how to do a keyword research analysis

How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide

Published: September 04, 2024

Keyword research has remained a constant in a rapidly changing search landscape. If you’re an inbound marketer looking to optimize your website, understanding how to do keyword research is a must.

In this post, we’ll define what keyword research is, why it’s important, how to conduct your research for your SEO strategy , and how to choose the right keywords for your website.

Table of Contents

What is keyword research?

Why is keyword research important, elements of keyword research, how to research keywords for your seo strategy, how to find and choose keywords for your website, best keywords for seo.

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Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

Keyword research helps you find your SEO sweet spot — the overlap of keywords that aren’t too hard to rank for and keywords that you can confidently produce excellent content on. It also identifies the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.

I talked to HubSpot Growth Manager Amal Kalepp , who says that keyword research “determines who your competitors are and which area of the search landscape you can rank for. Doing keyword research and understanding where your blog or website sweet spot is — that’s what gives you rankability.”

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Drill down into your website’s traffic sources and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people use to arrive at your site.

Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have.

Remember, if you’re having trouble brainstorming with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues in sales or service. Ask them what types of terms their prospects or customers have questions about.

Those are often great starting points for keyword research.

Here at HubSpot, we use the Search Insights Report. This template is designed to help you do the same and bucket your keywords into topic clusters, analyze MSV, and inform your editorial calendar and strategy.

Featured Resource: Search Insights Report Template

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Step 3. Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze accordingly.

User intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google.

That means it’s vital that your web page addresses the problem a searcher wants to solve rather than simply including the keyword the searcher used.

So, how does this affect your keyword research?

It’s tempting to take keywords at face value, but they can have many different meanings.

And because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra careful about how you interpret the keywords you target.

Let’s say you’re researching the keyword “how to start a blog” for an article you want to create. “Blog” can mean a blog post or the blog website itself, and the searcher’s intent behind that keyword will influence the direction of your article.

Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post ? Or do they want to know how to launch a website domain for a new blog?

If your content strategy only targets people interested in the latter, you’ll need to determine the keyword’s intent before using it.

To verify a user’s intent, it’s a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself and see what types of results come up.

I did a quick search for “how to start a blog,” and it looks like most users are searching for info on how to start a website with a blog, not an individual blog post:

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Keyword Research – An In-Depth Guide to Help You Rank Higher [+Template]

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Keyword research can help you effectively reach more of your audience. By understanding exactly what they are searching for, you can create targeted content to meet their needs. But, in order to maximize your impact, you need to take a systematic approach using the most accurate keyword research tools . In this post, we’ll break down the complete step-by-step guide to how to conduct keyword research and the tools to use to achieve real results.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of finding the words and phrases your target audience is searching for on Google. Whether they are looking to find information like, pizza delivery options in your city, or are ready to purchase a product or a service, once you identify the high-value keywords they are searching related to your business, and their intent, you can optimize your search strategy and rank higher on Google.

Why does keyword research matter to you?

Using the right keywords (also known as search terms) gives your content the power to climb higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is exactly why keyword research is a pillar in search engine optimization (SEO).

If you set up your keyword research properly, scaling your ongoing SEO efforts and powering your growth will be fairly easy to execute.

It is important that your primary research is comprehensive and hones in on search intent because it will be the foundation of your search engine optimization strategy. Think of it as the base of all your future subject-specific SEO efforts to bring you new leads like a passive income. During this initial phase of research, your goal is to gather as many relevant keyword phrases as you can that could reach your audience.

In this blog we will guide you through how to conduct keyword research:

• Scan your website for keywords
• Dig deeper into your keyword data with Google Search Console
• Take advantage of competitor analysis tools
• Find the most valuable phrases with the keyword generation tool
• Consolidate your keyword data
• Categorize keywords by user intent and semantic search
• Analyze long-tail vs. short-tail keywords
• Choose the right mix of keywords to focus on

You can download our keyword research template below and apply what you learn as you go.

How to do keyword research

1. scan your website for keywords.

To start your keyword research process, the first step is to open your website and identify the main categories. Note any very obvious keywords you will need to include. The keywords you find during this process are the first ones you should add to your initial list to gain high-level insight into your website’s main goals.

At this stage don’t focus on the specific terminology used, you can tweak the wording later, focus on understanding what your website is aiming to do and/or sell to understand how you will generate search traffic.

• Pro Tip: Pay special attention to how your content is organized. Look for where the content and product pages are located. If you have a menu, those keywords are (yes, you guessed it) key. You can also find additional crucial industry words by scanning your site as a whole, including content featured on your homepage, blogs, product pages, feature descriptions, mission statements, and FAQ. If you sell a product, both the product and its category would be included .

Below you can see an example of important keywords on Similarweb’s homepage that would need to be included during this stage of SEO research. Words like ‘digital research’ and ‘investing’  relate to how our content is organized. As you go through your own website these are the types of phrases you are searching for in this stage of your keyword research.

2. Dig deep into your keyword data in Google Search Console

Take a look at the data you already have. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel – yet. If you have access to Google Search Console, (which can also be visible through your Google Analytics account), you can navigate to the performance section and look at the search results reported there. The list you create here will give you a thorough review of your strongest keywords that are already working.  If a term is performing well, you need to ensure you continue to include it in your SEO strategy , and possibly, even double down on your content efforts to win traffic from the term.

• Pro Tip: To use the Performance section effectively, set the data range for the page at 6 months, exclude all branded queries to compile a list of general terms that your audience is searching for, and then download the list it creates as a CSV file.

3. Take advantage of competitor analysis tools

Use competitive data tools to analyze your website and gain more insight into your current performance. Keep in mind that the keywords you will find differ for macro-level SEO and local SEO. You could conduct macro-level keyword research for specific countries using Similarweb. This will help you drill down and understand the topics and keyword opportunities that are trending in countries that interest you.

To do this, you can use Similarweb’s website analysis tool , and first, insert your own URL. Next, click on the Keywords section and filter out all branded keywords. After that, navigate to the “Competitors” section of your website analysis. Note the top three competitors you have and then run an audit on their websites too. For each audit you run, go to the Keyword Analysis section, filter out the branded search queries and export the reports for internal use. Remember that competitors’ traffic data can be as valuable as ranking data for your analysis, so don’t give up on any exported dataset yet – many of them will come in handy for your SEO strategy.

• Pro Tip: It can also be useful to filter out results that fall outside of the top 50 rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) to weed out many irrelevant queries.

Combine the keyword list you created for each of your competitors’ sites with the one you made for your own site. You should merge the exported Excel files into one. Now you can consolidate the ranking and traffic data for each of your competitors and then remove any duplicate keywords.

Alternatively, you can decide not to consolidate your competitors’ ranking and traffic data and use only the keyword data. At this point you have the basis of the research: You found out what your website is ranked for, what phrases your competitors’ websites are ranked for, and what real people search for. Now it’s time to inspect your entire search potential.

You can also perform micro-level research using Navads . Navads, acquired by Uberall in 2018, is the leading location data provider for the databases that power the navigation and mapping industry. It has a local search tool that helps you rank higher in map search results.

4. Find the most valuable phrases with Keyword Generation Tool

Your next step is to use a keyword tool to discover more keyword ideas, synonyms, and suggestions. You can use Google Keyword Planner to discover new keyword ideas. Another and often easier option is to use a keyword research tool like Similarweb’s Keyword Generator Tool and insert keywords by the categories you found on your website during stage one. Diving into more specific categories ensures the keywords the tool suggests are relevant to your topic.

Consider your target audience: Who are they? How do they search for what they need? What words or phrasing do they use? Are they primarily on desktop or mobile? This is also the perfect time to further research “interesting” phrases you may have found through competitive keyword research .

• Pro Tip: Since branded terms are usually irrelevant to SEO, be sure to filter out brand terms when you conduct your keyword research. You should also filter out irrelevant keyword phrase suggestions such as price and jobs. 

Again, in this stage, the goal is to compile a comprehensive keyword list for each of your chosen categories, so add as many relevant keywords as possible. You will probably discover that the broad category you started off with needs to be broken down into subtopics to make your keyword list usable for technical SEO and content marketing purposes. For example, digital marketing is a huge category that includes SEO, pay-per-click (PPC), media planning , marketing strategies, and more. So, each of those subjects should become its own subcategory at this stage since they each require research into specific keyword terms.

After you’ve broken down your main category into more easily digestible bite-sized subcategories, each subcategory should have its own keyword list that you can download. Now, it’s time to download those lists and take some time to review each. If you find that one of your categories is still quite wide, meaning it contains many search queries and very large volumes, you can break it down further into more detailed subcategories until it’s manageable.

Once you’re happy with your subcategory lists go to Google Keyword Planner. This tool allows up to 10 base phrases per ‘research,’ so group all phrases from the same subcategory together to find the best relevant keyword suggestions. ‘Research’ in SEO keyword planning refers to the maximum number of starting keywords that you can use in Google Keyword Planner to find related keyword suggestions.

5. Consolidate your keyword data

At this point, you’re probably wondering why you have so many keyword lists, but don’t worry that means you’re on the right track! These lists are your data sources for all search volumes and trends, and also for your competitors’ ranking and performance data. In fact, now it’s time to combine all of the lists that fall into the same subcategory by migrating all the data to one master Excel file. Once you’ve combined them remove any duplicate keywords. The reason you are merging the lists you’ve made is so you can effectively organize and implement your keyword research when it’s go-time.

• Pro Tip : Perform search trend and rank calculations on your data lists. Then consolidate the sources and remove duplicate phrase entries. Finally, pull all the competitive data related to your research (competitors ranking, traffic shares , etc.). Now you can calculate competitive keyword difficulty and value easily and build a data-driven SEO strategy. For example, you can identify recent changes in search volumes as well as competitor’s weak spots, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

To understand how to most effectively implement your keyword research, map out your data and insights against the current content on your website. Ask yourself:

• Which terms do you already have pages for?
• Which ones do you need to create pages for?

These questions will allow you to understand how to prioritize your efforts and successfully execute your keyword strategy.

6. Categorize keywords by user intent and semantic search

Start by dividing the phrases you’ve compiled into smaller groups based on topic similarities. From there you can break them down into large categories, like digital marketing, subcategories like SEO, and topic words like keyword research. For your topic keywords with semantic similarities, you want to keep in mind the users’ search intent for every query and effectively reach your potential customers.

People can use the same keywords to mean different things, so an important part of this process is decoding the user’s search intent.

For example, if someone searches for toilet paper what do they mean? Are they looking for places to order from, popular brands, or keeping tabs on which stores have toilet paper in stock? This is why you must understand search intent to categorize your keywords and ultimately reach your relevant target audience. Once you understand your target audience’s intent you can analyze the most relevant search phrases for them and for your business, and decide what are the right keywords for you.

In general, there are four main intent categories:

• Informational: These generally include “how-to” questions and “what” questions. For example, ‘how to disinfect plastic.’   
• Commercial investigation : Specific Attributes, versus, best, for example, ‘Walmart vs Target.’
• Transactional : This includes searches where the user has the intent to buy or download, for example, ‘buying waterproof kid’s toys.’
• Navigational : This includes branded queries, like ‘Facebook updates.’
• Pro Tip : Taking the time to thoroughly complete this step will help you to achieve very high clarity in your groups and ensure your SEO optimization efforts will have the largest impact possible.

Remove all remaining terms that are still irrelevant to your SEO goals such as queries that include times, locations, and competitor names. What you deem irrelevant will change based on your individual site and industry, so there is not a hard and fast rule to follow.

Optimization gaps are pages that are optimized for the wrong search intent, that have missing content, or are missing the right meta elements . To do this, continue re-dividing your keyword groups into smaller and smaller groups until you’re left only with keyword groups of semantically related search queries .  

7. Analyze long-tail vs. short-tail keywords

Within your keyword groups, it’s important to ensure you have a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords . Short-tail keywords are more competitive and more to rank for because they are broader searches. On the other hand, long-tail keywords typically contain over three words and are less competitive because they are geared toward more specific searches. A good mix of the two types allows you to develop a keyword strategy that balances long-term and short-term wins.

For example, which of these keyword phrases do you think would be easier to rank for?

Toilet paper

Reusable toilet paper

[Did you pick the second one? Good!] The more competition there is for a keyword, the harder it is to rank.

As you can tell, long-tail keywords are more specific so they have a much clearer search intent than short-tail keywords. They also usually drive higher-quality traffic to your site since people are looking for something specific, which results in a more qualified lead. At many times data will show long-tail keywords can also produce larger traffic volumes when accumulated than short-tails for a specific topic, in those cases, it will be a strategic decision to focus on long-tail keywords that offer higher relevancy and match the audience’s search intent. This is another reason to make sure you don’t only pick high-volume phrases, but look at the big picture and choose the right keywords for SEO that offer maximum relevance and potential.

8. Choose the right mix of keywords to focus on

When creating your keyword plan you need to consider the following information and how they fit into your SEO strategy:

• Search volume: You should be closely evaluating the search volume of the keywords you are targeting. A keyword with a high search volume is more likely to be competitive, or harder to rank for. In order to rank higher on a high-volume, highly competitive keyword, you need to have site authority for the topic. One way you can build authority: create content on lower volume-related keywords. This shows Google that you are an expert on the topic and boosts your standing. Knowing the search volume for any given keyword helps you strategize to create the most effective approach given the characteristics of your website.
• Organic click-through rates (CTRs): This metric will give you an idea of how likely people are to click on posts that rank for a specific keyword. For example search terms like “what is the weather,” which are often answered on the Google Search Result page, may have a lower click-through rate since the user gets their answer question without needing to take another action.
• Keyword search trends: Trending keywords are constantly changing, so you need the most up-to-date data to stay on top of what’s trending in search. Similarweb has a keywords trends feature where you can quickly see what keywords are driving traffic now. Trends can change based on current events, pop culture developments (think Meghan and Harry’s Oprah interview ), or even seasonal events like Black Friday. Watch for specific times to rank for keywords because that’s when it matters.
• Your competitors’ keywords:  You can gain a lot of insight from keywords your competitors are ranking on. Using Similarweb’s Website Analysis, you can see the market share that each competitor has for specific keywords.
• Long-tail and short-tail keywords: As discussed earlier, you want to be sure you are focusing on the long-tail and short-tail keywords that make sense for your search strategy and your site’s level of authority.

Now you have sorted and expanded on your data strategically. This means you can easily estimate the difficulty as well as the value of ranking for a keyword or a topic and build an SEO strategy that takes everything into account and can be easily deployed. You can make smarter choices in creating or optimizing content, easily discover and address content gaps , and scale your activity without duplication hazards.

Put your keyword research to work

Boom. You did it. You just completed your initial keyword research. You now have small keyword groups you can use to map out and optimize pages from your site and create new pages for keywords you know will win SEO traffic. The list you have now enables you to easily manage on-page optimization and keyword use, as well as mitigate the risk of duplicate content.

Keyword research is the process of finding the terms and phrases that your target audience is searching for on search engines.

Why should I use keyword research?

You should use keyword research to discover the right terms that will help you climb higher on the SERP, and therefore increase the traffic to your website.

How do I conduct keyword research?

