually have the following characteristics:

• Lower search volume
• Contain more words
• More specific
• Lower competition

While the search volume is lower for long tail keywords, because they are more specific and have lower competition, they make good targets for content.

The Long Tail Keywords report in SEOTesting.com takes the default query report, and orders it by position to show you first the queries you rank for in lower search positions.

The assumption is you rank low for these keywords because you have not directly targeted them yet with a specific piece of content. If you were to create content based on targeting these keywords, as you already rank for them, your new page should have a good chance of ranking well.

While looking through these long tail keywords you’ll see a lot of queries that have only 1 or 2 impressions per week. I would suggest looking for the queries that are getting 10-20+ impressions per week. You do need a certain amount of search volume to make it worth the time it takes to write, edit and publish a quality piece of content.

New Keywords

The New Keywords report in SEOTesting.com does exactly as it described. It displays the new keywords your site has just started ranking for over the past completed week (Mon – Sun).

The ‘New Keywords’ report shows you queries to base new content on.

Some of these keywords will already be directly targeted by content you have recently published and hence appearing in the new keywords report.

But as you create and update content on your site, and as Google gets better at understanding keywords and relationships between topics and queries, your site will start to rank for new keywords for the very first time.

These are often also long tail keywords, but we surface them in a separate report so you can notice the high impression and potentially valuable instances as early as possible.

You can read more about the New Keywords report here.

As well as the New Keywords report, whenever a full week of data completes (usually on a Tuesday as Google Search Console is two days behind), you will get an email with the top 10 new keywords your site ranks for in terms of impressions.

What to do with keyword ideas?

As you review these keyword ideas and you find an interesting one, you can click on the keyword itself to take you to the query details page for that particular keyword.

Here you can see the page that has been ranking for the keyword for the past seven days and make the decision to potentially include the keyword in the existing article in a new section, or create a completely new and separate article – often internal linking between the two.

Back on the report you were referencing, you will see Lightbulb ‘idea’ icons aligned with each keyword row. Clicking on this icon will save the keyword to your ‘Saved Ideas’ section which you can then find on from the main left side navigation.