Today’s Memo is a full refresh of one of the most important frameworks I use with clients – and one I’ve updated heavily based on how AI is reshaping search behavior…
…I’m talking about the keyword universe. 🪐
In this issue, I’m digging into:
- Why the old way of doing keyword research doesn’t cut it anymore.
- How to build a keyword pipeline that compounds over time.
- A scoring system for prioritizing keywords that actually convert.
- How to handle keyword chaos with structure and clarity.
- A simple keyword universe tracker I designed that will save you hours of trial and error (for premium subscribers).
Initiating liftoff … we’re heading into search space. 🧑🚀🛸
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A single keyword no longer represents a single intent or SERP outcome. In today’s AI-driven search landscape, we need scalable structures that map and evolve with intent … not just “rank.”
Therefore, the classic approach to keyword research is outdated.
In fact, despite all the boy-who-cried-wolf “SEO is dead!” claims across the web, I’d argue that keyword-based SEO is actually dead, which I wrote about in Death of the Keyword.
And it has been for a while.
But the SEO keyword universe is not. And I’ll explain why.
What A Keyword Universe Is – And Why You Need It
A keyword universe is a big pool of language your target audience uses when they search that will help them find you.
It surfaces the most important queries and phrases (i.e., keywords) at the top and lives in a spreadsheet or database, like BigQuery.
Instead of hyperfocusing on specific keywords or doing a keyword sprint every so often, you need to build a keyword universe that you’ll explore and conquer across your site over time.
One problem I tried to solve with the keyword universe is that keyword and intent research is often static.
It happens maybe every month or quarter, and it’s very manual. A keyword universe is both static and dynamic. While that might sound counterintuitive, here’s what I mean:
The keyword universe is like a pool that you can fill with water whenever you want. You can update it daily, monthly, quarter – whenever. It always surfaces the most important intents at the top.
For the majority of brands, some keyword-universe-building tasks only need to be done once (or once on product/service launch), while other tasks might be ongoing. More on this below.
Within your database, you’ll assign weighted scores to prioritize content creation, but that scoring system might shift over time based on changes in initiatives, product/feature launches, and discovering topics with high conversion rates.
Image Credit: Kevin IndigTo Infinity And Beyond
The goal in building your keyword universe is to create a keyword pipeline for content creation – one that you prioritize by business impact.
Keyword universes elevate the most impactful topics to the top of a list, which allows you to focus on planning capacity, like:
- The number of published articles needed to comprehensively cover core topics.
- Resources needed to cover essential topics in a competitive timeframe.
- Roadmapping content formats and angles (e.g., long-form guides, comparison tables, videos, etc.).
Image Credit: Kevin IndigA big problem in SEO is knowing which keywords convert to customers before targeting them.
One big advantage of the keyword universe (compared to research sprints) is that new keywords automatically fall into a natural prioritization.
And with the advent of AI in search, like AI Overviews/Google’s AI Mode, this is more important than ever.
The keyword universe mitigates that problem through a clever sorting system.
SEO pros can continuously research and launch new keywords into the universe, while writers can pick keywords off the list at any time.
Think fluid collaboration.
Image Credit: Kevin IndigKeyword universes are mostly relevant for companies that have to create content themselves instead of leaning on users or products. I call them integrators.
Typical integrator culprits are SaaS, DTC, or publishing businesses, which often have no predetermined, product-led SEO structure for keyword prioritization.
The opposite is aggregators, which scale organic traffic through user-generated content (UGC) or product inventory. (Examples include sites like TripAdvisor, Uber Eats, TikTok, and Yelp.)
The keyword path for aggregators is defined by their page types. And the target topics come out of the product.
Yelp, for example, knows that “near me keywords” and query patterns like “{business} in {city}” are important because that’s the main use case for their local listing pages.
Integrators don’t have that luxury. They need to use other signals to prioritize keywords for business impact.
Ready To Take On The Galaxy? Build Your Keyword Universe
Creating your keyword universe is a three-step process.
And I’ll bet it’s likely you have old spreadsheets of keywords littered throughout your shared drives, collecting dust.
Guess what? You can add them to this process and make good use of them, too. (Finally.)
Step 1: Mine For Queries
Keyword mining is the science of building a large list of keywords and a bread-and-butter workflow in SEO.
The classic way is to use a list of seed keywords and throw them into third-party rank trackers (like Semrush or Ahrefs) to get related terms and other suggestions.
That’s a good start, but that’s what your competitors are doing too.
You need to look for fresh ideas that are unique to your brand – data that no one else has…
…so start with customer conversations.