You can conduct keyword research with SEO tools. Similarweb’s SEO tools allow you to discover keywords your target audience is searching for, and the terms that are driving traffic to your competitors.

by Limor Barenholtz

Director of SEO at Similarweb

Limor brings 20 years of SEO expertise, focusing on Technical SEO, JavaScript rendering, and mobile optimization. She thrives on solving complex problems and creating scalable strategies.

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Keyword Research: An In-Depth Beginner’s Guide

Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization. This guide covers what it is and how you should do keyword research.

Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization, and without it, you cannot expect to create sustainable and repeatable visibility.

Today, SEO is a much wider discipline than in the early days of the industry and has been segmented into many verticals.

But, at the core, SEO is about finding opportunities online and capturing relevant traffic to a website through visibility in search engines. Keyword research is at the heart of that SEO strategy.

This guide explains what keyword research is, why it’s important, and how you can make a start for a successful SEO strategy.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a process of finding words, queries, and phrases that users are searching for, which means a keyword that has search volume.

Research involves connecting the relevance of keywords to a website and its individual pages so that the user can find the best page to answer their query, known as search intent.

Keyword research also involves categorizing search queries into the different stages of a user journey and different categories of search, such as transactional, navigational, and informational.

Good keyword research enables users to find what they need:

• Shoppers who want to buy something can find the right product page.
• A user that wants to know ‘how to’ can find a page that explains a process in-depth.
• Users who want to research a person or brand can find out about that entity.

Keyword research should also carefully consider if ranking on a keyword is worth the effort it would take to rank highly and get visitors. Not all traffic is equal.

Download the ebook, How To Do Keyword Research For SEO .

Why Keyword Research Is Important For SEO

A search engine is an information retrieval system built around the queries that a user inputs to find an answer or relevant information to their search query.

The predominant focus of Google is to connect a user with the best answer to their query and the best website page so that a user is satisfied. Understanding this underlines SEO.

Good keyword research is the foundation of how a business can connect with its potential customers and audience. Understanding this helps to understand a good SEO strategy.

A business strategy starts with understanding its audience and their needs.

• What do they want?
• What do they need?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• What could solve their problem?

Keyword research is an extension of understanding your audience by first considering their needs and then the phrases, keywords, or queries they use to find solutions.

Keyword research is also important for SEO because it can show you where the opportunities are by knowing what your audience is searching for.

This will help you to find new areas of business and to prioritize where to focus attention and resources.

Keyword research will also help you to calculate where you can expect a return on investment to justify your efforts:

• Can a keyword deliver relevant traffic that has the possibility to convert to an end goal?
• What is an estimation of that traffic, and how much is each visitor worth to your business?

Basically, keyword research is the ultimate business research tool.

Read more: Why Keywords Are Still So Very Important For SEO

Keyword Research Basics

Monthly search volume.

Monthly Search Volume (MSV) is a predominant measure of keyword value. It’s a useful metric as a starting point to consider if anyone is searching for that keyword, but it shouldn’t be used in isolation or as the only measure of value.

Just because a keyword has a high MSV doesn’t mean it is the right keyword for you to rank on.

High-volume keywords generally deliver ‘browsing’ traffic at the top of the funnel. They are useful for brand awareness but not for direct conversion.

Low-volume keywords can be much more valuable because they can deliver users who are ready to buy a product.

Read more: A Complete Guide To Keyword Search Volume For SEO

User Intent

User intent refers to what type of result they want to see when they search for a query – the intention of their search.

You will hear user intent talked about a lot in keyword research, as it is one of the most important factors in the process.

User intent is important in two ways, firstly because your primary aim in creating content and pages on a website are to provide a user with information that they want to know.

There’s no point in creating a page about what you care about – your user only cares about their problems and needs.

You can have the best page in the world about the history of cupcakes, but if a user searching for [cupcake] wants a recipe for cupcakes, then they will not click on your link.

Secondly, Google considers relevance when serving results pages (as we said above, they want to deliver the best result for a query). So, the better your page fits user intent, the better it might rank.

Read more: How People Search: Understanding User Intent

When Google considers which pages it will show in search results, the algorithm will look at other pages that users are clicking on for that query.

If we have a query such as [cupcake], Google has to consider if a user wants to know what a cupcake is, how to make a cupcake, or wants to buy a cupcake.

By looking at a search result page, you can get a good idea of user intent from the other results.

Reviewing the search results page of a query should be part of your research process for every keyword you want to consider.

Keyword relevance and user intent are much the same things. It’s about knowing what the user really means when they search. This is more ambiguous for head keywords and less so for long-tail queries.

Long-Tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are called long-tail because they fall to the right of the search demand curve – where the graph looks like a long tail stretching to the right.

The search demand curve is a graph that shows keywords with high volume to the left and lower search volumes to the right.

Longer queries that are more focused fall to the right. Head terms with broad meaning and high volume fall to the left.

The value of long-tail keywords is that they are usually highly focused terms that convert well, as users are actively looking for something very specific.

For example, [iPhone 13] is a head term with high volume (2.7 million MSV), and [Best affordable iPhone 13 cases] (210 MSV) is a long-tail keyword with far fewer searches but would have a high conversion rate.

Long-tail keywords are useful to include in a keyword strategy because they are usually much easier to rank for and achievable for a new website, and the cumulative volume of many long-tail keywords adds up to considerable targeted traffic.

This is a much more stable strategy than focusing on one high-volume ambiguous keyword.

Read more: Long-Tail Keyword Strategy: Why & How To Target Intent For SEO

Types Of Search Query

There are four types of keywords that are useful to understand as they categorize the different user intents and can help when planning a keyword strategy.

• Informational – users looking for information or an answer to a question (top of the funnel).
• Navigational – users wanting to find a specific brand, site, or page (brand searches).
• Commercial – users researching brands, products, or services (middle of the funnel).
• Transactional – users ready to complete a purchase or action (bottom of the funnel).

Local keywords can also be considered another category.

How To Do Keyword Research

Now that you have a better understanding of the basics of keyword research, we can look at where you would start with your research and keyword strategy.

1. How To Find Keyword Ideas

The first stage of keyword research is to brainstorm ideas for seed keywords, and there are several ways to do this.

Your Target Audience

Everything starts with your audience and what they want. Think about their needs, wants, and especially their pain points and problems.

Start to compile your wide list of words, ideas, and topics that surround your niche or business.

Think About Questions

Question-based keyword queries are valuable as they can help you to capture featured snippets and can be a way to jump rank on highly competitive keywords.

Ask your sales team and review CRM data to find the questions that your audience is asking.

Also, think of question modifiers that will start to build out your list:

• What [is a road bike].
• How to [ride a road bike].
• When is [the best time to service a road bike].
• What is [the best road bike].
• Where is [road bike shop].

Current Site Queries

If your site already has some online history, then Google Search Console can tell you what Google thinks your website is relevant for. This is insightful to tell you if your site is conveying the right message and to find opportunities.

If Google is showing a lot of queries that have nothing to do with your product or brand, then you need to apply more keyword focus to your pages.

Look for queries that are position 10 or greater, have reasonable impressions, and you think are relevant to your business.

These are potential quick-win opportunities that you can capture by making improvements and optimizing pages for the query.

Read more: A Complete Google Search Console Guide For SEO Pros

Competitors’ Keywords

Your competitors are a gold mine of information because they might already have invested in extensive research.

A business should be constantly monitoring its competitors anyway, so keep an eye on what content they are producing and the terms they target.

A keyword gap analysis will help you find opportunities your competitors are targeting that you might not have considered.

Read more: Competitor Keyword Analysis: 5 Ways To Fill The Gaps In Your Organic Strategy & Get More Traffic

Seed Keywords

Start with high-level ‘seed’ keywords that you can use as a starting point to then open up variants and related queries.

Seed keywords are ‘big’ head terms such as [iPhone], [trainers], [road bike], or [cupcake].

For each seed keyword, start to think of topics that are related:

• Road bike maintenance.
• Road bike training.
• Road bike clothing.
• Road bike lights.

Also, use question modifiers and buying modifiers such as:

• Best [road bike].
• Buy [road bike].
• Price [for women’s road bike].
• [road bikes for hire] near me.
• Reviews [of road bikes under $1,000].

When you have finished this process, you should have a raw list of potential keywords grouped in topics – such as maintenance, clothing, training, etc.

2. How To Analyze Keywords

Once you have your raw list, it’s time to start to analyze and sort by value and opportunity.

Search Volume

Search volume will tell you if anyone is actively searching for this term.

For a first-stage strategy, you should aim for keywords with a mid-range and long-tail volume for quick wins and then build up to approach more competitive terms with higher volumes.

Head keywords with super high volumes (like ‘iPhone’) are not the best keywords to focus on as they can be too ambiguous and rarely have a specific intent.

Also, the amount of work that is needed to rank can be too high a barrier for entry unless you have an established domain of significant authority.

If a tool shows a keyword with zero search volume, this doesn’t always mean you should discard the term.

If the keyword is shown in the tool, then there can be value to consider targeting it in your strategy. However, make sure you know your audience and what is relevant to them before you invest resources in a zero-volume keyword.

Read more: Why You Should Target Zero Search Volume Keywords

Search Intent

After you have sorted your raw lists by search volumes, it’s then time to review the intent for each keyword that you would like to target.

The SERP will tell you everything that you need to know, and you should always review SERPs for clues on how to construct content and rank.

Look at the other listing that rank highly:

• Are they ‘how-to’ guides that indicate it’s informational?
• Do the titles say ‘buy,’ ‘best,’ or include product names?
• Is there a shopping carousel that indicates a buying keyword?
• Is there a location map that indicates it’s a local search?

Tag each keyword type and then consider which are the strongest keywords from each group.

You can also use a research tool that will tell you the type of keyword.

Topic Clusters

Grouping keywords into topic clusters is an advanced keyword strategy that can help to strengthen the topic authority of a site.

To do this, you would start with a high-volume head keyword and then research a series of keywords that supports that head term.

After creating pages of content that target each keyword, you use internal linking to connect pages with the same topic.

Read more: Keyword Clusters: How To Level Up Your SEO Content Strategy

3. How To Choose Organic Keywords

After sorting the volumes, intent, and topics, you will need to decide if you have a chance of ranking on a term by looking at how much competition there is for each keyword.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is one of the most important keyword metrics when doing your research.

If a keyword is so competitive that you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to rank, then you need to get strategic.

The easiest way to calculate keyword difficulty is to use a research tool that gives a score for each keyword.

Or, you can refer to Google Keyword Planner Tool and look at the CPC and level of difficulty. The higher the CPC bid, the higher the competition.

If you are starting out, first approach the lower competition keywords that are achievable and then build your way up to more competitive terms.

Read more: Why Keyword Research Is Useful For SEO & How To Rank

Connecting To Your Objectives And Goals

Unless a keyword can actually deliver a result for you – do you want to target it?

As we said above, targeting head terms is not the best strategy as they will, at best, deliver browsing or drive-by visitors. Unless you are a big brand with a big budget that is aiming for brand awareness, this is not the best application of your resources and budget.

Choosing your keyword priority should start with what can give you the best return in the shortest time frame.

Good keyword research is not just about trying to target a high-volume popular keyword. A good keyword strategy is about finding the right keywords for your needs and outcome. Always keep that front and center.

Read more: How To Calculate ROI For SEO When Targeting A Set Of Keywords

Watch John Mueller talk about ranking for head keywords in this video from the 38:55 minute mark.

Using Keyword Research Tools

Doing your research without a tool is limited; for the most in-depth keyword research, you need help to find keyword opportunities you had not thought of.

The following keyword research tools are all free versions that you can start out with.

Google Keyword Planner

The original keyword tool has evolved over the years, but it still remains one of the best free keyword tools and a good starting point to find seed keywords and keyword ideas.

The Google tool is aligned with Google Ads, so the data is skewed towards paid ads but is still valuable for research.

You need a Google Ads account to access the tool. Google will try to force you to set up an active campaign, but you can access the account by setting up an account without a campaign.

Without a campaign running, you will only get limited search volumes displayed in ranges, but the tool is still useful for its suggestions of keyword ideas. If you have an active campaign, Google will show you the monthly search volume.

You can add up to 10 seed keywords and get a list of suggested keywords, and run competitor URLs in the tool to find keywords they are targeting. Doing this is a great place to start building out raw lists of keywords to work from.

Read more: How To Use Google Keyword Planner

Read more: 9 Creative Ways To Use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool

Google Trends

Google Trends offers data based on actual search query data. It doesn’t provide search volumes, but the data in Google trends can be compared with actual search volumes from other tools so you can get a comparative feel of what the actual volumes are.

Where Trends excels is to identify trending topics and subtopics in a niche and to find geographic search trends in a local area. Trends will recommend related keywords that are currently growing in popularity.

As part of a keyword strategy, this can show you where to focus resources and when to stop investing in terms.

Read more: How To Use Google Trends For SEO

Google Autocomplete

Previously known as Suggest, Autocomplete is integrated into the Google search box to help users complete their search with what Google calls ‘predictions.’

Google takes its predictions from common searches and trending searches.

As the suggestions are all variations around the topic you are typing, the results shown give you an insight into other related terms that users could be looking for.

Checking the predictions that Google provides in Autocomplete can help you find more variations and keywords to consider.

Read more: Google Autocomplete: A Complete SEO Guide

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a powerful tool that scrapes data from Google Autocomplete and connects a seed keyword with a variety of modifiers to produce a list of variants.

Answer The Public will quickly provide a list of suggestions, especially based on questions that you can use as a raw list to then review.

Read more: More Free Keyword Research Tools

Paid Keyword Research Tools

Free keyword tools are great to get you started and to create raw lists of keywords that you can then drill into.

However, for the best results, you might want to invest in a paid competitive analysis tool that can help you get monthly search volume and keyword difficulty data.

Some tools will also help with assigning topics and clustering for more advanced keyword strategies.

Anyone who does keyword research in-depth or to an advanced level will have their own process. They will also use a variety of tools and a combination of paid and free resources to get the best results.

Read more: Best Keyword Research Tools

Advanced Keyword Strategies

Now that you have an understanding of how to get started with keyword research, experiment with a few different websites and niches. Doing the work yourself is the best way to learn.

Once you have a better understanding in practice, move into more advanced methods and strategies to take your keyword research to the next level.

Advanced Keyword Research

• B2B Keyword Research Done Right With Practical Examples
• Keyword Clusters: How To Level Up Your SEO Content Strategy
• Building A Keyword Strategy For Comparison Content

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Shelley Walsh is the SEO Content Strategist at SEJ & produces the Pioneers, a series about the history of SEO ...

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Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide

Keyword research is an essential part of your SEO strategy. It’s the first step in the SEO copywriting process. Before you create your site’s content, you should find out what search terms your audience uses. Their search terms are your keywords. Based on these keywords, you can start writing useful, high-quality, and findable content. In this post, we’ll take you through the steps involved in keyword research.

Table of contents

What is keyword research, originality versus findability, a video on keyword research, focus keyword, long-tail keywords, keyword strategy, search intent, how to do keyword research in 10 steps, quick keyword research, prioritize your keyword list, a focus keyphrase and its synonyms only need one page, add related keyphrases to help google understand your text, check out results for singular and plural keywords, use a keyphrase only once, ready start writing.

