Even though Google keeps us guessing with their constant algorithm updates, there is one area that has remained consistent for inbound marketers who want to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.
What is keyword research?
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 is called keyword research. The purpose of keyword research is often to find queries to target for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can also reveal the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research is a process that helps you identify which keywords are most effective to target and provides insights into the search queries that your target audience is actually using on Google. The information you can glean from these actual search terms can help you develop a content strategy as well as a more comprehensive marketing strategy.
If you want more traffic, you should be targeting the searches that people are conducting. This can be done by using keywords in your content. By being successful in getting your content in front of your audience, you are more likely to gain more traffic.
We should be creating content around what people want to discover, rather than what we want to tell them. In other words, our audience is coming to us.
This all starts with keyword research.
You can increase your chances of success in SEO by following these three steps:
3 Steps SEO Experts Use to Pick Keywords
A new, innovative, never-before-seen SEO strategy that takes you months to implement and even longer to see results is not what SEO experts are doing.
SEO experts who write high-quality content and land on page 1 for relevant searches tend to see results from their content.
#1: Ideate Keywords
There are two types of advertising: interruption-based and intent-based. The former interrupts your current activity, such as an ad on your social media newsfeed, while the latter is based on your specific intentions, e.g. a search engine ad strategically placed before the organic results. Paid SEO advertising focuses on interruption-based advertising.
In SEO marketing, you’re focused on catering to customers who have already shown an interest in your product or service. This is done by creating content that anticipates the search terms they are likely to use when looking for answers to their questions. For example, if you are selling olive green cotton blankets, you would want to create content using key phrases such as “olive green cotton blanket” in order to capture potential customers who are actively searching for that product.
The search engine results are a mixture of ads that are designed to interrupt the user and organic results that are based on the user’s intent.
When you are thinking of keywords for your products and brand, you are looking for words that express a purpose. For DigitalMarketer, these are words like:
- Digital marketing training
- Digital marketing help
- Content marketing training
- Copywriting training
The keywords in the text relate to the products being marketed. The text is teaching people how to be good digital marketers so they can be successful in their field, whether they are working for themselves, for a company, or for clients.
Your customer avatar asks specific questions and uses certain words to describe to search engines what content they want output. Use these questions to make a list of 20+ keywords you could rank for:
- What questions do your customers ask surrounding your products or brand?
- What single words would your customers use to describe your product or brand?
- What phrases would your customers use to describe your product or brand?
The questions will provide you with a list of keywords and keyword phrases to target for your website.
First, identify the keywords you want to target. Then, go to AnswerThePublic.com and generate a list of questions related to those keywords that people have asked search engines. Check to see if there are any other keywords or keyword phrases you may have missed, and make note of the questions people are asking. These questions will be the topics of your content.
If we see people asking a question like “how to pick SEO keywords,” our team knows that this would be a great topic to add to our online library. However, you don’t want to chase after every keyword that looks like it would make for a great piece of content.
You will need to research what keywords are the most effective to use before you can begin yield results.
#2: Research the Best Keywords
Use your list of keywords and keyword phrases to determine which keywords to focus on. You can’t focus on all of them, so choose the ones that you can reasonably rank for and that will capture a significant part of your audience.
We should ask for help from our robot friends to do more research on the best keywords to use forTools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Ahrefs can help us a lot in this area.
A few things to take note of to compare your keywords/phrases and see which are the best option:
- Volume is key to understanding if this keyword is worth creating content on or if it’s better to choose something with a higher search volume.
- The keyword difficulty score shows you how hard it will be to organically rank for that keyword (good luck on getting on page 1 for running shoes!).
- Use Keyword Variations to figure out if there are other keywords you can try to rank for that are similar but less competitive.
The keyword phrase “plants for desk” had its highest search volume between July 27th and July 3rd, according to Google Trends. Searches for this phrase are lowest from October to the end of November.
This data can be used to determine the best time to place paid ads that interrupt the user, as well as if there is specific content that can be created to target spikes that occur during certain seasons or months.
Talk to your finance team to figure out which keywords you want to focus on.
#3: Check Bid Estimates (For Paid Advertising)
If you’re not willing to invest money in your SEO strategy, you’re not going to get very far. If you are willing to invest inads to improve your SEO, keep reading.
