Exclude Keywords
This document will guide you through the keyword research process for one content silo, highlighting the importance of the process of using the Exclude feature on Ahrefs.
Example Keyword Research for a B2C/B2B video editing platform
InVideo is a company from San Francisco, California, that provides its clients with the most robust/comprehensive cloud-based video creation platform.
InVideo provides users with over 2,000 templates (more added constantly) that they can use to transform their existing content into compelling videos in a very shot period of time.
Leading by example, InVideo is always looking for ways to educate their community on industry-related trends. In their blog, InVideo wants to create content relating to video marketing trends and video marketing data.
In the next few minutes, through the example of researching video marketing trends, you will learn how to refine your keyword research by including relevant search terms and excluding search terms unrelated to your targeted search intent.
Getting started
Go to Ahrefs.com
Type in all of the variations for video you can think of
Choosing your Main Keywords
Main keywords are your broad match keywords that describe the topic of keywords you want to rank for.
Remember: Go as broad as possible here, using terms that are going to be common to most searches.
In our case, we will start with the broadest industry-related keywords:
video, videos
Use Include Feature to streamline your research
Having video, videos as our main keywords resulted in a keyword list of almost 14,000,000 results.
We want to streamline our research towards video marketing trends and statistics.
So before we dig into the Exclude Feature, let's include terms relevant to our research.
We opted for: data, statistics, statistic, trends, trend, stat, stats, graph, graphs, metric, metrics, analytics, analysis, kpi, kpis
Makes sense right? And look, we got our keyword list to little over 28,000. Great.
Pro tip: Check out our Include Keywords Feature how-to at this point. It will help you fine-tune your research to perfection!
Using Ahref's Exclude Keywords Feature
The power of the Exclude feature is to filter out keywords that are not related to the targeted intent of the research you are conducting.
At this point, you need to go through your list of keywords to find out what is not relevant.
In our case, it becomes obvious we do not want to target search queries related to the gaming industry. We are looking for video marketing stats.
So, let's exclude game, and all derived terms, such as games and gaming. And, while we are there, let's exclude some terms irrelevant to our search.
In our case, it's 6 in total: game, games, gaming, software, stream, streaming.
Final Look
Now that we have a refined list of keywords, we can do another quick look and see if there are more terms to include.
Scroll through the pages looking for any keywords that were discovered, but are not in our Include Keywords.
In our case, things look awesome!
So let's export!
Exporting Your List
Our list contains around 23,000 relevant keywords, but we may not need to export them all.
Why?
Because many of the keywords likely have 0 search volume.
Important: Why would you export as much as 23000 keywords if you don't need them all? We care about your budget! ClusterAi is usage based, eliminate keywords that don't add value.
Use the pagination at the bottom of Ahrefs to get to the part of the list where the volume goes down to zero.
In our case, this was page 30.
Important: If your export does not go down to zero, you risk leaving valuable keywords out of your ClusterAi groupings.
This means we need to export the first 1500 keywords.
Pro Tip: Each page contains 50 keywords. Page 10 = 500 keywords, page 100 = 5,000 keywords, etc.
Pro tip: instead of using the pagination at the bottom of Ahrefs, use the permalink in your browser to navigate pages faster.
Modify the variable after ?page=.
Let ClusterAi do the rest!