Are you looking for a guide to keyword research for ecommerce? You can find more information tailored to your needs in this post about keyword research for online stores .

Keyword research is part of SEO (search engine optimization). It’s the work someone does to come up with an extensive list of keywords they would like a website to rank for. To obtain such a list, website owners need to dig into their desired audience and search engines. What search terms do people type into Google when looking for a particular product, service, business or type of organization? And what do they expect to find? With this list, website owners can create content that will attract more high-quality traffic to their site. Keyword research is never finished: repeating it regularly is essential to staying up-to-date!

Read more: What is keyword research? »

Why is keyword research important?

Proper keyword research is important because it makes clear what search terms your audience uses. At Yoast, we frequently come across business owners who use one set of words to describe their products, while their target audience uses a completely different set of words! As a result, potential customers can’t find those websites. In other words: there’s a mismatch.

To avoid this mismatch, you should do thorough keyword research. This research will make sure that you use the same words as your target audience. In addition, you should also consider your audience’s search intent . This will help you figure out what exactly your audience is looking for. All that’s left is for you to write high-quality content that answers your audience’s questions!

What about originality? Isn’t it better to stand out from the crowd and use different keywords than your competitors? Let’s say you (or your marketing department) decides to give a product an uncommon name. This can be a smart marketing decision, because people could remember your product more easily. If you rent out vacation cottages instead of vacation homes, for example, you might stand out more.

But beware: very few people search for [vacation cottages]. So if you optimize your text for cottages , you’ll probably rank well on that specific term. However, because your audience uses a different word, you won’t generate a lot of traffic, and you won’t reach a large part of your potential customers.

In this video, Michiel tells us more about keyword research and how we think it should be done. It’s part of our SEO for beginner’s course , available through our Yoast SEO Academy subscription :

Essential concepts of keyword research

Before we jump to doing keyword research , we’ll briefly explain some of its essential concepts.

A focus keyword or keyphrase is the word or phrase you want a certain page on your site to be found for in Google. You determine your set of focus keyphrases by doing keyword research.

Long-tail keywords are more specific and less commonly searched for than head keywords. They focus on a niche. The longer and more specific search terms are, the easier it will be to rank for them. Why? Because there will be less competition.

However, long-tail keywords are still worth ranking for! Because even though less people are searching for them, they might be more motivated to buy, subscribe, sign up, etc.

Your keyword strategy is about the decisions you make based on your keyword research. For instance, what content are you going to create first? Will you focus on the head or tail? How and where will you publish it? Will you create a piece of writing, a post or a product page, a video tutorial or an infographic?

Digging into search intent is key here: you have to discover what a searcher actually wants or needs. You’re not just looking at keywords. You’re also looking at the underlying goals of what a searcher wants to know, do or buy. Your content should provide a solution to the searcher’s “problem”. This is also known as content design .

There are 10 crucial steps to follow when carrying out keyword research. We’ll guide you through the process, and give you practical tips so you can conduct your own keyword research:

Before you start, think about your mission . Reflect on questions such as: What is the main goal of your business or organization? What makes it special? Who exactly are you trying to reach? And, what promises do you make on your website? Take your time and literally write down your mission. Once you’re able to answer these questions in detail, you’ll have taken the first and most important step in developing your keyword strategy. What if you’re in a competitive market? The market you’re in determines whether you’ll be able to rank high with your chosen keywords. Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. It’ll be hard to compete with these companies, because they have huge budgets for marketing in general and SEO in particular. If you’re launching into a competitive market, your best bet is to start out small. Once you ‘own’ a small part of that niche and become a bigger name in your business area, you could try to level up and sell your cruises to a larger (more general) audience. Your mission will then become more general as well. The scope of your business mission should align with your SEO goals, too. Be realistic about what kind of rankings you can achieve with the size of your business, and focus on what will help you achieve your mission. An example Let’s say you sell cruises to Hawaii. You offer great facilities for children, which makes your cruises especially suitable for parents with younger kids. If there are no other family-friendly cruises to Hawaii, you will stand out from the crowd. It will make your service unique. So it would be smart to make this your mission, your niche – because this is what you have to offer your audience.

Based on the data you’ve collected now, you can determine a keyword strategy . If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have a spreadsheet with a substantial amount of keyphrases, plus information about the competition and the search intent of your audience for those keyphrases. Now think about this question: How does my website hold up compared to the websites in the SERPs? Are you of equal size and marketing budget? Then go ahead and focus on those head terms. If not: try more long-tail keywords first. Focusing on a whole bunch of long-tail keywords combined could very well attract a lot of traffic. Once you’ve managed to rank for those long-tail keywords, aiming for more head terms will become easier. When you’ve decided where to jump in, think about the type of content: What was the search intent for my keyphrases? What is my audience looking for? But also, which content can I create that isn’t there yet, and how can I stand out in terms of quality or providing solutions? This will help you decide on the type of content you’re going to create .

In theory, this step is out of the scope of keyword research itself. Nevertheless, creating awesome landing pages is essential if you want to get traffic to your website. So, you’ll need to build optimized landing pages for your search terms. You don’t have to create all these pages immediately – it can be a long-term effort. Your keyword strategy will help you prioritize. Cornerstone content For your most important keyphrases you’ll create cornerstone content articles ; articles that provide the best possible content about that keyword – authoritative and all-encompassing. All your supporting long-tail articles should link to your cornerstone content pages. This is part of your internal linking strategy , which Yoast SEO Premium can help you implement . You can also use our SEO workout: the Cornerstone content approach to build a strong internal linking strategy in a few easy steps.

Once you’ve done a thorough analysis of your chances to rank on each specific term, published some amazing articles (and optimized them accordingly), you should wait a little. Check out your rankings. Does your article pop up? Did it hit the first page of Google’s SERPs? Or is it hidden away on page 2 or 3? Make sure to evaluate your results in the SERPs. There are various ways to check how your content is performing in the search results. The simplest way is to Google the terms you’ve optimized your articles for. Another option is to use Google Search Console to find out which queries you’re ranking for . While the Google Search Console method is a bit more complicated, it can be a great way to find new opportunities! And finally, a third method is to use a keyword tracking tool to monitor your rankings ; you can do this easily using the integrated Wincher features in the Yoast SEO plugin. However you do it, it’s always a good idea to check if your efforts are paying off. If you’re not able to rank on the first page, try to write another article, focused on an (even) more long-tail keyword. Make it a little bit more specific, more niche. And see how that goes. Evaluate again. Continue this process until you hit that first page of the SERPs!

As time goes on, things will change. Your audience may start using different words to search for what they want, so you might need to add new keywords to your sheet. And with the rise of generative AI , the competitive landscape is bound to change, either making it easier or harder to target particular keywords. Who knows? Blogging might not be relevant anymore. When you look at the situation from year to year, a lot can change. That’s why it’s important to reevaluate and refresh your keyword research once in a while. Take the time to update your sheet with the latest information. And don’t forget to keep your content fresh and up-to-date , too!

In an ideal world, you would do your keyword research, make a beautiful spreadsheet and create landing pages for each one. Your site structure would be flawless, and you’d blog and write every day, making your site rank higher and higher in Google. But we live in the real world.

Of course, your keyword research will not always be as extensive. And some posts or articles aren’t written as part of an awesome strategy, but just because the topic was in the news or something inspired you to write it . That’s just how these things work. But this doesn’t have to be a problem.

If you’re writing something that doesn’t exactly fit your strategy, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make that content rank. You could still use it to rank for something related to the terms in the list of your keyword strategy. Use the tools mentioned in step 3 and Google Trends to quickly check which keyword you’d like to rank for. At least, take some time to think about how to make your article or blog fit your strategy. After all, if you are writing valuable content, you might as well make it rank! You can find more tips on how to do keyword research on the fly in our focus keyword article .

Tips for keyword research

This all might sound pretty straight-forward, but we know it’s a lot of work and easier said than done. When put into practice, you might bump into some common issues or questions. Here we’ll give you some tips to make it work!

Pro-tip: Want us to guide you through keyword research step-by-step? With videos, quizzes and other training material? Take a look at our keyword research training in Yoast SEO Academy and let us help you!

How many keywords should you target? Well, we can’t tell you the exact number of keywords you should have, but we can tell you that you need a lot of them – as many as you can think of. However, more than 1000 keywords is probably too many! Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords.

But there’s no need to create pages for all of these straight away. You can add content bit by bit. Think about which keywords you want to rank for now (perhaps the more long-tail ones?) and which ones aren’t as important right away. Understand your priorities and plan the creation of your content.

Keep reading: Managing a growing blog: content planning »

In the past, each of the keywords you wanted to be found for got its own landing page. Today, however, search engines are so smart that they mostly use search intent to give searchers the best answer to their questions. The page that answers those questions best will rank on top. Search engines also understand subtle differences between keywords, so you don’t have to create landing pages for every subtle variation of a keyword, like synonyms.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use synonyms! In fact, synonyms can really improve the readability of your copy, so make sure to use them. Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin can help you with this; it allows you to optimize your content for synonyms and related keyphrases . You can fill in synonyms of your keyphrase under the SEO analysis tab in your Yoast SEO sidebar. If you want to fill in more than one, you can separate them by commas. When it comes to adding related keyphrases to your text, we have an awesome feature you will want to know more about. So let’s discuss that next!

Glossary of terms

In the following paragraphs, we use a few words that you might not be familiar yet. Such as related keyphrases, word forms and exact focus keyphrase. Don’t worry! We wrote a glossary of terms that can help you out when you’re not quite sure what we mean when we use a specific term.

Related keyphrases are words and concepts that deepen and broaden the understanding of your focus keyphrase. They even help Google better understand the topic you’re talking about . By using related keyphrases in your text, you can paint a complete picture of your focus keyphrase in the article you’re writing.

How do you find related keyphrases?

You might be able to think of a few related keyphrases, but we think using proper keyword data is the safest bet. That’s why we have a Semrush integration in Yoast SEO. It suggests related keyphrases and even shows you the search volume and trend for every keyphrase. As Semrush is one of the leading SEO and marketing software companies in the world, this will help you find the right related keyphrases for your content.

You can find this feature in the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box. Simply go to the ‘Get related keyphrases’ button underneath the ‘Focus keyphrase’ field and click it. The first time you click this, you will need to connect your Semrush account or create an account and authorize Yoast SEO to use it. After you’ve connected your account, you will be able to click the ‘Get related keyphrases’ button and find related keyphrases right away:

The related keyphrase feature is available for free, but if you use Premium you can also use those related keyphrases to optimize your content with the related keyphrase feature . This feature allows you to add related keyphrases or synonyms to a field in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. That way you can easily optimize your content for multiple keyphrases and synonyms. If you want to know more about this integration, we have an article on how to use the Semrush related keyphrase feature .

Should you aim for the singular or the plural keyword? Well, this depends on the query. As Google learns more about the search intent of your query, it is able to better guess what you’re looking for. For instance, if you search for book , you get different results than if you search for books . Apparently Google thinks that in the first case you’re looking for a definition, in the second case it believes you’re intending to buy a book. So make sure you know what you offer on your page and that it fits with the query and results Google gives on that query.

Yoast SEO Premium has word form support , so it automatically detects all the different forms of your focus keyphrase (known as keyword stemming ). So, you no longer have to optimize your post for a specific word form. Optimizing your post has become a much more natural process. However, there are reasons why you’d still want to optimize for a very specific word form of a keyword. In this case, you can put your focus keyphrase in quotes: “best books ever”. Yoast SEO will now only take that exact focus keyphrase into account when checking your content.

Beware, you shouldn’t use your exact focus keyword more than once . If you do, your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization . Google has a hard time distinguishing between content that’s very alike. Therefore it might rank very similar posts or pages lower.

Not sure if you used a focus keyphrase before? The post why and how to export your focus keyphrases with Yoast SEO Premium will help you get an overview of the focus keyphrases you’ve used before and on what page. Also, Yoast SEO gives you a warning in the SEO analysis if you use one twice.

Did you find out you’ve already used the same or very similar keywords or keyphrases on various posts and pages? Then, it probably makes sense to audit your content and perhaps merge/delete/redirect some of it. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to solve keyword cannibalization issues .

Keyword research should be the start of any sustainable SEO strategy . The result will be a long list of keywords for which you’d like to be found. But the hardest part is still ahead: writing all that content. You should write articles and blog posts on every single keyword you would like to be found for. That’s quite a challenge. Check out our ultimate guide to SEO copywriting to get started!

Read on: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

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Camille is a content specialist at Yoast. As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO.

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Bfcm prepathon by cloudways, the seo update by yoast - october 2024 edition, 8 responses to keyword research for seo: the ultimate guide.

Wow, this ultimate guide on keyword research is incredibly detailed! As a blogger, I know how crucial it is to target the right keywords for SEO, and this article has provided me with a wealth of information and strategies to improve my keyword game.

The step-by-step process of conducting keyword research is well-explained and easy to follow. I’ve always struggled a bit with finding the best keywords, but now I feel more confident in selecting the ones that will boost my website’s visibility.

I appreciated the explanation of long-tail keywords and their importance. It’s fascinating how these less competitive keywords can drive highly targeted traffic. Any tips on how to use long-tail keywords effectively in blog content?

The section on understanding keyword intent was an eye-opener. I never realized how crucial it is to align my content with what the audience is actually searching for. I’ll definitely be implementing this in my content strategy.

I noticed that the article focuses mainly on keyword research for written content. How can I apply these techniques to optimize my video content for better search rankings?

It would be great to see some real-life examples of successful keyword research implementations. Case studies or before-and-after scenarios would be incredibly beneficial to understand the practical application.

Hi there! Thank you for your comment :)

We actually have an article on how to do keyword research for YouTube which can help you figure out what keywords to use for your videos! If that’s not quite what you’re looking for, I can also recommend our article on video SEO in general. Good luck!

Clear and detailed information, thanks for sharing.

You’re welcome and thank you for your comment! :)

What an excellent analysis you have done on research. Your research is very good and it was an excellent guideline. Best recharge tools ever in your research.

Thank you very much, glad you found it helpful :)

This is a nice article on keyword research. I find it very useful. To my experience Ahref has the best keyword research tool ever. But of course there are many other useful tools available as well.

Thank you for your comment, Ehsan! Good to hear that it’s helpful, lots of luck with your keyword research :)

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A Step-By-Step Guide to Keyword Research (Bonus: Best Keyword Research Tools Compared)

Imagine getting over a quarter million visitors to your site every month. We did it thanks to keyword research:

That screenshot is from one of my sites called The Wandering RV . My wife and I grew this site from a brand new site to a quarter million monthly visits in just three years with less than 30 articles.

Yes, you also have to create great content and build links to that content, but those actions come AFTER you know the best keywords to target. Every successful SEO campaign begins with keyword research ; skip this step at your peril.

Ready to get started?

How to Do Keyword Research (Quick Steps):

Good keywords make or brake a successful SEO marketing campaign. Here’s the key steps to get started with keyword research :

Step 1 : Find keyword ideas based on key terms, related search, long-tail keywords, and LSI. Step 2 : Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume. Step 3 : Determine user intent.

