Keywords Research - How To Guide
Keyword research is one of the cornerstones of SEO in search engines. It is the basis for a site’s content strategy, link strategy, and its internal structure and hierarchy. It involves a process of tests, investigations, and searches aimed at identifying a list of words that users search on Google to find a service, information, or a product.
Most people who ask me what I do and hear “SEO” as the answer immediately say,
“Ah, that’s when you put a lot of different words on your site, and then it appears on Google, right?”
Well, that’s not quite accurate, but it definitely correlates with the fact that search engines, including Google, rely on content, which, after all, is a collection of words.
How do you conduct good keyword research?
Good keyword research is based on familiarity with the content world of the service or product your site deals with, but also on external tools and checks in the search results of relevant engines.
As the attached infographic explains, excellent keyword research can be conducted in five simple steps: extract > search > delve > sort > prioritize.
Let's start with Google
Our goal is to appear on Google (preferably in the top spots), right? So that’s also our starting point. We’ll start by opening an Excel file and throwing in all the words that come to mind in the context of our content world. How do you know which words to use? Start with what your gut says, or what immediately comes to mind when you think of your field, and then see what happens on Google.
A review of the results on Google will help you understand the competition and its nature. Check if the words you typed bring up related terms that could inspire you, common questions, video content, and various built-in data.
Google’s autocomplete suggestions (the suggestions offered to you as soon as you start typing a word or a few words in the search box) can also help you understand what people are looking for and what deserves to enter your final list of keywords.
Now continue to our competitors
Additionally, check out the sites that come up first in the results – visit them and see what they offer in terms of content and generally, and most importantly – which words they use.
To extract the maximum relevant words from your competitors, without using external tools, you can simply type in Google site:mycompetitor.com (replacing mycompetitor.com with the competitor’s site address of course) and then scan the titles and descriptions of the various site pages.
Examine the words they link with between site contents, the names of image files and other media, as well as alt tags, buttons in the navigation menu, breadcrumb menus, and even the addresses of the different pages.
Choose a keyword research tool and start digging
Until this stage, we haven’t needed an external tool, and the truth is that for many businesses, keyword research up to this point can create a sufficient to excellent list of target terms that we want our site to appear on in the Google search results or any other engine.
However, for the meticulous and the in-depth, it’s worth choosing an external tool to perform keyword research to get a numerical estimate of the level of competition and difficulty. The really good tools cost money but almost all of them have a free option limited by time or capabilities, so I highly recommend using them.
In any case, at this stage, we will choose a tool like SEMrush or ahrefs, both excellent tools for SEO and marketing projects in general, and enter into it the words we have found so far and/or the addresses of our competitors’ sites. These actions will bring us additional relevant words and/or confirm the list of words we have already built, but what’s wonderful – we will get an estimate for monthly search volume for each word, a guess at the amount of traffic that such or other positions can bring, and the level of difficulty of achieving high positions for those words in the results of the different search engines.
SEMrush, by the way, in the Guru plan, also allows for content research of sites by topics, something that can help greatly with the promotion and content strategy.
Move on to keywords sorting
At this stage, we’ll take all the words we’ve found and sort them by search volume, traffic estimate, and ranking difficulty along with a high user intent. Our goal is to reach a logical list of 5 main topics or “overarching themes” under which are dozens of key terms.
Sorting the list by search volume, traffic estimate, and ranking difficulty is easy, as most tools provide this information. User intent, on the other hand, is something you need to think about a bit.
For example, if my site deals with weddings and includes providers of wedding rings, do I have a chance to rank in the top results for “wedding rings” and will someone who searches on Google for “wedding rings” find what they are looking for on my site?
If you search for the key phrase “wedding rings” on Google, you’ll get the answer: the first page on Google shows sites for selling wedding rings and not even one site that aggregates several stores or such providers, which means that the user intent in this term is less relevant for my site.
Conclude with prioritization
At this stage, we’ll look at our list of topics and arrange them in descending order of difficulty level, from easy to hard, since our goal is to bring as much relevant traffic as possible to our site as quickly as possible.
At this point, all that remains is to move on to our content plan, but I’ll expand on that in a separate post. 🙂
