How to do keyword research for SEO

What is keyword research?

Keyword research refers to the process of finding and analyzing keywords that your ideal website visitors/customers will be searching for when using a search engine. Think of keywords as being the foundation of SEO. If nobody is searching for what you’re writing about, you won’t get any traffic from Google—no matter how good your content strategy is.

The basics

Keywords are single words or phrases that allow searchers to find information or products. For example, if you wanted to buy food for your cat, you might type the keyword “food for cats” into Google.

In-depth keyword research helps you to:

• Better understand your niche and target audience
• Fine-tune your content strategy to fit the needs of your audience
• Get more relevant organic traffic to your website

Without keyword research, you run the risk of targeting keywords that nobody is even searching for, or not targeting any keywords at all! In this blog, we’ll outline the three steps of keyword research.

How to find keyword ideas: Step 1 

Brainstorm “seed” keywords

Seed keywords are the starting point of the keyword research process. They will define your business’s niche and help you identify your competitors. Every keyword research tool you find will first ask for a seed keyword, which it can then use to generate a huge list of keyword ideas. 

If you already have a product or business that you want to promote online, just think about what people would type into Google to find it. For example, if you sell tea and tea-making equipment, then your seed keywords might be:

• tea
• black tea
• loose tea
• tea strainer etc.

As soon as you have a handful of broad ideas related to your website’s topic, you’re good to move on.

Check out what keywords your competitors rank for

Next, you’ll need to search Google for one of your seed keywords and see which businesses rank on the front page. Once you find a competitor’s website that measures up to what you do, you can plug it into a competitive intelligence tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to check which pages bring it the most traffic and what keywords these pages are targeting. 

It’s good practice to repeat this process with a few of your competitors. This way you’ll end up with a pretty sizable list of relevant keywords.

Use keyword research tools

Although competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas, there’s a chance that many keywords will not have been covered by them—this is where you can use a keyword research tool. Simply plug in one of your seed keywords, and the research tool will pull keyword ideas from their databases based on that keyword.

Google Keyword Planner (GKP for short) is one of the most well-known keyword tools.

How to analyze keywords: Step 2

Great, you’ve accessed a whole bunch of keywords. But how do you know which ones will work best for your pages? By using SEO metrics of course! SEO metrics will allow you to narrow things down and sort the valuable from the worthless. Here are three keyword metrics you can use to do this:

• Search volume—this will tell you the average number of times a keyword gets searched per month. 
• Keyword Difficulty—experienced SEO professionals account for many different factors to judge how hard or easy it’ll be to rank for a given keyword. 
• Cost Per Click (CPC)—this highlights how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click on an ad displayed on top of search results for a given keyword. It can serve as a useful proxy for a keyword’s value.

How to target keywords: Step 3

The last step of your keyword research will involve finding out how to target the keywords you want to rank for. Let’s explore how you can do this:

Identify the primary keyword

One topic usually contains multiple keywords. This means you can rank for many keywords with one piece of content that covers the topic thoroughly. However, you still need a single primary keyword that will help you target the topic. 

A keyword can be one of these two:

• A primary keyword: a keyword that is the best representation of the topic, has the highest search volume, and is used in the key elements of the page (such as the URL, title tag, heading, etc.). For example, the primary keyword of this guide is “keyword research.”
  
• A secondary keyword: a keyword within the same topic with a lower search volume that you also want to rank for (but is not your primary target). There can be multiple secondary keywords within one topic (e.g., “what is keyword research?” “how to find keyword ideas,” “how to analyze keywords.”)
  

Pinpoint the search intent

By this, we mean that you need to be targeting your specific keyword with the right content. So first, you need to find out the search intent behind your keyword. We would recommend going through the top results on Google and analyzing them closely. This way, you can:

1. Look at the actual pages that rank for the keyword
2. Find out what search intent Google attributes to that keyword
3. Create corresponding content

For example, if all the results ranking for a keyword are product landing pages, you probably shouldn’t target that keyword with a blog post. And vice versa—if there are 10 results with review posts, you likely won’t be able to rank your landing page. 

What to take away

Keyword research for SEO is an essential part of any content strategy. So now is the time to put what you’ve learnt into practice and dive into your own keyword research. Incorporating these terms into your content strategy will help search engines rank your website pages and users find your content when looking for it. Happy researching!