In today’s guide, I share a step-by-step guide to keyword research that covers not just how to find hundreds of great keywords, but also how to tell which ones can move the needle for your business and which aren’t worth your time. Let’s dive in!

Keyword Research Fundamentals

Before I talk about the exact steps to find keywords for your SEO campaign, let’s briefly cover what keyword research is and why you should care.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the act of finding and vetting keywords to target in an SEO campaign.

This is done using a number of free and/or paid tools that show you what people are searching for on Google and other search engines .

Suggested in-depth guides: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools .

The Role of Keyword Research in Digital Marketing

As you’ll learn in the next section, the quality of your keywords is the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a waste of time. The keywords you pick will determine your SEO marketing strategy from beginning to end.

Let’s see how.

How Important is Keyword Research? (Don’t Skip This!)

SEO can be complex, but it boils down to three fundamentals:

• Keyword Research
• Link building

Of those three, keyword research is the most important.

Why? Because you can create the best content and build incredible links that score you #1 Google rankings and still get zero benefits in terms of business growth or revenue if you target the wrong keywords.

For example, let’s say you want to write some content on your site’s blog so you can show up on Google’s first page. You have an idea of a blog post and think you have a good keyword to target. You make amazing content, build links to it through guest posting and email outreach (here’s how to find anyone’s email address ), and end up on the first page of Google . You’re getting hundreds of visits every month…

But your income from that article remains a big fat $0.

That’s because you didn’t properly research your keyword ahead of time. You may have found a keyword, but finding a keyword and doing keyword research are very different things.

Properly researching a keyword means understanding it’s income potential, how competitive it is, and even the exact kind of content you need to create to be able to rank for it. You’ll see what I mean by the end of this guide.

In a nutshell: Proper keyword research can be the difference between a wildly successful SEO campaign that makes your business tons of money and an utter waste of time and money.

Search Volume and Long Tail Keywords

The first concept to understand about keywords is search volume .

This is what most people look at when they first start researching keywords, and also one of the worst metrics to look at.

A high search volume is very deceiving for two reasons:

• The raw number of people searching for something has very little to do with how much you can actually earn from that traffic. For example, if you rank for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per month, but if people are just looking for information and aren’t ready to buy (hint: you’d need to define the search intent. More below.), that does nothing for your bottom line.
• Just because 10,000 people search for a keyword doesn’t mean all 10,000 people actually click on a result. Take a look at the keyword “How old is Biden”, for example—it gets 51,000 searches per month, but only 17% of those people actually click on anything. That’s because people get the answer right on Google and don’t need to click through to find it.

On the other hand, a low search volume doesn’t mean a keyword is bad or that the number you see is the number of visitors you’ll get. Virtually all pages that rank on Google for one keyword also rank for dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of other keywords.

These other keywords are usually synonyms and long-tail variants. There are also Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, which I get to in a section below.

For example, take a look at this post that my wife, Kayla, wrote for The Wandering RV. She was targeting the keyword “best camping gear”, which gets around 2,700 searches per month according to Ahrefs. But as you can see in the screenshot below, it also ranks for 1,912 other keywords and even ranks on page one for “camping gear” at 32,000 searches per month!

The point of the story? While search volume is an important metric, you shouldn’t base your target keywords solely on how many people are searching for it every month (unless you’re only focused on brand awareness and/or advertising revenue on a per-impression basis).

Search Intent

Search intent is exactly what it sounds like—the intent of the person searching for a given keyword. It’s similar to the marketing concept “buyer intent”.

In other words: What is the user looking for?

Are they searching for an item they are ready to buy right now? Are they doing research before they make a purchase decision? Or are they just looking for information that has nothing to do with buying anything, but rather with a problem they may need a solution to?

Let’s look at an example of each.

High Buying Intent : A high buying intent keyword may be a product name, such as “RV rental las vegas”. If you type that into Google and look at the results, you see a bunch of ads for RV rentals and a map showing Las Vegas RV rental companies. Someone searching this is likely ready to buy, or very close.

Research Intent : These are keywords where people are still doing research on solutions, but will likely buy soon. “Best” and “Review” keywords often fall into this category, such as “best RV rental companies”.

Informational Intent : These keywords are for people strictly looking for information and aren’t ready or even thinking about buying anything. The “how old is Biden” example falls under this category. Another example that fits with RV rentals might be something like “how to travel the country with a pet”.

However, don’t think that you should only go after buying intent keywords. Informational keywords can help you build your email list and get people into your marketing funnel to eventually buy from you.

Search intent is also important to know because it affects what content ranks on Google. If you try to create a landing page to rank for an informational keyword when Google is ranking long-form blog content, you probably won’t rank even with perfect on-page SEO and plenty of backlinks because it’s simply not what the user is searching for.

For example, let’s say you want to rank for “small campers”. So you create a guide to owning small campers. However, when we look at Google, we can see that people aren’t looking for a guide, but rather, they’re looking for a list of small campers to buy.

That’s why even after you find good keyword ideas , you should always manually type them into Google and see what’s currently ranking to get an idea of what you need to create. Don’t write a massive guide when people just want a quick answer and don’t try to rank a blog post when people are looking to buy a product.

The Role of LSI and Synonyms

Earlier, I mentioned LSI keywords. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, and it’s a fancy way for Google to say “synonyms and related keywords”. They’re words that are commonly found together within a single topic and are semantically related to each other.

They’re important to tell the search engines what your content is about since there can be multiple meanings to the same keywords.

For example, let’s say you’re writing an article about cars. There are five different potential “cars” you could be talking about:

• Cars, the vehicles
• Cars, the animated Disney movie
• CARS, the Canadian Association for Rally Sports
• CARs, the Canadian Aviation Regulations
• (The) Cars, the American 1970s music band

How does Google know which version of “cars” you’re talking about? By LSI keywords! Take a look:

• Using the words “vehicle”, “used”, “new”, “buy”, “sell”, etc.
• Using the words “film”, “movie”, “Disney”, etc.
• Using the words “association”, “rally”, “sports”, etc.
• Using the words “aviation”, “regulation”, “administration”, etc.

While LSI keywords don’t necessarily matter during your keyword research, they are important when developing your actual content. You should include various LSI keywords naturally in your content without stuffing them, including in headings and image alt text.

You can find LSI keywords (and learn more about them) with a tool like LSI Graph .

How Do You Do Keyword Research? (Step-by-Step Guide)

Alright, now that you have a firm understanding of the important metrics behind keyword research, it’s time to actually find your very own keywords! There are three steps I follow when I’m doing keyword research for a new site, with an optional, more advanced fourth step:

• Find keyword ideas
• Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume
• Determine their search intent
• (Optional) Find & utilize keyword silos

Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Find Keyword Ideas

Finding keyword ideas is the easy part. There are loads of tools that will spit out hundreds of ideas at the click of a button. It’s vetting them that takes effort, but we’ll get to that.

For now, go take a look at the “Best Keyword Research Tool” section below and pick your poison. I’ll be using Ahrefs in the examples because it’s my favorite tool and has all the bells and whistles, but the other tools can work as well.

My favorite way to find great keyword opportunities is spying on my competition. You can do this by plugging their site into any keyword tool and look at their keywords. Ahrefs has a nifty tool called the Content Gap Analysis.

Here’s how it works:

1. Plug your site into Ahrefs, then click the Content Gap link in the left-hand menu.

2. Plug in 1-10 competitors who are ranking on Google for keywords you want to rank for. You can find them by Googling those keywords and grabbing the URLs off of Google or by using Ahrefs’ Competing domains tool right above the Content gap link. Run the tool.

3. From here, you can export the list to an excel spreadsheet if you want. I like to comb through the list right in Ahrefs. If I see a keyword I might want to target, I open it in a new tab and add it to a keyword list using the + Add to button in the top right.

If you don’t have access to Ahrefs or another keyword tool that allows you to see competitor’s keywords, you can also use a tool like Keyword Shitter to give you a ton of ideas, then vet them using other free tools such as Uber Suggest.

Step 2: Check The TRUE Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume

Once you have a list of keyword ideas you’re comfortable working with (I aim for 50-100 at a time but you can do far more), it’s time to see which are even worth pursuing based on keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume.

There’s just one caveat… the search volume and KD you see in most keyword research tools are usually way off. KD in Ahrefs is solely based off the number of linking domains to the top results, which isn’t a 100% accurate depiction of the true difficulty to rank for a keyword.

This is because SEO is a complex beast, and things like domain rating (which I’ll cover shortly) and internal linking can have a massive impact on rankings. Backlinks are only part of the picture.

And the search volume? That’s not including LSI and long-tail keywords!

Remember that camping gear example I showed you at the beginning of this article that ranks for over 1,900 keywords? The main keyword only had 2,700 searches per month, yet the article gets over 5,000 visits per month. That’s because it’s ranking for other keywords besides the main keyword.

So if you see a keyword with 200 searches per month, chances are it’s really more like 500 or 1,000 if you include the related keywords that you’ll rank for.

To determine true search volume, grab the #1 result on Google for the keyword and plug it into Ahrefs or Uber Suggest to see how much traffic that page actually gets. That should give you a more accurate picture of the search volume for a given keyword.

Here’s the traffic for the #1 ranking page for “tiny campers”, a keyword that gets ~3,400 searches per month:

See how the page gets over 10k traffic, despite the main keyword getting a third of that? That’s true search volume potential.

The other metric, keyword difficulty, is also not 100% accurate. But figuring out true difficulty is usually as easy as looking at the top pages domain authority (DA), or domain rating (DR) if you’re using Ahrefs. Let me explain.

If a keyword has a difficulty score of 8, but the top ranking pages are all DR 80+, ranking your site for those keywords may be difficult if you have a low DR, despite the low difficulty score.

My advice is to aim for keywords with a 30 KD or lower if you’re under a 40 DR, then branch up as you build more links and gain a higher authority. As your DR climbs, your internal links are worth more “link juice” (or pass more “page authority” depending on what source you listen to).

But this isn’t an article on technical SEO, so I’ll leave it at that for now!

Step 3: Determine Search Intent

At this point, you should have a pretty decent list of keywords with a difficulty you’re comfortable tackling and a search volume potential you’d be happy to capture. Now it’s time to figure out what people actually want when they search for these terms and whether or not it fits in with your marketing and revenue goals.

This part is as simple as Googling each keyword on your list and looking at the top 3-5 results. Review their meta title and description, click on them to view the page, and check out the angle they took on the page.

• Are they mainly listicle posts? How-tos? Ultimate guides ? A landing page? Something else?
• How do they seem to be monetizing the page ? Are they using display ads ? Selling products as a solution to the problem? Affiliate marketing ? Just capturing emails and not actually selling anything?
• Take a look at the comments. Are people asking questions that weren’t answered in the article? Do they seem happy, angry, or neutral?

All of these questions will help you dial in on the type of post/page you need to create, how you can monetize it (or use it to capture emails/push notification subscribers/social followers), and what you can do to improve it.

As you’re going through each keyword, keep your answers to these questions in a spreadsheet or word document to keep track of which ones you’re interested in pursuing. Your final list is the list you can start pursuing!

To give you a better idea of how to determine search intent, here are a few examples courtesy of this Moz post :

Informational Intent:

• [product name]
• what is [product name]
• how does [product name] work
• how do I use [product name]

Commercial Intent (AKA Research Intent):

• best [product name]
• [product name] reviews
• compare [product name]
• what is the top [product name]
• [colour/style/size] [product name]

Transactional Intent (AKA Buying Intent):

• how much does [product name] cost
• [product name] in [location]
• order [product name] online
• [product name] near me
• affordable [brand name] [product name]

This graph from Ahrefs may also help:

Now take your list and go crank out some content! Or, you can follow one last step.

Step 4: (Advanced) Find & Utilize Keyword Silos

If you really want to do well, you can optionally take it one step further and look for keyword silos to create corresponding content silos on your site.

A keyword silo is a list of highly related keywords that you can create content around to interlink between on your site (also called the “hub and spoke” method). Here’s a visual I created to help you understand:

Essentially, you create a hub page targeting the primary head term you want to rank for, then create “spoke” pages based on related and long-tail keywords.

For example, while doing keyword research for my wife Kayla’s vegan food blog, I found a series of related keywords asking “Is ___ vegan”. People wanted to know if common foods, such as bagels, donuts, or Oreos are vegan.

To rank for these keywords, we created this hub page which links to all of her “Is ___ vegan” articles. These articles all link to one another, as well as back to the main hub page.

This inter-linking is called content siloing, and it works so well for two reasons:

• Because all the pages interlink to one another, if you build links to any of the pages, it improves page authority across all of the other pages.
• Google uses relevancy in its algorithm, and since these topics are all highly relevant to one another, it can improve your rankings further.

So how do you find keyword silos? There is no silver bullet solution — you have to be good at picking up on patterns and noticing relevancy. However, there is one trick you can use to try and find them: books.

Look for books on your topic on Amazon and browse the table of contents. Oftentimes, books are full of keyword silos: that’s what makes them a book! Think of the binding as the hub page and the chapters as the spoke pages.

Of course, as you can see in the example above, these keywords aren’t exactly what people are searching for on Google. People aren’t typing “vegan out in the world”, but rather “how to eat vegan at restaurants” or “how to eat vegan at family gatherings”. So you may have to do some sleuthing to figure out the keyword that corresponds with the chapter title in the books you find.

Once you find a potential silo, be sure to run the keywords through steps 2 and 3 before you commit to it! Just because you found a silo, doesn’t mean you should pursue it. Think logically about how all that content will fit into your business and how you can expand on it in the future.

What Is The Best Keyword Research Tool?

There are dozens, if not hundreds of keyword research tools on the market today. Some are extremely unique, but most are just slightly different takes on the same idea. So what’s the best one? Let’s break it down by free and paid tools.

Free Keyword Research Tools

There are two free keyword research tools I’ve used and recommend:

Ubersuggest

Keyword shitter.

Let’s put on hold all the conversions about Neil Patel for a second. This tool does its job and, if you’re on a budget, it can work to get you started with SEO.

Ubersuggest is basically a free, scaled-down version of Ahrefs or Moz. It lets you spy on competitor’s backlinks, see what keywords they’re ranking for, and do some decent keyword research. If you’re doing SEO on a budget, it can get the job done.

Keyword Shitter is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You type in a keyword and get hundreds of keyword suggestions. It’s great if you just need tons of ideas, but it mostly only spits out related keywords to the one you typed in, not unique, separate ideas.

Paid Keyword Research Tools

Now we’re getting into the big-boy (or girl) tools! If you’re serious about SEO and you have the budget, these are the tools you want to use.

Keyword Insights

Keywords everywhere.

Ahrefs is hands-down my favorite SEO tool; not just for keyword research, but also for link-building, rank tracking, coming up with content ideas, and more. It has all the bells and whistles and is easily the best all-around SEO tool on the market. However, it comes at a steep price, with just the basic tool being $99 per month.

SEMrush is another great keyword research tool. It’s more affordable than Ahrefs, but it doesn’t have quite as many features. It’s more geared towards search engine marketing and PPC (thus the SEM in SEMrush). However, if you want a great paid tool but don’t want to pay the premium on Ahrefs, it’s a valid option. It even lets you try out the product for free!

