If you're launching a new product or service, your first SEO task is to research and identify the search keywords for which you should try to rank the new component. This brief video will show you how to use Topic Explorer for that process.

1. In Topic Explorer, enter a general topic relevant to your new offering. In this example, we're imagining that H&M is launching a new Harry Potter clothing line for back to school, so we enter "harry potter clothing." For now, we'll stick with Phrase Match, and click the Search button to begin our research.

2. Note that the highest percentage of intent for keywords related to "Harry Potter clothing" is transactional (52%), followed closely by informational (41%).

3. Scrolling down to the table, we can see a lot of information about these related topics, including user intent, average search volume, CPC cost, and seasonal search volume.

4. Now let's switch to Semantic Match. This will enable us to identify a broader range of topics I might want to try to rank for.

Notice that with Semantic Match we uncover some interesting topics that don't necessarily contain words from our initial keywords. For example, in this case we might want to try to rank pages for clothing from the different Hogwarts houses, such as "ravenclaw shirt" and "slytherin shirt."

5. Let's go back to Phrase Match (because it had a larger keyword set) and activate the Topic Clusters Only filter.

Topic Clusters Only cleans up a lot of the clutter and redundancy in a keyword list, grouping similar terms together.