Can I assign a hotkey or shortcut to change the background of a word?

I work in Pages. I need to hightlight/change background of single words in documents. I normally doubleclick a word, then go to palette, then click the color I want. I want to be able to select a word by double clicking, then press a hotkey(s) to hightlight it, like you would with yellow highlighter/marker on paper.

Thanks, Eddy