Keyword Insights claims to be “the smartest way to group keywords and classify search intent at scale”… and with good reason. The tool utilizes geo-specific, live search engine result page data to cluster keywords into similar groups whilst also working out the search intent behind them.

A user simply uploads a list of keywords (as many as you’d like) and the tool will spit out a preformatted Google sheets document with the clustered keywords and the intent pulled through. Its most recent update also sorts the grouped keywords into “top-level themes” so you can see what their content hubs should be and what their spoke content might look like. The insights will also tell you which keywords you can target a single page with, or which need to be broken into multiple pages.

Keywords Everywhere is an awesome tool that used to be free and now is credit-based. The tool shows you search volume, competition, and average CPC right on Google whenever you type something in. It also shows you stats on related keywords and the “people also search” keywords. Regardless of which other tools you use, I highly recommend grabbing this one.

Want more SEO tools? Check out Kinsta’s list of must-have SEO plugins for WordPress .

Suggested Stack

So what keyword research tools should you get? My suggested stack is Ahrefs and Keywords Everywhere. Ahrefs is a complete SEO software that will help you rank your site, not just find keywords. And Keywords Everywhere lets you see search volume and keyword ideas any time you’re searching something on Google. Plus it’s free, so what’s not to like?

Here’s a quick recap of everything we’ve covered:

• Keyword research is extremely important to any SEO campaign and should not be skipped or taken lightly.
• Search volume and keyword difficulty can be deceiving. Do some deeper research by typing the keyword into Google and reviewing the results before you make a decision.
• Don’t be fooled by low search volume. Check the true search volume by reviewing the top pages search traffic using Ubersuggest or Ahrefs.
• Search intent is king. Make sure the content you’re creating matches the content people want to see (and what Google is already showing).
• Look for keyword silos. They’re can be a shortcut to ranking your pages faster.

And that’s all there is to it! If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment below or shoot me an email. For more help with SEO, click here to read my step-by-step guide and this awesome in-depth guide on how to drive more traffic to your website.

Bill is a content marketing and SEO expert with over 6 years' experience. When he's not nerding out over Google, he loves traveling, playing video games, and spending time with his wife.

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Keyword Research is predominantly a statistical analysis of trending interests that are expressed by internet searches.

Although I realize the importance of said statistics, I am “right brained” and have struggled with being interested in numbers, all of my life. When I look at a keyword research result, the numbers tell me nothing in terms that I can understand. In fact, I’m totally bored by the concept.

I have read many posts, papers, and websites about the subject, and although not many agree with the same approach, they basically are saying the same things. b-o-r-i-n-g!

What is stopping a keyword research tool (once the stats have been gathered) from asking what it is that you sell, and then saying… well, to sell that, try concentrating on this…, and spare me the statistical analysis.

Really helpful article. Especially for the newcomers who want to be an SEO expert.

Thanks, Eva! Glad you enjoyed it. :)

What if I’m a business owner with a brand new site with no blog posts yet? How would I start this if I’m new to KW research? Are there services (real people services) that help with this or do it with me?

Hey, Johnny!

No problem! The steps with the content gap analysis are the same – you just have to manually find your competitors rather than using a tool. To do that, Google some keywords you think you want to rank for and grab the URLs of the top-ranking sites that monetize their sites similarly to you (whether that’s through ads, affiliate marketing, or selling similar products).

Paste those URLs into the content gap tool and follow along from there! Hope this helps! :)

Awesome! i am using this article to share with my students while i m teaching keyword research.

Lots of great information here ! Just wanting to introduce to a free alternative to Keywords everywhere, a chrome extension – WhatsmySERP.com/everywhere it gives you unlimited searches for volume and CPC.

Our team has launched this tool and it already has 5 star reviews and 20k+ users. I’d love for you to try it and see what your thoughts are.

I’d love to know your thoughts :)

This article is really really helpful for the newcomers. specially the one who recently started a blog or a website and Also, wants to Learn SEO.

The thing with the search intent is really important!

This was really what i was searching. perfect timing, thanks Bill such an valuable post.

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Home » Grow Online » Future-Proofing Your SEO: How to Do Keyword Research

Future-Proofing Your SEO: How to Do Keyword Research

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If you lack knowledge of the SEO basics  and a good strategy, people won’t be able to find your website or online store. That’s why SEO keyword research is so important, no matter if your site is built using a website builder or a CMS. People search for a specific word or phrase and search engines direct them toward related content. And, hopefully, that’s your website’s content.

In this article, we’ll go over the keyword basics, learning what they are, why they’re so critical to websites, and how to do SEO keyword research yourself. Let’s get started!  

What Is Keyword Research?

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines to get information. They help search engines understand the content on a web page so that they can decide if it’s relevant to the query.   

When you strategically use these keywords in your website content, you drive up your site’s visibility. This helps search engines drive traffic to you.  

SEO keyword research is simply the act of finding and analyzing the search words that people enter into search engines, then using those terms in your website, content-making, and marketing. SEO keyword research helps you immediately understand what your potential customers are looking for online, and target them to guide them back to you. 

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Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research can guide your content strategy. If done properly, you’ll get insight into the habits, choices, and preferences of your audience . This helps you get a better idea of how to get your audience’s attention and best solve their problems.  

Keyword research can guide your content, product development, and marketing. Your business should be creating products and content that your target audience will find valuable.  

There’s so much noise online, so we understand it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. But by using the most relevant keywords, you help users find your content. You’re speaking their language, and you’re making a roadmap that leads them straight to your website.  

When Should Keyword Research Be Used?

Once you understand how to find keywords for SEO, you have a lot to gain. The great thing about keyword research is there there are plenty of applications for it, including:   

• SEO Optimization: When you use the right keywords in your website content, meta descriptions, and tags, those rankings go up, and so does organic traffic to your site.  
• Content Strategy: Keyword research can tell you about the topics that interest your audience. You can create content around these keywords, attracting even more visitors. Targeted content means relevant information that keeps your audience on your site, and that means more visibility on your pages and a higher chance of conversion.  
• Paid Campaigns: When you’re ready for paid advertising campaigns like Google Ads or social media ads, keyword research gives you the best words to use. This expands the reach of your ads and ups the return on investment (ROI).  
• Long-Tail Keywords: These are longer and more specific phrases that have less competition. When you go for long-tail keywords, you’ll rank higher for specific queries. Generally speaking, the more specific a product search query, the more likely the visitor is to convert. For instance, “best website builders” is fairly broad, but “best website builders for food delivery businesses” is a specific query that leans toward a purchase.   

How To Conduct Keyword Research: The Main Steps

By now you might be chomping at the bit to get into how to find keywords for SEO. Here’s a handy step-by-step list to walk you through the process of SEO keyword research:  

Finding Keywords  

Of course you want to find keywords for SEO! You can begin by brainstorming possible keywords that are relevant to your business and audience. If you were searching to find your business or looking for related information, which keywords would you naturally use?  

Analyzing Keywords  

Once you’ve formulated a list of possible keywords, it’s time to use tools to analyze them (we’ll discuss these in more detail in the next section). Pay attention to search volume (how many people search for the term), difficulty (how competitive is the keyword), and relevance to your business.  

Considering User Intent  

When choosing your SEO keywords, consider the audience’s intent behind using them. For example, if people search for “best website builders”, are they looking for an expert opinion or are they ready to sign up to a platform? The keywords you prioritize can depend on the user journey and the stage the reader is at.  

Comparing Keywords  

Have a look at which keywords your competitors are using and ranking for. What are they missing? Are there any gaps in the market that you can take advantage of? What is everyone talking about? What’s trending? Where can your content rank highly?  

Targeting Keywords  

After finding and analyzing your keywords, the next step is to pick the most promising keywords to use in your content. With your research, you should be able to determine which keywords work best for your audience and website.  

Prioritizing and Optimizing Keywords  

Go beyond just picking the right keywords. Prioritize those keywords depending on their SEO impact. Some terms will perform better than others, so we recommend tailoring your content around these.   

Verifying Search Intent  

Now, make sure that your keywords match the audience’s searches by regularly reviewing your keywords. Popular keywords change over time, so adapting and targeting new search terms will help your website rank well and meet your audience’s needs.  

Tools for Keyword Research

You might be wondering how to do keyword research for SEO – as in what type of help is available?   

For accurate SEO keyword research, we recommend using a dedicated SEO tool to help determine and analyze your targeted terms. Here are a few of the most popular options:  

Ahrefs  

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO keyword tool with a huge keyword database and accurate search volume data. Its “Keyword Explorer” tool gives you keyword data including keyword difficulty, search volume, and clicks-per-search.   

You’ll also get the top-ranking pages for a specific keyword and insights into how many backlinks would help your pages rank better.  

Semrush  

Semrush has robust SEO keyword research capabilities, a user-friendly interface, highly-detailed keyword reports, and competitor analysis (to help you analyze your competitors’ keywords and strategies).   

We recommend using its “Keyword Magic Tool”, which will cover all of your basic keyword research needs. It helps you find the right keywords by showing the broad match, phrase match, and exact match keywords, along with their search volume, trend data, and difficulty score.    

Google Keyword Planner  

Google Keyword Planner is not only a free tool, but it’s extremely powerful because its insights come directly from Google, the world’s most popular search engine.   

Though it’s technically meant for paid search campaigns, it finds keywords related to your business or industry and gives search volume and competition-level info for each keyword.  

Moz Keyword Explorer   

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a great tool for SEO keyword research thanks to its predictive metrics, which can let you know which keywords are worth targeting in the first place. No more wasted time!   

It gives you a wide variety of data, including monthly search volume, difficulty, priority, and click-through rate. And it also suggests related keywords and which websites are high-rankers for the target keyword.  

KWFinder  

Are you a small business with limited resources? KWFinder has a user-friendly interface and focuses on finding less competitive keywords . That means you can be a big fish in a smaller pond instead of competing against the big sharks.   

KWFinder finds those long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty so that you can spot good opportunities. On top of that, it will give you keyword suggestions, search volume data, and information on trends.   

How To Maintain Keyword Rankings

SEO keyword research isn’t a one-time thing. Once you’ve done the hard work of finding, analyzing, and implementing your keywords, you’ve got to keep your rankings as high as possible.  

That means part of how to do keyword research is to regularly revisit your SEO keyword research , lightly (or completely!) refresh your content, keep checking out what your competitors are doing (and what they’re missing), and stay on top of SEO trends.  

As we’ve discussed, knowing how to do keyword research for SEO is an essential part of a successful SEO strategy. You want to drive appropriate visitors to your website – all it takes is knowing the best keywords to target them effectively, and how to use them across your website and content.  

SEO keyword research is a goldmine of information that every website should tap into, giving you all the insights you need to target your ideal audience.   

When you understand your audience’s language and meet them where they are, you can boost your visibility, drive traffic to your site, and ultimately, grow your online business.  

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Fundamentals of Keyword Research

68 percent of online activity begins with queries in search engines like Google or Bing.

That’s why keyword research should be the basis of any online marketing campaign.

The goal of keyword research is to find out what your target audience is searching for online and determine what it will take to actually rank in search engines for those keywords.

Without knowing what keywords you should be targeting, how will you effectively optimize your website, target phrases for link building, or know what content to develop for your audience?

If you want a complete guide to keyword research, you’ve found it. In this article, I’ll show you my step-by-step process for finding, analyzing, and choosing keywords. By the end of it, you’ll know exactly how to do keyword research for SEO.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research refers to the process of discovering what search terms your target audience is entering in search engines to find businesses and websites like yours. By optimizing your content for those keywords, you are more likely to appear in search engine results .

You can use keyword research to discover universal, national, or global topics that people are searching.. But you can also use l ocal keyword research to find topics that only people in a specific area are searching for. This means you can do keyword research even if you are a small business that only serves customers in a particular city or state.

For example, my target audience for this blog is primarily marketers and small businesses looking for help with their SEO and digital marketing strategies . This means I want pages from my website to appear in the SERPs when my audience searches for terms related to SEO and digital marketing.

Let’s say someone in my target audience is searching for “what is SEO?” I want to make sure I have content on my website that comes up early in the results for that search term. Luckily, I do!

Here are some of the top results for the phrase:

This hasn’t happened by accident. I’ve worked hard to target almost every SEO-related keyword you can think of. Thanks to thorough keyword research, my hard work has paid off.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research is a critical skill for any digital marketer. Not only do they need to know how to develop a good keyword list for PPC and SEO, but smart content marketers use keyword research to find out what topics they should write about and what phrases they should use while writing.

If you want your audience to find your website—whether it’s your blog, e-commerce website, or a local service, like lawn care—you must develop a strategy to help them find you. That’s where keyword research comes in.

The top result in the Google search results for a given search query (aka “keyword”) gets the most traffic 34 percent of the time. The second result gets the most traffic 17 percent of the time. By the time you get to the second page of Google, users click on each result less than one percent of the time.

In order to drive your audience to the website, you must identify the keywords they are searching for and create content that matches their search intent. You also need to know which related terms to use in your article to make sure it is as optimized and authoritative as possible.

How to Do Keyword Research

Wondering how to conduct keyword research? The good news is that there are many methods and tools you can use for keyword research. We’ll outline some of those methods and tools below, as well as our best keyword research tips, so you can pick and choose what works best for you.

Prework: Spreadsheet Set Up

The first thing you will want to do is set up a spreadsheet to record your data.

I’ve set up a basic spreadsheet that you can access.

You can add or delete columns as you wish in order to match your keyword research needs. The columns included are as follows.

• GAKT – Competition (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
• GAKT – Global Monthly Searches (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
• GAKT – Local Monthly Searches (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
• GAKT – Approximate CPC(cost per click) (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
• SEOmoz KA – Difficulty (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 DA (domain authority) (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 RDLRD (root domain linking root domains) (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 DA (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 RDLRD (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 DA (Moz Keyword Explorer)
• SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 RDLRD (Moz Keyword Explorer)

In this section, we’ll cover filling up the columns with keywords and Google Ads Keyword Tool data.

In the following section, we’ll look at how to narrow down those keywords using the Moz Keyword Analysis tool (or some alternative methods if you are not a Pro member).

Saving the Google Docs Version

If you are signed into your Google account, simply use the File > Save option to save the spreadsheet to your documents and start filling it in with your information.

Downloading Excel and Open Office Versions

If you don’t have Google Docs or would prefer to save it on your local machine, go to the Google Docs version and use the File > Download As to save it as your desired file type. I’d suggest Excel for the best possible functionality.

Step 1: Keyword Discovery

The first phase of keyword research involves coming up with new keyword ideas.

Sometimes this is the most difficult part of the process as many people unfamiliar with keyword competition will select very broad target words such as pizza, hotel, or Los Angeles.

Others will pick obscure phrases that no one will likely search together such as “SEO + link building + social media.” Yes, I’ve seen people trying to rank for similarly over-punctuated phrases.

So, the first thing you will need to do is find suitable, related phrases for your business.

You can always start with some simple brainstorming. Look at the main topics on your website and jot down keywords associated with those topics. I would suggest doing so in Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet application.

