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