Dig into:
- Sales calls.
- Support requests.
- Customer and/or target audience interviews.
- Social media comments on branded accounts.
- Product or business reviews.
And then extract key phrasing, questions, and terms your audience actually uses.
But don’t ignore other valuable sources of keyword ideas:
- SERP features, like AIOs, PAAs, and Google Suggest.
- Search Console: keywords Google tries to rank your site for.
- Competitor ranks and paid search keywords.
- Conversational prompts your target audience is likely to use.
- Reddit threads, YouTube comments, podcast scripts, etc.
Semrush’s list of paid keywords a site bids on (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)The goal of the first step is to grow our universe with as many keywords as we can find.
(Don’t obsess over relevance. That’s Step 2.)
During this phase, there are some keyword universe research tasks that will be one-time-only, and some that will likely need refreshing or repeating over time.
Here’s a quick list to distinguish between repeat and one-time tasks:
- Audience-based research: Repeat and refresh over time – quarterly is often sufficient. Pay attention to what pops up seasonally.
- Product-focused research: Complete for the initial launch of a new product or feature.
- Competitor-focused research: Complete once for both business and SEO competitors. Refresh/update when there’s a new feature, product/service, or competitor.
- Location-focused research: Do this once per geographic location serviced and when you expand into new service locations
Step 2: Sort And Align
Step 2, sorting the long list of mined queries, is the linchpin of keyword universes.
If you get this right, you’ll be installing a powerful SEO prioritization system for your company.
Getting it wrong is just wasting time.
Anyone can create a large list of keywords, but creating strong filters and sorting mechanisms is hard.
The old school way to go about prioritization is by search volume.
Throw that classic view out the window: We can do better than that.
Most times, keywords with higher search volume actually convert less well – or get no real traffic at all due to AIOs.
As I mentioned in Death of the Keyword:
A couple of months ago, I rewrote my guide to inhouse SEO and started ranking in position one. But the joke was on me. I didn’t get a single dirty click for that keyword. Over 200 people search for “in house seo” but not a single person clicks on a search result.
By the way, Google Analytics only shows 10 clicks from organic search over the last 3 months. So, what’s going on? The 10 clicks I actually got are not reported in GSC (privacy… I guess?), but the majority of searchers likely click on one of the People Also Asked features that show up right below my search result.
Keeping that in mind about search volume, since we don’t know which keywords are most important for the business before targeting them – and we don’t want to make decisions by volume alone – we need sorting parameters based on strong signals.
We can summarize several signals for each keyword and sort the list by total score.
That’s exactly what I’ve done with clients like Ramp, the fastest-growing fintech startup in history, to prioritize content strategy.
Image Credit: Kevin IndigSorting is about defining an initial set of signals and then refining it with feedback.
You’ll start by giving each signal a weight based on our best guess – and then refine it over time.
When you build your keyword universe, you’ll want to define an automated logic (say, in Google Sheets or BigQuery).
Your logic could be a simple “if this then that,” like “if keyword is mentioned by customer, assign 10 points.”
Potential signals (not all need to be used):
- Keyword is mentioned in customer conversation.
- Keyword is part of a topic that converts well.
- Topic is sharply related to direct offering or pain point your brand solves.
- Mmonthly search volume (MSV)
- Keyword difficulty (KD)/competitiveness
- (MSV * KD) / CPC → I like to use this simple formula to balance search demand with competitiveness and potential conversion value.
- Traffic potential.
- Conversions from paid search or other channels.
- Growing or shrinking MSV.
- Query modifier indicates users are ready to take action, like “buy” or “download.”
You should give each signal a weight from 0-10 or 0-3, with the highest number being strongest and zero being weakest.
Your scoring will be unique to you based on business goals.
Let’s pause here for a moment: I created a simple tool that will make this work way easier, saving a lot of time and trial + error. (It’s below!) Premium subscribers get full access to tools like this one, along with additional content and deep dives.
But let’s say you’re prioritizing building content around essential topics and have goals set around growing topical authority. And let’s say you’re using the 0-10 scale. Your scoring might look something like:
- Keyword is mentioned in customer conversation: 10.
- Keyword is part of a topic that converts well: 10.
- Topic is sharply related to direct offering or pain point your brand solves: 10.
- MSV: 3.
- KD/competitiveness: 6.
- (MSV * KD) / CPC → I like to use this simple formula to balance search demand with competitiveness and potential conversion value: 5.
- Traffic potential: 3.
- Conversions from paid search or other channels: 6.
- Growing or shrinking MSV: 4.
- Query modifier indicates users are ready to take action, like “buy” or “download”: 7.