The idea is to create a seed list of initial ideas that you can explore further with keyword research tools.

A seed list is your initial set of keyword ideas. Write down a few main categories to start. Then use a combination of brainstorming and investigation (see below) to fill out the list with keywords, spending the most time on brand and product terms.

You want this list to be thorough in terms of capturing all the things your product does and the problems it solves, but you don’t need to be exhaustive in coming up with synonyms, etc. That will happen in the next step.

• Research your audience. What terms does your audience use to describe your products or services? What other relevant terms do they use in their day-to-day lives? Look at blog posts and comments, forums, LinkedIn groups, and your own support requests.
• Find the search terms in use now. Use your analytics tool, Google Search Console, and your weblogs to see what search terms people are using to get to you. If you have access to data on your internal site search, look at those terms to see what people are looking for.
• Get some suggestions. Soovle is a tool that lets you enter a keyword and see what the top autocompletes are for a number of different search engines and other sites. It’s not worth running every keyword through Soovle, but you might try a couple to see if you missed anything.

Then, whenever you’re ready to expand on those ideas, there are more keyword tools ready to help.

Keyword Discovery Tools

The following is a great collection of free and premium tools for SEO and tools for PPC keyword analysis that will help you discover new keywords related to your website or business.

Ubersuggest

There’s a reason Ubersuggest is at the top of the list, and it’s not just because it’s my tool. Ubersuggest is great for helping you discover new keywords. To get started, simply enter the keyword or phrase in the tool.

Let’s say we’re researching Social Media Marketing.

Input the phrase and click Search.

You’ll get a breakdown that looks like this:

• Search volume – number of searches the keyword has during a month
• SEO difficulty – estimated competition in organic search
• Paid difficulty – estimated competition in paid search
• Cost per click – average cost per click for a Google Ad

You’re also provided an overview of what it takes, on average, in terms of backlinks and domain score, to reach the first page of Google for the keyword. This is located above a chart displaying the keyword search volume, both for desktop and mobile, over the past 12 months.

You’ll also be able to scroll down and see different variations of your keyword phrase.

This gives you a wider view of what you can strive to rank for.

For low budgets, you may want to optimize a low-competition, low-cost-per-click keyword that still gets good results.

Or, you can pick multiple keywords and A/B test them for the best results.

However you use it, this is a great tool to start with.

Ubersuggest Search Suggestions

Here’s another reason to use Ubersuggest for keyword research . Once you have some basic ideas, you can expand upon them by using the five keyword idea variables in Ubersuggest:

• Suggestions
• Prepositions
• Comparisons

In the screenshot above, “suggestions” is highlighted by default. But if you’re searching for the largest list of keywords that contain your phrase, click “Related.”

Every keyword on the list now includes your seed keyword, “social media marketing.”

From there, you can experiment with the other search types. Here are some examples of the keyword phrases you’ll uncover for each one:

• is social media marketing dead?
• is social media marketing worth it?
• is social media marketing effective?
• guide to social media marketing
• help with social media marketing
• problems with social media marketing
• social media marketing vs digital marketing
• social media marketing vs traditional marketing
• social media marketing and SEO

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is another part of the NP Digital family, but it’s not an accident it’s on this list. My team acquired this specifically because it’s such a valuable keyword research tool for digital marketers.

Answer The Public provides insights into the questions people are asking and the topics they’re interested in related to a specific keyword or phrase. By entering a keyword into Answer The Public, digital marketers can access a wealth of information that can inform their content strategy.

For example, Answer The Public has the ability to uncover search queries in the form of questions. These questions can help marketers understand the specific information users are seeking and create content that directly addresses their needs.

For example, let’s take a look at a search for the keyword “social media marketing.”

Answer The Public shows us questions people are actually entering in Google, such as “What are the best social media marketing strategies?” or “How to measure ROI in social media marketing?” With this info, you know that you can create blog posts, videos, or other content pieces that provide in-depth answers to these questions, helping position you as authorities in the field.

In addition to questions, Answer The Public also provides insights into other types of search queries, such as prepositions and comparisons. This gives you even more potential ideas to build content on that you know there’s an audience for, like “social media marketing vs. traditional marketing” or “guide to social media marketing.”

Lastly, I also want to mention how Answer The Public presents data visually The tool generates a visualization called the “search cloud,” which displays the most common and relevant search queries related to the entered keyword. This makes it easy for marketers, at a glance, to get proper context and notice potential recurring trends or patterns. Overall, Answer The Public makes a great platform to get into the minds of your intended audience.

Alternative Search Suggestions

Looking for alternative suggested search boxes?

The following search engines have similar suggested search options that appear below the search box when you start typing in keywords.

Depending on your keyword, each search engine will offer different suggestions.

Most people stick with Google as it is the most-visited web platform in the world , but it still doesn’t hurt to get additional keyword ideas from elsewhere.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

The next tool up is the commonly referenced Google Ads Keyword Planner .

Here is what each of the columns displayed in the Google Ads Keyword Planner will tell you about each of the keyword ideas displayed. These definitions come straight from Google itself, let’s take a look:

• Avg monthly searches – “The average number of times people search for a keyword and similar terms based on the month range, the location and your Search Network settings. This information shows how popular your keywords are during different times of the year. This range is averaged over a 12-month period.”
• Competition – “‘Competition’ shows how competitive ad placement is for a keyword, specific to the location and Search Network targeting options that you’ve selected. The level of competition—low, medium, or high— is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google.”
• Ad impression share – “‘Ad impression share’ is the number of impressions you’ve received divided by the total number of searches for the location and network you’re targeting that matched the keyword exactly in the last calendar month. This metric can help you identify potential opportunities this keyword has to get impressions and clicks.”
• Top of page bid (low range) – “‘Top of page bid (low range)’ shows the lower range of what advertisers have historically paid for a keyword’s top of page bid, based on your location and Search Network settings. The average CPC of your keywords may vary.”
• Top of page bid (high range) – “‘Top of page bid (high range)’” shows the higher range of what advertisers have historically paid for a keyword’s top of page bid, based on your location and Search Network settings. The average CPC of your keywords may vary.”

You can also select specific Match Types by checking the box next to a keyword you’re interested in and then clicking the “Broad match” dropdown that appears:

Inputting your search term with the added punctuation will change the traffic volume for Global and Local Monthly Searches based on the approximation of traffic that a keyword gets on Google.

• Broad – The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms, and related words. If you were doing PPC and targeted the broad match for social media, ads would show with any searches, including social or media. Organic results would include the same.
• [Exact] The search volume for that keyword idea. If you were doing PPC and targeted the exact match for social media, ads would only show if someone typed in social media but not any other variation of that phrase.
• “Phrase” – The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include that whole phrase. If you were doing PPC and targeted the phrase match for pizza dough, ads would show for anyone who typed in social media, with or without additional keywords such as social media marketing or about social media. Organic results would include only results including the exact phrase social media.

You can learn more about match types (and some additional ones not on this list) in Ads Help .

You can also see the difference in data based on the three match types using the phrase social media in order of broad, “phrase,” and [exact].

And if you were to use these match types in a search, you would get 419 million results for a broad match search for social media and only 304 million results for a phrase match search for “social media.”

Going back to the generic term social media, you might want to remove certain words from the keyword ideas.

For example, you may not want to target anything about social media jobs, so you could add the word job under the Negative Keywords tab on the left side of the screen.

Now, you’ll need to export your data.

To do so, click the Download button in the top right corner of the screen. Then export to your preferred format.

You can then copy the data from the exported spreadsheet to your keyword research spreadsheet.

You can also get this data for the keyword ideas you generated using SEMrush and suggested search by copying and pasting those keywords into the Word or phrase box and checking the box to only show ideas closely related to my search terms.

Then export the data for those keywords and phrases by checking the boxes next to them under the Search Terms section.

Google Search

You can even use Google’s own search engine for keyword research. Enter your keyword into Google and it will show you other things people asked and several other related search terms.

Here’s what the People Also Ask section looks like for social media marketing:

And here’s what the related searched section at the bottom of the page looks like:

These are similar to the other keywords Ubersuggest gave me, but I might see some suggestions here that didn’t appear before.

You could also spend some time exploring these suggestions by clicking those links, which will lead to more links, and so on and so forth.

At this point, you probably have a lot of great keyword ideas.

In the next section, I will cover how to use the Moz Keyword Analysis Tool (or an alternative method to get the same information if you are not a Pro member) to get additional data and then narrow down your keywords to the ones that you should most likely focus upon for your online marketing strategy.

Step 2 – Analyzing and Choosing the Best Keywords

Now that you have a base spreadsheet to use for keyword data entry, let’s look at what’s next.

I want to show you some ways to get even more data about each keyword and further narrow down your results.

Please note that this data will take a bit of time to compile, so you might want to run through the keyword list and remove any obvious ones that you don’t want.

I usually go with no more than 100 keywords for this part of the process.

Keyword Analysis with Ubersuggest

We used Ubersuggest above for keyword discovery, but that’s not its only use case. Ubersuggest is also a great tool for analyzing which keywords to use and what websites to examine for ideas.

For example, when we search for social media marketing in Ubersuggest, you can see a list of “content ideas”:

As you can see, a list of pages that rank for the keyword “social media marketing” appears. You can also see how many visits the page gets from the keyword, how many backlinks the page has, and how many shares it has on Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit.

You can poke around the most successful websites and use that as a jumping-off point for what to include on your own page to rank for the keyword.

Keyword Analysis with Moz

You can get other important data to help you narrow down your target keywords with Moz.

If you have a Pro membership with Moz (you can always get a 30-day free trial if you have just one keyword research project to do), then you have access to a very nice little tool called Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis .

This tool will show you the percentage of difficulty for each keyword, giving you an idea of how hard it will be to rank highly for it.

You will also see the top ten sites ranked for each keyword, each listed with its domain authority and the number of root domains linking to it.

The latter is really the information that will help you decide which keywords to target.

You can put in five words at a time, and you can now pick between keyword, root domain, subdomain, or page.

Using our keyword phrase “social media management,” you can see the results of the difficulty assessment, search volume, organic click-through rates, and the balance of ranking ease and end results (Priority).

While this information is helpful, it’s not really anything we don’t already know. We’ve already decided we like this keyword phrase.

If anything, this is just a double-check that confirms the basics you found in the Ads Keyword Tool.

Below this information, you’ll find more keyword suggestions and a SERP analysis of the keyword.

The suggestions are fine for more brainstorming, but we’ll come back to the SERP analysis. That’s the real goldmine.

You can also find a short list of mentions for your keyword at the bottom of the page.

This is useful in letting you know who is using the keyword and how recently they created content with it.

While this information is nice, the real competitor information can be seen when you click on the SERP full analysis for each keyword, such as these results for a social media company.

I like to open them in new tabs for convenience.

This is the part where you can learn a few things.

First off, you can see who you will be trying to beat.

If your website comes up in this list of the top ten, then congratulations – you’re on the first page for a keyword phrase with a highly competitive keyword difficulty of 61%.

If you’re not in these results, you can compare your own website’s domain authority and linking root domains to the stats of the sites ranking in the top ten.

Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100. The higher a website’s domain authority, the more likely it is to rank for the keywords it is optimized for.

The linking root domains is the number of unique domains linking to a website.

You can see that the site with the highest authority and linking root domains doesn’t necessarily win the top spot.

But if you want to make #1, your site may need a domain authority of 28 or higher and hundreds of linking root domains to beat the competition.

Another thing you can learn from this is whether a keyword is drawing commercial or informational results.

This means that you will learn whether your keyword is being searched for commercial purposes (meaning that someone wants to find a product or service) or whether it is being searched for informational purposes (meaning that people are looking for information, not a product or service).

For social media company , the results include seven actual social media consulting companies and agencies.

Comparatively, if I do a full analysis of the keyword phrase “what is social media” you will see that the first page of results is purely informational. All of the results are from highly authoritative domains.

So, if you are a social media company, you will probably want to target the phrase “social media companies” for your main business homepage.

You will also want to create some content based around the phrase “what is social media” and place it on highly authoritative domains such as YouTube and SlideShare to see if you can get it into the rankings for a phrase searched potentially by a million people monthly.

Alternative to the Moz Tool

If you’re not interested in a premium tool, then you can simply look up each keyword and look at websites ranking on the first page of the results.

If you’re interested in the domain authority stats, you can get some using another Moz tool called Open Site Explorer . You’ll get a limited amount of stats for free accounts though.

Or, you can use the free version of the SEOmoz toolbar – just use that and compare it to your own website’s domain authority.

At least with this information, you can still determine the commercial vs. informational usage of a keyword plus some basic stats to compare against your own website.

Keyword Analysis with Competitors

Before I start eliminating any more of my keywords at random, I want to do one final bit of research: competitive analysis .

One of the things I’ve found in my years of doing keyword research is that people don’t take their competition seriously.

They don’t know how competitive their keywords are, or what kind of ROI they can expect, or how much of their budget to devote so they can compete.

That’s because they often skip this crucial stage of the research process.

Normally, with competitive keyword research, you would make a list of competitors and then enter their URLs to see what they rank for.

For example, you could use Follow.net or something similar to research each of your competitors.

But to save time, I’m going to do things a little differently.

I’m going to look up my chosen keywords on Google and then see which sites already have content out there using those keywords.

For instance, for “social media marketing,” I first see three ads that won’t appear in any Keyword Research tool. It’s good to know that searchers won’t immediately see the organic results unless they scroll.

Next, I see that there are some very large, trusted websites that appear first. Sites like WordStream and Sprout Social will be tough to beat unless you have a very authoritative site.

I can do this for a few of my chosen keywords to see what larger sites are part of my competition.

If I want to, I can always do regular competitive keyword research from here using another tool (entering in those URLs), but if I’m in a rush, I can just take note for now.

At this point, I should have a good idea of what my keyword difficulty will be and which keywords will stand the best chance against my competitors on SERPs.

Then I can move on to narrowing my list even further.

Focus on Search Intent

Searcher intent is everything when it comes to content for SEO and PPC .

In everything we do online, we should always be focused on fulfilling the needs, wants, and desires of the customer.

The customer is the lifeblood of our business and it’s what keeps us functioning.

But lots of posts lack searcher intent and therefore get lackluster results.

You can see this almost instantly in both PPC advertising and organic listings.

In PPC, for example, conduct a basic search for something like “ best crm ” and see what turns up:

The results are specific CRM companies calling themselves the best.

But take a moment right now to dig deeper into that keyword “best crm.”

What do you think the searcher is looking for? What signals can you derive from it?

Well, usually when someone is searching for the term “best,” they are looking for comparisons, right?

They want to know what the best product is. What’s the top-rated one? Which one should they choose?

“Best” signifies a desire to compare and review, not to instantly purchase a CRM claiming to be #1.

Scroll down to the organic results for this listing and you can see that Google has correctly intuited searcher intent:

We also see this often in SEO.

For example, when you search for “how to do seo for small business,” you find a mixed bag of results all catering towards different intent:

Almost all of these cater to the intent differently.

That shows me that marketers struggle to understand user intent, but that it’s also more important than ever.

