Google is the most popular search engine in the world, with more than 8.5 billion daily searches conducted by people.
Even more fascinating is the fact that 15% of these searches are brand new.
Everyone on Google, including your target audience, uses keywords to find information online.
Gaining knowledge of those keywords can transform your digital presence, whether you are a business or content creator.
You would be able to create a solid SEO (search engine optimization) driven content strategy and boost organic search traffic by focusing on the right keywords to target.
After first understanding what keyword research is, and reading this guide on how to do keyword research for Google, you will be able to find, analyze, and select the best keywords for your website's SEO.
Let’s dig into how to find these keyword opportunities to develop your SEO strategy.
We have broken down the entire keyword research process into logical steps for you to follow. Each stage is explained in detail in a dedicated section later in the guide.
Seed keywords are the first few words or phrases of a query to help you find other related keywords.
They provide a solid starting point for effective keyword research.
For example, if you sell footwear online, seed keywords can be "shoes," "slippers," "sneakers," and so on.
Seed keywords act as inputs for the next stage when you use several methods to create a master keyword list.
Here are some valuable tips for developing seed keywords for your website.
Describe the key jobs your products or service helps your target audience to complete in simple words.
For example, if you provide accounting services, your potential customer jobs can be described with words like "tax filing," "tax savings," or "business accounting." This method makes use of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework for understanding customer needs.
Think of the most likely terms that come to mind concerning your business that you are reasonably sure your target audience is searching for.
For example, if you sell cookies online, then "tasty cookies," "milk cookies," and "chocolate cookies" may be commonly searched by your customers.
Leverage AI tools like CopyAI's Keyword Generator tool to come up with more seed keyword ideas.
By the end of this stage, you should collect 10-20 relevant seed keywords, maybe more depending on your business and products.
This step is the core of any keyword research process when you will use several basic and advanced techniques to build a master list of keywords.
It is a good practice to build your database of potential keywords in spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. You can share this spreadsheet with team members so they can contribute to it and keep a single source for a potential keyword list.
Now, let’s dive deep into several keyword discovery techniques that you can utilize to generate a comprehensive list of keyword ideas.
Google Autocomplete is a feature of Google Search that provides suggested searches based on your typing.
Autocomplete recommendations are automatically generated by an algorithm that compiles a list of possible phrases that other people have searched for. Then, the system will suggest these searches as you type.
You can hack the feature to generate hundreds of relevant keyword ideas for your website.
Google Keyword Planner is a completely free keyword tool from Google primarily created for Google Ads campaigns.
It can generate hundreds of keyword ideas and provide relevant keyword metrics to help with the analysis step.
People also ask (PAA) suggestions box is a Google search engine results page (SERP) feature highlighting questions related to the main search query.
It is an excellent source for finding frequently asked question keywords for your seed term.
Pro tip: A single PAA box can be hacked into, displaying many more suggestions than the initial set. All you have to do is open and close a question, and new questions will populate below it.
Another useful SERP feature to scrape keywords is the "People also search for" suggestions box. It is not immediately visible and requires a different approach.
Another SERP feature that can be used to fill out your keywords list is "Related searches."
They appear at the bottom of the SERP with the label "Related searches." A lot of these suggestions often overlap with autocomplete suggestions. Still, you may find some new terms to add to your keyword list.
In competitor keyword research, you identify the keywords your search competitors are targeting and ranking for, but not your website.
You can find those keywords with a solid competitor research strategy, fill your SEO content gaps, and grow relevant organic traffic.
Get more detailed instructions by checking out this guide on how to do competitive keyword analysis.
Popular forums like Quora and Reddit are a great place to find topics related to your niche to get more ideas for keywords that you might not have thought about before.
One way to do this is by searching for questions about your niche and then reading through them all until you find something you can use as a keyword.
For example, if you're selling a product for pet owners, you can search for questions related to pets on Quora and Reddit. The best part about this is that the people who ask these questions are likely already interested in the subject matter, meaning they may also be interested in buying what you offer.
You can further browse niche forums in your industry to expand your keywords database.
Going straight to the source (your customers) is always a good plan if you're looking for new keyword ideas.
Here are some effective ways to turn your customer voice into a keyword ideas generator.
Customer surveys are a great way to understand better what your audience is looking for on your website. You can ask questions about the types of products they are looking for, what they think about your current product offerings, or even why they chose one product over another. Once you've compiled all of this information, use it as inspiration for new keyword ideas that can help you reach such customers more effectively.
Have customers submitted tickets asking about specific topics related to their purchasing decisions? If so, that's great! You can use those tickets as a resource to find new keywords to create content that answers them. If customers created tickets asking questions, that means there are other customers out there that may have the same questions, so use those keywords to create a resource for them.
Google Trends is another free-to-use service from Google to understand search trends.
Related topics reveal other content themes that users searching the seed term also look for on Google. You can sort the topics list by "Top" and "Rising."
Related queries are other keywords the same users search for on Google. They also can be sorted by "Top" and "Rising" queries.
The rising queries are particularly interesting as they cover terms showing a significant increase in searches compared to the previous period. They could naturally have lower competition and become excellent keyword choices to create content.
When you have a website, you should create a property within Google Search Console to get more data that you can’t get from other tools like Google Analytics.
In Google Search Console, you’ll see how many impressions certain keywords are getting, their clicks, average rankings, any website issues, page experience, and so much more. You’ll submit your sitemaps here to let Google know what you want crawled on your website.