The sum of all scores for each query in your universe then determines the priority sorting of the list.
Keywords with the highest total score land at the top and vice versa.
New keywords on the list fall into a natural prioritization.
Important note: If your research shows that sales are connected to queries related to current events, news, updates in research reports, etc., those should be addressed as soon as possible.
(Example: If your company sells home solar batteries and recent weather news increases demand due to a specific weather event, make sure to prioritize that in your universe ASAP.)
Amanda’s thoughts: I might get some hate for this stance, but if you’re a new brand or site just beginning to build a content library and you fall into the integrator category, focus on building trust first by securing visibility in organic search results where you can as quickly as you can.
I know, I know: What about conversions? Conversion-focused content is crucial to the long-term success of the org.
But to set yourself apart, you need to actually create the content that no one is making about the questions, pain points, and specific needs your target audience is voicing.
If your sales team repeatedly hears a version of the same question, it’s likely there’s no easy-to-find answer to the question – or the current answers out there aren’t trustworthy. Trust is the most important currency in the era of AI-based search. Start building it ASAP. Conversions will follow.
Step 3: Refine
Models get good by improving over time.
Like a large language model that learns from fine-tuning, we need to adjust our signal weighting based on the results we see.
We can go about fine-tuning in two ways:
1. Anecdotally, conversions should increase as we build new content (or update existing content) based on the keyword universe prioritization scoring.
Otherwise, sorting signals have the wrong weight, and we need to adjust.
2. Another way to test the system is a snapshot analysis.
To do so, you’ll run a comparison of two sets of data: the keywords that attract the most organic visibility and the pages that drive the most conversions, side-by-side with the keywords at the top of the universe.
Ideally, they overlap. If they don’t, aim to adjust your sorting signals until they come close.
Tips For Maintaining Your Keyword Universe
Look, there’s no point in doing all this work unless you’re going to maintain the hygiene of this data over time.
This is what you need to keep in mind:
1. Once you’ve created a page that targets a keyword in your list, move it to a second tab on the spreadsheet or another table in the database.
That way, you don’t lose track and end up with writers creating duplicate content.
2. Build custom click curves for each page type (blog article, landing page, calculator, etc.) when including traffic and revenue projections.
Assign each step in the conversion funnel a conversion rate – like visit ➡️newsletter sign-up, visit ➡️demo, visit ➡️purchase – and multiply search volume with an estimated position on the custom click curve, conversion rates, and lifetime value. (Fine-tune regularly.)
Here’s an example: MSV * CTR (pos 1) * CVRs * Lifetime value = Revenue prediction
3. GPT for Sheets or the Meaning Cloud extension for Google Sheets can speed up assigning each keyword to a topic.
Meaning Cloud allows us to easily train an LLM by uploading a spreadsheet with a few tagged keywords.
GPT for Sheets connects Google Sheets with the OpenAI API so we can give prompts like “Which of the following topics would this keyword best fit? Category 1, category 2, category 3, etc.”
LLMs like Chat GPT, Claude, or Gemini have become good enough that you can easily use them to assign topics as well. Just prompt for consistency!
4. Categorize the keywords by intent, and then group or sort your sheet by intent. Check out Query Fan Out to learn why.
5. Don’t build too granular and expansive of a keyword universe that you can’t activate it.
If you have a team of in-house strategists and three part-time freelancers, expecting a 3,000 keyword universe to feel doable and attainable is … an unmet expectation.
Your Keyword Universe Is Designed To Explore
The old way of doing SEO – chasing high-volume keywords and hoping for conversions – isn’t built for today’s search reality.
Trust is hard to earn. (And traffic is hard to come by.)
The keyword universe gives you a living, breathing SEO operating system. One that can evolve based on your custom scoring and prioritization.
Prioritizing what’s important (sorting) allows us to literally filter through the noise (distractions, offers, shiny objects) and bring us to where we want to be.
So, start with your old keyword docs. (Or toss them out if they’re irrelevant, aged poorly, or simply hyper-focused on volume.)
Then, dig into what your customers are really asking. Build smart signals. Assign weights. And refine as you go.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about building a system that actually works for you.
And speaking of building a system…
Keyword Universe Tracker (For Premium Subscribers)
For premium Growth Memo subscribers, we’ve got a tool that will help save you time and score queries by unique priority weights that you set.
Image Credit: Kevin IndigMore Resources:
- Google AI Mode And The Future Of Search Monetization: Ads, Prompts, And The Post-Keyword Era
- How To Use ChatGPT For Keyword Research
- SEO In The Age Of AI
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