It also shows me that there can be multiple forms of intent within a single keyword, which is why long-form content tends to dominate the competition.

Why? It includes everything, from start to finish.

So, how do you start to focus more on searcher intent?

Well, a strategy that works for me is to think about your topic first and then conduct a basic Google search.

Let’s say you want to write about “ PPC vs SEO .” Start by using a Google search to see what other companies have determined the intent to be:

This is pretty solid. But the intent of this keyword is also easy to understand.

Someone simply wants to discover what is worth their time and money, and likely, what produces the best return on their investment.

But what about a difficult long-tail keyword like “is seo good for my website?”

Now you’ve got another mixed bag of results where it’s nearly impossible to determine intent instantly based on previous posts.

But this is also a good thing!

If you find this, you potentially have a huge win in the making.

What I mean by this is the fact that people haven’t tapped into the intent yet. They aren’t sure yet what works best.

This gives you a huge opportunity.

To decipher the intent, I like to find specific words that stand out.

Here are a few to be aware of and the common intent behind them:

• Best: Comparison or reviews-based results are best:

• Proven: Data-backed studies:

• Easy: Fast but in-depth step-by-step guides

These are some of the most common words you’ll find in long-tail search terms and the typical intent behind them.

Try putting this into practice the next time you target topics to understand how your positioning will impact CTR and traffic.

The better you line up with searcher intent, the more click-throughs you will get.

Get Real Topic Suggestions From Google

Keyword research takes up way too much time.

Finding the right terms with the right volume in your niche is futile.

Want an easier way to find fast topics that real people are searching for?

Let Google do the work for you.

Google currently compiles frequently asked questions on topics as well as other searches conducted by users around specific topics:

This data is invaluable, and I am still shocked that Google shows it to us.

It blows keyword research out of the water because it gives you ideas for semantic keywords.

Semantic keywords are those that give your content some context , allowing you to possibly show up for multiple terms with a single post.

Head to Google and search for a topic that you want to write about.

For example, I recently wanted to write about artificial intelligence and how it impacts marketing.

So I went to Google and searched for it to see other industry perspectives and gather some keyword data.

To find ideas and instant contextual keyword data, scroll to the bottom of the search results page.

Now I’ve got a complete list of searches related to my original query.

This is how you add context to your content. How you tell Google that you are providing the right information.

My usual next step is to use these to form a basic outline for a new post.

For example, I could structure it like this:

Header: Original keyword query of “artificial intelligence marketing.”

Intro: How will AI impact marketing?

Body 1: Application of artificial intelligence in marketing

Body 2: Content marketing and artificial intelligence

Body 3: Software trends

Step 3: Putting It Together in the Spreadsheet

The final part of the process is taking the spreadsheet and interpreting the data.

I like to use Conditional Formatting in Excel to highlight cells a certain color based on the numerical value in the cell.

You simply highlight the cell range you want to compare, then go to Conditional Formatting > New Rule.

Select the 3-Color Scale Format Style, and change the Lowest Value / Highest Value color when applicable.

Certain fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is good whereas a lower number is bad.

For those fields (global & local monthly searches), you will want to leave the color settings as default, as shown below.

Other fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is bad whereas a lower number is good.

For those fields (GAKT – Competition, GAKT – Approximate CPC, SEOmoz KA – Difficulty, SEOmoz KA – Competitor DA, SEOmoz KA – Competitor RDLRD), you will want to change the lowest value color setting to green and the highest value color setting to red, as shown below.

Once you’re finished, you can highlight the top row and add a filter by applying the Sort & Filter > Filter option.

I like to start with selecting the filter for the SEOmoz KA – Difficulty column and sorting it from smallest to largest.

This way you get the following (click on the image below to see a larger view):

As you can imagine, having the highlighting and sorting options would be very valuable when looking at a spreadsheet with up to 100 keywords.

You could quickly see which keywords have the most searches and least competition or the least competition but most searches.

You could then move over and look at the actual competition for each keyword if you were shooting for #1 rankings.

Step 4: Making the Final Keyword Choices

My suggestion when making the final choice of keywords is as follows:

• If your website is commercial (offering products or services), go with keywords that seem to have the most commercial intent based on the currently ranking websites. If your website is informational (blogs come to mind), go with keywords that have the most informational intent.
• Look for a “sweet spot” of high search volume in conjunction with low difficulty/competition.
• Look at keywords with high search volume with top competitors that have lower domain authority and backlinks.
• If your website is already ranking on the first page, but not in the top 5 spots (or beneath other search result areas such as images, local results, etc.) and the keyword has good search volume, focus on getting those keywords and phrases to move up.

Sometimes, it’s not the actual decision that is the most difficult – it is actually compiling the data that takes the most time! Also, don’t forget to take the keywords that are more informational and use them for content topic ideas!

This concludes our method of discovering keyword ideas, analyzing them, and then choosing the best for your website.

We have noticed that there are many various ways to perform keyword research, and you have to try out different analysis methods to see which ones speak to you the best when deciding on keywords.

Recap: Keyword Research Checklist

There’s a lot of information in the previous sections. To make your job easier, here’s a handy checklist you can use to ensure you’re following each step.

Feel free to copy and print it out. It’s a useful template for all of your keyword research projects!

• Download Excel or create an account with Google Sheets
• Download or copy this spreadsheet with all of the columns you will need for your keyword research
• Choose a keyword discovery tool, like Ubersuggest or Google Ads Keyword Planner
• Researching your audience
• Finding the search terms in use now
• Getting some suggestions from tools like Soovle

Step 2: Analyzing and Choosing the Best Keywords

• Choose a keyword analysis tool, like Ubersuggest or Moz
• Finding keywords you already rank for
• Focusing on search intent
• Getting real topic suggestions from Google
• Export the keyword data from your chosen analysis tool and add it to your spreadsheet
• Set up conditional formatting rules in your spreadsheet
• User search intent
• Keywords with high search volume but low or medium competition
• Keywords with high search volume with top competitors that have lower domain authority and backlinks
• Keywords with high search volume that you already rank on the first page for, but not within the top five search results

Keyword Research Resources

Do you want to delve even deeper into keyword research? Here are some resources with a plethora of keyword research tips:

• A New Way to Do Keyword Research : This article and video walk you through another way to complete keyword research.
• SEO Unlocked: Keyword Research Part 1 : In this video, I walk you through the basics of keyword research.
• SEO Unlocked: Keyword Research Part 2 : This is the continuation of my keyword research walk-through videos. Be sure to check out the keyword research PDF for a more detailed walk-through than this post!

Do you have more questions about keyword research? We have the answers to some frequently asked questions on the topic.

The keywords you target must be relevant to your website and target audience. Think about the topics related to your industry or business that your audience is likely to search on the Internet. Use a tool like Ubersuggest to find and select the best keywords for those topics.

Tools like Ubersuggest and Moz have free versions of keyword tools you can use, though you will unlock additional data and features when you select a paid version. You don’t need to spend a fortune on expensive SEO tools to compile a list of good keywords, however. 

You should do keyword research for your organic and your paid marketing. You may want to focus on different metrics depending on whether you are targeting organic or paid visits, however. For organic search, it’s important to take note of the domain authority of your competitors. For paid search, take note of the average CPC to decide which keywords are worthwhile. 

Keyword research relates to SEO in that you must know what terms to target in order to rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You can utilize keyword research to find specific search terms that relate to your business, which drive the most traffic, and which are possible to rank for. With this information, you can optimize your website for search engines using those specific terms.

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of how to do keyword research for SEO and PPC.

Completing thorough keyword research is crucial if you want to drive traffic to your website .

There are many keyword research tips and methods to try in addition to those I outlined in this post. As you get more experienced with keyword research, you may want to try out some additional methods.

There is also a plethora of keyword research tools at your disposal. My favorite (biased though I may be) is Ubersuggest. Our team is continually rolling out new features to provide you with better data that other tools don’t provide.

If you don’t want to do your own keyword research, SEO, or digital marketing, you can reach out to my agency for help.

What are your favorite keyword research tools?

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About the author:

Co Founder of NP Digital & Owner of Ubersuggest

He is the co-founder of NP Digital . The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/keyword-research/

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Keyword Research And Analysis: How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Website

Last updated on January 12, 2024.

Which keywords do you want to rank for? To answer this question, a lot of SEOs like to follow their gut instinct. When starting out, this isn’t fundamentally wrong. But if you want to get the most out of keyword research and discover keywords with major potential, you need to take a systematic approach.

Systematic keyword research and analysis will give you the terms that your target group is searching for on Google , giving you the basis for developing a content strategy for your website .

This article will take you step by step through the process of keyword research and give you useful tips and strategies for finding relevant keywords for your website. We’ll also show you how Seobility’s free Keyword Research Tool can help you with this.

You can find an introduction to the tool’s features in the article “ New: Seobility Keyword Research Tool .”

Tip Signing up for a free Seobility Basic plan will let you carry out up to 5 checks per day. And during the free 14-day trial period for Seobility Premium, you’ll have as many as 50 queries per day.

If you’re already familiar with the basics of keyword research, you can jump to the hands-on section here .

Table of Contents

• 1 What is Keyword Research?
• 2 Why You Need Keyword Research
• 3 How Keyword Research Works
• 4 Step 1: Identify the Right Seed Keywords
• 5 Step 2: How to Find Relevant Keywords
• 6 Step 3: Analyze and Prioritize Your Keywords
• 7 Step 4: Develop a Content Plan
• 8 Additional Tools for Keyword Research
• 9 Conclusion

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research means looking for search terms that your target group will enter into a search engine to accomplish their search intent : Buying something, conducting research, finding information, being entertained, or navigating to a specific website (or part of a website). By knowing these search terms, you can offer tailor-made content on your website to draw searchers to your site and, for example, convert them to customers.

Keyword research is typically based on a combination of creative processes and tool use. These tools have the advantage of providing keywords that you may not have found just by putting on your thinking cap, or that might be overlooked by other approaches. They’ll also save you a lot of time, since a tool is typically faster than searching Google manually.

Another major advantage: Tools provide qualitative and quantitative data about the value of keywords that can’t be found in Google search or anywhere else, such as data about the competition for a keyword, the search volume , cost-per-click prices and link data. This makes it easier to assess whether it’s worth optimizing for a keyword, or whether it’s too expensive compared to the potential return.

Why You Need Keyword Research

Keyword research is important for search engine optimization for several reasons.

• Better visibility : Building the right keywords into your web pages increases the probability that these pages will receive a higher ranking for precisely those keywords. From a quantitative perspective, that potentially means more traffic, for one thing.
• Competitor analysis : You can also get a quicker idea of the competition you’re up against by seeing what keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their sites (which is typically part of keyword research). This analysis will help you identify niche keywords that are relatively less competitive and rewarding targets for content and product pages – as well as keywords that you absolutely must rank for in your niche.
• More efficient resource usage : With targeted keyword research, you can better utilize your SEO resources by concentrating on keywords that have more value for your organization. Nobody can rank on everything in the long term. Keyword research in general, and content production in particular, require significant investment of time and money. With the insights gained from keyword research, you can prioritize your use of each of these and also justify necessary compromises. For a short-tail keyword like “bicycle,” the pages that rank will typically be those with lots of links and high domain authority . Experience shows that it is unrealistic for a new website to compete with this.

How Keyword Research Works

Before we get down to business, it’s worth taking a look at the overall process of keyword research. Depending on your needs, it can be very simple – or highly complex. It depends on whether you’re doing keyword research for a few (dozen) keywords or whether your project requires research and categorization of thousands of keywords, as is the case with online shops that carry a lot of products. In this article, we’ll focus on the basic process, which is the same for any type of website.

• Step 1 : The first step in keyword research is to identify your “seed keywords.” Those are the main keywords related to your products and services, and the starting point for deeper research.
• Step 2 : Tools provide you with extensive lists of relevant keywords related to your seed keywords.
• Step 3 : The next step is to prioritize the keywords in these lists to extract ideal keywords, and then to structure them into meaningful keyword clusters.
• Step 4 : As you develop your content plan, determine what content needs to be produced for the most valuable or useful keywords.

Step 1: Identify the Right Seed Keywords

Keyword research always begins with the question: “What should I be optimizing for, anyway?” Usually, no tool can answer this question for you. Ultimately you know best what the goals of your website are.

Based on these goals, you’ll derive your main keywords or “seed keywords”. This basic list (ideally) covers your website’s most important topic areas . It forms the foundation for more in-depth keyword research.

The good news: You don’t need any tools to create your first seed keyword list. Seed keywords are found using classic techniques.

Brainstorming

Perhaps you know your subject so well that you can simply draw relevant terms from your own experience. Alternatively, you can sit down with your customers, colleagues and partners to create an initial list of keywords. The following questions might help you with brainstorming:

• Target group analysis : Who are the primary target groups of your products? What are their needs? How do these target groups search for what you’re offering them?
• Identifying and categorizing core themes : What primary themes emerge from your products and services? How can these core themes be categorized?
• Questions and answers : Which questions related to the core themes are the target groups asking?

These questions should give you a sizable list of keywords and additional questions that your potential customers have. This list will be the basis of your keyword research. If that’s not enough, we have a few more creative ideas for you:

Customer conversations

Conversations with your customers will inevitably lead to discussions about problems that need to be solved. Be sure to take notes in these situations, as discussions can easily lead to content such as FAQs and how-to guides. Actively asking questions can also provide valuable information.

E-mail inquiries

Support or sales inquiries also provide important clues to what visitors/customers are looking for.

Competitor analysis

Reviews and ratings, whether in comments, forums, newsletters or social media, are gold mines for creative keyword research. Don’t just look at your competitors’ own sites, but wherever customers and other interested people are talking about your competitors’ products and services, such as forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Regardless of your competitors, these platforms are always an interesting research resource in general.

Print media

Ideas for keywords and topics can also be found in relevant technical print media. Take a walk sometime to a well-organized bookstore with a large selection of technical journals and magazines. It’s fun, and it will give you ideas that your competitors don’t have because they often limit themselves to online research.

At the end of the process, you should have an extensive list of seed keywords to use as a basis for keyword research.

Step 2: How to Find Relevant Keywords

The next step is to identify relevant search terms associated with your seed keywords. These might be variations of the keyword, similar or related terms, or more specific long-tail keywords .

To provide an example of the process below, let’s imagine a sample project. We’ll assume that we’re starting with a new online shop offering foosball tables for sale. As a break from the heavy SEO work, it’s nice to have a little fun with your colleagues in the office every now and then to recharge your batteries for new ideas 🙂

So the seed keyword is “buy foosball table.” Now using the keyword research tool , we need to find out which variations and sub-keywords there are and how much potential each one has. You’re welcome to follow these steps, using your own seed keyword.