After finding the most relevant keywords to focus on using factors like search volume and difficulty score, the next step is to consider the cost of each keyword. The cost is determined by the ad auction, which is how Google decides which ad will be placed in a given position depending on the user.
- Your Bid: This is your maximum budget for an ad click.
- Ad Quality: Google won’t show your ad to everybody searching for your keyword—they’ll show it to the people most likely to click based on past behavior and data they have on the user.
- Extensions and Ad Formats: Google likes when you use extensions, like phone number and other links, as well as the other ad formats you’ve chosen and can boost you in the auction for a lower price.
To understand how much you can spend on ads and what your ROI should be, you need to understand how the auction works. For example, the cost-per-click for the search “running shoes” is estimated to be $0.84 on SEMRush. This means that if you want 10 clicks on your ad per day, you need a minimum budget of $8.40. Keep in mind that these numbers are much smaller than what you’ll actually be working with, but they give you an idea of how to calculate your SEO budget.
How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy
Here is a process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting for your keyword research strategy. This will help you establish a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about.
Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
To begin this process, consider the various topics you want your business to rank for, and categorize them into 5-10 broader topics. These topics will then help you generate more specific keywords later on in the process.
Identify the themes, and reflect on which of the three types of problem they fall into. The three types of problems are: 1. Problems that can be solved with information 2. Problems that can be solved with a product or service 3. Problems that can be solved with a change in behavior If you blog regularly, you probably write about topics that come up frequently in conversation, or topics you’re especially passionate about. To help you blog more effectively, consider which of the three types of problems your topics fall into. 1. Problems that can be solved with information: These are problems that can be solved by sharing knowledge or awareness. For example, if you blog about a particular health condition, you might share information about its causes, symptoms, and treatments. 2. Problems that can be solved with a product or service: These are problems that can be solved by using or purchasing a specific product or service. For example, if you blog about a new piece of technology, you might recommend it to your readers as a solution to a problem they’re having. 3. Problems that can be solved with a change in behavior: These are problems that can be solved by changing the way If you were a company like HubSpot, for example — selling marketing software (which happens to have some awesome SEO tools… but I digress), you might have general topic buckets like:
- “inbound marketing” (21K)
- “blogging” (19K)
- “email marketing” (30K)
- “lead generation” (17K)
- “SEO” (214K)
- “social media marketing” (71K)
- “marketing analytics” (6.2K)
- “marketing automation” (8.5K)
The numbers in parentheses by each keyword show how often that keyword is searched for each month. This data can help you understand how important these topics are to your audience and how many different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful with that keyword.
Step 2: Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
Once you have brainstormed a list of potential keywords, it’s time to _______. analyze the competition
For instance, if I took that last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company — “marketing automation” — I’d brainstorm some keyword phrases that I think people would type in related to that topic. Those might include:
- marketing automation tools
- how to use marketing automation software
- what is marketing automation?
- how to tell if I need marketing automation software
- lead nurturing
- email marketing automation
- top automation tools
And so on and so on.
Although more keywords are being encrypted every day, you can still figure out which keywords your website is being found for. To do this, you’ll need website analytics software like Google Analytics or HubSpot’s Sources report ( found in the Traffic Analytics tool). Drill down into your website’s traffic sources, and look through your organic search traffic to identify the keywords people are using to find your site.
Assuming that you have already given your topic buckets, this text is telling you to brainstorm more possible topics that relate to those buckets. Customer-facing colleagues can be a great resource for finding out what people are searching for and the language they use to do so.
Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyze Accordingly.
When you are looking at keywords, it is easy to just take them at face value. However, keywords can often have different meanings than what is initially apparent. The intent behind a search is very important for your ranking potential, so you need to be careful about interpreting the keywords you are targeting.
Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post or do they want to know how to actually launch a website domain for the purposes of blogging. If your content strategy is only targeting people interested in the latter, you’ll need to make sure of the keyword’s intent before committing to it.
You can verify a user’s intent for a keyword by entering the keyword into a search engine. Make sure the type of content Google returns is closely related to what you want to create for the keyword.
Step 4: Research related search terms.
One way to find more keywords to add to your list is to use a thesaurus. This will help you find different words that have the same meaning as your original keyword.
If you’re struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results page, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Step 5: Use keyword research tools to your advantage.
Keyword research and SEO tools can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. Some of the most popular ones include:
You have your keywords, researched and ready to go.
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