So how can you use Google Search Console for keyword research?
After you’ve gathered your master list of keywords with any, or all, of the keyword research methods above, use them in the next step to get valuable keyword data so you can analyze keyword difficulty, monthly searches, cost-per-click (CPC), search intent, and much more to develop your content strategy.
With SEO being a significant marketing channel, many software tools have been built to meet the needs of businesses and SEO professionals.
There is an entire list of tools with solid keyword research capabilities. You can think of them as an advanced version of Google Keyword Planner.
Such SEO keyword research tools can help you with a ton of features to help with SEO.:
Most SEO tools will require you to subscribe to a paid plan to unlock all features and data. You can try different tools and stick to the best one for your needs and budget.
Now that you have a comprehensive database of keyword ideas, it is time to analyze the list and pick the most suitable keywords.
You should evaluate each keyword against a set of parameters and metrics. Let us understand some important ones and how they should be interpreted.
Keyword volume is a measure of the popularity of a keyword based on average monthly searches. The higher the keyword monthly search volume, the more people search for the term, and the more potential traffic there is for a target keyword.
You can use Google Keyword Planner, which gives an estimated range of monthly searches, or an SEO and keyword tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, which gives more accurate and precise metrics, to get keyword volume estimates.
Keyword difficulty is a measure of the competition to rank your page for the keyword that usually ranges from 0 to 100.
A higher difficulty score means you’ll need more backlinks, a stronger website domain authority, and high-quality and optimized content to rank for the term. Keywords with high competition often have a significant search volume as well.
You must strike a balance between difficulty and volume to pick keywords.
Relevance illustrates the suitability of a keyword phrase for your website and target audience. This is probably the easiest step, as you should be able to easily identify the relevant and related keywords to your business that you want to target.
Mostly, you should have a list of relevant terms from your keyword ideation process. Still, if some irrelevant words slip in, you can remove them in this step.
Search intent describes the user's purpose for a search., and can be broadly classified as informational, transactional, or navigational.
For example, "how to install ceiling lights" is an informational query, "best ceiling lights online" is a transactional query, and "Philips ceiling lights" is a navigational search term.
Keyword trend describes the search volume for a keyword across time. It can help you identify seasonal queries like "best christmas gifts."
The keyword cost-per-click (CPC) rate can give you a good idea of the demand for a keyword, but will be more costly if you plan to do paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A higher CPC rate usually means a valuable keyword to target, but could also suggest higher competition.
Note: There is no magic formula to pick the best keywords using the above parameters. Your choice depends on several factors, with no guaranteed outcomes, and may or may not work for someone else.
For example, suppose your website is already established and has a high domain rank or authority. In that case, you should be able to pick medium to high volume and competitive keywords and potentially rank for them. You can pick keywords that will fill out your topic clusters or keyword groups and internally link them to have the best chance of ranking sooner.
However, if you have just started a website, you are better off going with low-difficulty, long-tail keywords for your SEO strategy. As you get more backlinks and create more content, you’ll be able to go after medium difficulty keywords with higher search volumes.
Once you have a filtered list of keywords, you should organize them into keyword groups.
You can consider a keyword group as a topic cluster. Each group consists of multiple related keywords with the potential to rank on a single page.
One of the keywords should be treated as the primary keyword and others as secondary or related terms.
The next step is to prioritize your keyword groups for content creation. This is important because, with proper prioritization, you can attain SEO results faster and drive desired outcomes.
Overall, this step also shapes your content marketing strategy by defining what content you will create and when you plan to produce it.
You can document this plan in the form of an SEO content calendar.
Now is the time for execution by putting your SEO content calendar in motion.
Each planned SEO content page or post will have an assigned keyword group.
Your job is to optimize the page for its target keywords properly. This will cover following the best practices of on-page SEO like using the primary keyword in H1, meta title, URL slug, subheadings, and naturally throughout the content..
More importantly, you should try to meet the search intent with your content as much as possible.
Additionally, you should focus on off-page optimization actions like building quality backlinks and technical SEO optimization like improving page speed.
Related read: How to write an SEO-friendly blog post
SEO is a long-term process, so you can't expect immediate results from it. Tracking the performance and making adjustments of your SEO-focused pages is an integral part of the process.
Keyword rankings and traffic are an essential metric to track. You can do so with an SEO tool that tracks rankings, and Google Analytics for your traffic.
After you hit publish, your page may start at position 90 in SERP. Knowing this, you can devise a plan to boost its rankings to the top 10 using various techniques like building backlinks, interlinking, and content refreshes.
To streamline the search performance tracking and optimization process, you should maintain a central dashboard of key metrics plus an optimization-related task list.
We have also written detailed keyword research guides for other popular search engines and use cases. You can follow the links below to learn more about them.
Keyword research is the primary step to a successful SEO strategy for your website.
You can consider it the foundation on which your website content marketing will happen.
It is critical to get this groundwork right.
This is possible with a well-planned and executed keyword research process that focuses on the quality and comprehensiveness of your keyword database.
We hope this in-depth guide on how will help you build a solid keyword strategy and drive success with organic search.
By the way, if you have still not leveraged AI technology to improve your SEO activities like writing SEO-friendly blog titles, it is time to give CopyAI's suite of AI-powered writing tools a free trial.
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