Find similar keywords and variations

First enter your seed keyword in the keyword research tool and choose “similar keywords” as the analysis:

After clicking on the “Keyword Research” button, the tool will show you a list of keywords similar to your seed keyword:

Now you can select all the terms that might be interesting for your website. The data to the right of each keyword gives you valuable information about the keyword’s potential, the underlying search intent, and how difficult it might be to rank for that term:

• Search volume : This is the estimated number of searches per month. For example, the phrase “foosball table for sale” is searched for an average of 2,900 times a month. The higher the search volume, the more traffic you can potentially attract to your website with that keyword. However, there’s usually a lot of competition for high-volume keywords, making it harder to achieve a high ranking.
• Search intent : Here you can find out the search intent behind a keyword. Do searchers want to buy something, find information on a topic, learn about a product, or simply navigate to a website? If multiple intents are served in the search results, you will see multiple entries here.
• Competition : Here you can see whether the competition for a keyword is high, average or low. According to the keyword research tool’s estimate, competition for the phrase “buy foosball table” is high. There are a lot of websites that want to get on the first page for that search.
• CPC (cost per click) : This is the approximate cost of a web ad for the phrase in Google Ads . It’s how much you would have to pay if a user clicks on your ad in the search results. In general, the higher the number of advertisers that bid for a keyword, the higher the CPC will be.

Terms with a high CPC and little competition are particularly valuable (but also rare).

These are the low-hanging fruit. It’s usually worth creating a page for them. This makes sense because advertisers seem to be willing to pay more for search terms (higher CPC), and if these terms have less competition, it’s all the easier to rank for them. That’s why such discoveries should be a high priority. The same applies to terms with high search volume but little competition.

The “Related searches” tab provides additional keyword variations. These are terms from the “Related searches” section that are displayed at the end of Google search results:

These related searches are a bit more general and are good for additional content ideas.

Tip: You can add promising keywords from the Keyword Research Tool directly to your Seobility rank tracking:

I went ahead and selected several additional keyword ideas and then added them to my project by clicking “Save selected search terms”.

The advantage of this is that Seobility will immediately start monitoring the positions of these terms and will inform you of the success of your SEO work, tailored to your keyword list.

Alternatively, you can use the ‘Export CSV’ function to download the keyword lists for further analysis and clustering (more on this in step 3).

But for now, back to the research part.

The “Auto complete” tab returns additional queries based on Google Search’s autocomplete suggestions .

Another interesting research resource is the “People also ask” tab. Here you’ll find common questions that search engine users ask in relation to the keyword.

The question “Which foosball table is the best” seems particularly interesting for content such as an article or post that answers this question in detail.

All these analysis options allow us to quickly find relevant keywords. Even if you don’t do anything further, this step alone will give you a wide range of options to optimize for. Just enter the seed keyword and you’ve got a starting point for the next steps. But wait – there’s more.

Your competitors are already ranking where you’d like to rank. This also means that they have information that you don’t yet have. Fortunately, the Keyword Research Tool offers some features to analyze the ranking performance of these sites. You can use this data to add valuable terms to your keyword list.

Especially interesting are keywords your own website doesn’t yet rank for, but your competition does . You can find these terms by using the “Competitor analysis” function of the Keyword Research Tool.

To do this, enter your domain (or another domain) in “Your domain” (1) and then enter up to two competitors as Domain A and B. Then select “Gap” as the analysis (2).

And look: A top ranking domain for the keyword “buy foosball table” doesn’t yet rank for “foosball football table” compared to the two competitors (3).

The ‘Intersections’ analysis, on the other hand, provides terms for which all three analyzed domains rank. This is particularly useful as you can enter the top 3 domains for a keyword to get a list of the top keywords for which all 3 competitors rank in that area. This is particularly helpful if your site is targeting the same topic but isn’t yet in the top 3.

In our example, this approach helped us discover some of the top brands that consumers are interested in.

If the data from the gap and intersection analysis isn’t enough for you, you can get even more data on each individual competitor in the “URL/Domain” tab. Here you can see in detail which keywords a particular competitor is ranking for in organic search results .

Competitor analysis is an important process in keyword research because it allows you to see what’s already working well for your competitors.

Your analysis should always include finding out why your competitors are currently ranking so well. Take a closer look at the top 3-5. Can you see a strategy, especially when you compare the leaders (in terms of ranking)? For example, are they focusing on long-tail keywords that are more specific and easier to rank for?

But sometimes it’s quite simple: If you’re not targeting a keyword and all your competitors are, then it should probably be one of your top priorities!

Pro tip: How to find “pain point” keywords

Keyword research tools can be extremely helpful but they can’t replace a thorough understanding of your potential customer’s needs.

As Ané Wiese – SEO Lead at saas.group – explains:

For example: a common challenge with keyword research tools is the source of the search volume. Many SEO specialists want search volume data coming from Google, so a term like “keyword research tool Google search volumes” could be relevant to include in the set.

You can identify challenges that your potential customers face by asking the customer service team, using ChatGPT or you can look at forum websites like Reddit, Quora and Facebook groups.

Once you have your “pain-point” keywords, you can also look for keywords that might not have search volume data available yet, but that does not mean that these terms aren’t searched for. To identify these keywords, you have to use Google Autocomplete suggestions in Google’s search bar. For example, start typing in the beginning of the search term like “keyword research tools that….” or “keyword research tool for…” and see what Google suggests as autocompleted terms in its search bar.

This should serve as a clue to what popular terms there are related to your product. It is also a great way to identify terms that you can create new pages for as these terms are often very specific and descriptive.”

Step 3: Analyze and Prioritize Your Keywords

Now that your keyword search is complete, you probably have one or more long keyword lists. It’s not uncommon for them to contain thousands of entries. That’s why the next step is to select the best keywords. After all, no one can create content for every possible topic at the same time.

For the following examples, I’ve chosen the topic “trekking bikes”, because it gives a lot more results.

Let’s say your website/online shop is new. The site offers a range of trekking bikes for sale and now you want to produce content on trekking bikes to show Google that your company is an expert in this field.

A search for keywords similar to the seed keyword “trekking bike” returns a total of 524 variations.

The big question now is: “What do I do with all these keywords?”

As mentioned above, it’s important to find the best keywords for your website. This means high potential keywords where you have a good chance of attracting as much relevant traffic as possible to your website.

The filter function in the Keyword Research Tool allows you to filter your keyword list by search volume, search intent, CPC, competition and number of words:

For ultimate flexibility, though, use the “CSV Export” function, which I’ll use for this example.

Once you’ve exported the CSV file, you’ll have the full power of the spreadsheet at your disposal, letting you sort and filter your keyword list as much as you like.

About Keyword Priority

Beginners in particular often wonder what the best filtering criteria are . However, experience shows that choosing keywords/topics based on your own editorial skills leads to better results. The priority of your own keywords is highly individual and every website owner has their own objectives, both for the whole website and for individual areas and sub-pages. Your business goals and the resources available for technology, content and links will largely determine how you conduct your analysis.

Here are a few strategic tips based on experience that may be helpful as guidelines:

• If the search volume is high and there’s stiff competition for the keyword, you should only target it if you have the resources for both content and link building. For highly competitive search terms (such as “hotel London,” “loan comparison,” “cheap flights,” “buy bicycle,” “buy foosball table”) it can take years to get to page one or even number one.
• A brand new website or one that doesn’t yet have sufficient domain popularity (i.e. many high-quality links from different domains) will only rank for search terms with low search volume at first. Only over time, it will start to rank for more competitive keywords. So it’s not worth prioritizing a keyword like “buy foosball table” right off the bat. Instead, it makes sense for a new website to start by trying long-tail keywords with low search volume and limited competition. From there, you can gradually work your way up to more difficult keywords. (Of course, it makes sense to optimize for “buy foosball table” if you’ve actually recently started selling foosball tables, but more for business reasons than for SEO).
• How long does it take to rank for competitive terms? Old hands at SEO know that time itself is (or can be) one of the most important ranking factors. Waiting periods of 18 to 24 months to rank for competitive keywords are not uncommon – and that’s assuming you’re constantly working on new content, updates and links.
• Established sites with a certain history and a relatively high number of links compared to their competitors may see a much faster improvement. But even then, it sometimes takes a while if they try to rank for new topic areas. For example, if an online shop has been selling pool tables for 10 years and then adds foosball tables to its product range, it doesn’t automatically mean that the new search terms will get top rankings. You have to earn Google’s trust for each new topic area.
• Start by focusing on terms and combinations for which your competitors don’t offer much quality content. This will often get you closer to your goals than thoroughly analyzing the values from keyword research tools. Especially for beginners, it’s important to have those first small successes. Each one will keep you motivated and make it more likely that you’ll keep at it.
• Give priority to search terms and topics that serve informational search intent . Search terms with a purchase intent are usually more difficult to claim.
• Don’t spend 100% of your resources on your one dream keyword. In the beginning, 90% of your resources should go to the easier keywords and 10% to the difficult ones. Over time, the ratio should shift towards the harder keywords.
• But despite this recommendation, keep trying to rank for more difficult terms as well. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Group Keywords in Topic Clusters

Keyword analysis isn’t just about prioritizing your keywords. It’s also about organizing them effectively by topic , or forming “topic clusters”. A cluster can then be used as the basis for one or more posts or articles. Ideally, you would do all this by hand. Thanks to the AI boom, however, there’s now a long list of tools that can help you with this task, especially for clustering long lists of keywords. The Keyword Clustering Tool , for example, is a recent entrant into the field.

In this example, I uploaded 524 keywords (the tool’s limit is 2,919) and clicked on “Create Clusters.”

Clicking the button “Download All Clustered Topics” gives you an Excel file, which I then uploaded to Google Sheets:

This list is already much easier to read. Of course, we don’t want to rely 100% on the AI, so let’s take another look at the list. Do all the groupings make sense?

Since I’m primarily looking for good topics for editorial content, I’ve chosen a handful of interesting clusters:

Clustering radically simplifies the search for topics. After 10 minutes or so, I’ve reduced the list to these clusters and discovered the following potential article topics:

• What’s the best touring bike in 2023?
• Trekking Bikes: Buying Guide
• The best e-trekking bikes in 2023

This results in three topics to start with for which the new site can now try to achieve a first page ranking.

Step 4: Develop a Content Plan

Once you’ve analyzed and prioritized your keyword lists, you’ll have keyword clusters to use as the basis for your content. So now it’s time to create a content plan.

A content plan is basically a list of what topics you want to create for your website next, and in what order. Content plans are an important topic that definitely deserves its own article. For now, here are a handful of quick tips to help you ramp up your content production:

• You can look at each cluster keyword as a seed keyword for the post or article you’re planning, and carry out another round of keyword research to derive the subtopics that need to be addressed in the article.
• It’s not enough to just use the keywords identified in your research for a post or article. What’s more important is taking a careful look at the SERPs for each topic and analyzing users’ search intent more deeply (building on the search intent category you get from the Keyword Research Tool) before producing content. We describe this process in detail in the article “ Search Intent: How to optimize your content for searchers’ needs ” here on our blog.
• Analyzing users’ search intent will give you a good idea of which points your new post or article should address and in what format the article should appear.

We spoke to Shannon Kelly Ash – Content Marketing Lead at saas.group – about this and she also emphasized the importance of paying attention to search intent in keyword research and content planning:

“When mapping out your keyword clusters, be mindful of intent per keyword. Clusters can help drive topic ideation, but your content will not be contextually relevant without understanding the buyer’s journey. If you can, use this as an opportunity to include long-tail keywords with low volume terms.

For example, if you were selling sofas at Ikea, a basic cluster would look something like: “sofa” –> best sofas, comfy sofa, cheap sofa, sofa for living room, ikea sofa blue, sofas for sale london, sofa pet proof.

Now, if you go a step further with long-tail keywords according to intents, you would use:

● how to choose a pet proof sofa (informational) ● best pet proof sofa in london for small apartments (commercial and location-based) ● buy pet proof sofas for small apartments online (transactional).”

This way, you can align your content with the buyer’s journey and make sure that you provide a relevant piece of content (or transactional page) for each stage of the journey.

Would you like more information about how to create a content plan? Let us know in the comments!

Additional Tools for Keyword Research

There are many tools available for keyword research. Each has its own database and may have slightly different features. Here are a few more tips for finding topics.

Google Trends

Google Trends categorizes searches by time period and by location or region. With this information, you can get a comprehensive view of how the popularity of certain keywords varies by season and the geographic distribution of queries.

Most importantly, you’ll be able to see how search volume changes over time. Here in the screenshot for the term ” foosball table “, you can clearly recognize that it’s a “luxury good” with strong seasonal variations, so that significantly more traffic can be expected around the holiday season. The traffic peaks are in the pre-Christmas period at the end of November and beginning of December (1).

The tool displays additional information about search queries, such as “Related queries” (2). You can download these with a single click and evaluate them yourself:

In this case, I’ve imported the downloaded file relatedQueries.csv into a Google Sheet. Tornado, Harvard, and Sportcraft are popular brands. We can also see that foosball fans are also looking for air hockey and ping pong tables and dart boards. No surprise there!

It’s almost always worth using Google Trends, as you’ll often find keywords in the Trends database that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a classic tool for keyword research. It’s the central tool for Google Ads, after all. So it’s worth incorporating this tool in your analysis.

These days, no topic is complete without mentioning OpenAI’s chatbot. It’s refreshingly helpful for keyword research, but don’t forget that ChatGPT is not a specialized keyword tool. The data it spits out can’t possibly be up-to-date or accurate, as ChatGPT doesn’t have access to Google’s database.

Certainly! I can provide you with some keyword suggestions related to the topic “buy foosball table.” Here are some keywords that may be relevant for your keyword research:

• Buy foosball table
• Foosball table for sale
• Best foosball table
• Affordable foosball table
• Foosball table prices
• Outdoor foosball table
• Indoor foosball table
• Professional foosball table
• Mini foosball table
• Folding foosball table
• Wooden foosball table
• Electronic foosball table
• Used foosball table
• Custom foosball table
• Foosball table dimensions

Remember, these are just some suggestions to get you started. You can further refine your keyword research by adding location-specific keywords or targeting specific customer segments.

It’s interesting that ChatGPT suggests some new ideas for keywords. However, the results are limited to a few keywords and don’t provide a deep insight into a topic area like a specialized tool can.

What’s really surprising, though, is that even though ChatGPT claims not to have access to CPC data, it can still send you data if you ask for it:

Certainly! Please note that the following CPC (Cost Per Click) values are estimates and may not reflect real-time data. However, they can still provide you with a general idea of the potential cost associated with each keyword. Here’s a table with the suggested keywords and their estimated CPC values:

Please note that CPC values can vary greatly depending on various factors such as competition, industry, and location. These estimates are meant to give you a rough idea and should not be considered as definitive values. It is always recommended to use a reliable keyword research tool to get up-to-date and accurate CPC data for your specific targeting parameters.

As you can see, ChatGPT isn’t afraid to just take a guess. We’ll leave it up to you to analyze how close ChatGPT comes to the figures published by Google.

Doing keyword research for the first time to create a content plan can feel a little like looking for 10 tiny needles in 20 different haystacks.

But while the keyword research process may feel complex and time-consuming at first, it’s not as bad as it seems – thanks to the many helpful tools that are available today. Once you’ve been through the process a time or two, it starts to go a lot faster. The fun part is when you start ranking for your keywords. You’re most likely to achieve this if you use keyword research as a source of inspiration and focus as much as possible on your content and the process of creating it. Don’t forget: Always focus on users’ search intent, because that’s the surest and fastest way to success 🙂

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