what is the purpose of keyword research in seo

How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide

Published: September 04, 2024

Keyword research has remained a constant in a rapidly changing search landscape. If you’re an inbound marketer looking to optimize your website, understanding how to do keyword research is a must.

In this post, we’ll define what keyword research is, why it’s important, how to conduct your research for your SEO strategy , and how to choose the right keywords for your website.

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What is keyword research?

Why is keyword research important, elements of keyword research, how to research keywords for your seo strategy, how to find and choose keywords for your website, best keywords for seo.

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Keyword research is 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, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

Keyword research helps you find your SEO sweet spot — the overlap of keywords that aren’t too hard to rank for and keywords that you can confidently produce excellent content on. It also identifies the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.

I talked to HubSpot Growth Manager Amal Kalepp , who says that keyword research “determines who your competitors are and which area of the search landscape you can rank for. Doing keyword research and understanding where your blog or website sweet spot is — that’s what gives you rankability.”

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Drill down into your website’s traffic sources and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people use to arrive at your site.

Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have.

Remember, if you’re having trouble brainstorming with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues in sales or service. Ask them what types of terms their prospects or customers have questions about.

Those are often great starting points for keyword research.

Here at HubSpot, we use the Search Insights Report. This template is designed to help you do the same and bucket your keywords into topic clusters, analyze MSV, and inform your editorial calendar and strategy.

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Step 3. Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze accordingly.

User intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google.

That means it’s vital that your web page addresses the problem a searcher wants to solve rather than simply including the keyword the searcher used.

So, how does this affect your keyword research?

It’s tempting to take keywords at face value, but they can have many different meanings.

And because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra careful about how you interpret the keywords you target.

Let’s say you’re researching the keyword “how to start a blog” for an article you want to create. “Blog” can mean a blog post or the blog website itself, and the searcher’s intent behind that keyword will influence the direction of your article.

Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post ? Or do they want to know how to launch a website domain for a new blog?

If your content strategy only targets people interested in the latter, you’ll need to determine the keyword’s intent before using it.

To verify a user’s intent, it’s a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself and see what types of results come up.

I did a quick search for “how to start a blog,” and it looks like most users are searching for info on how to start a website with a blog, not an individual blog post:

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What is keyword research?

If you have a business nowadays, your website might just have become your lifeline. There’s no time to waste: Let’s get started with SEO and improve your rankings in Google. Keyword research is an essential first step. Here, you’ll find out what it is and which factors you should take into account.

Keyword research is all about finding the keywords your audience uses when they’re looking for a product or service you offer, and using this information to guide your keyword strategy. Without keyword research, you might find yourself lost in your own lingo and miss out on popular keywords that your target audience are already searching for. Or you could end up competing with industry giants – a battle you may only have a small chance of winning, even with a great strategy.

There are a variety of  factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy . In this blog post we’ll discuss your mission, your audience, and your competition.

If you want to take a deep-dive into keyword research you should start by reading our ultimate guide to keyword research . If you prefer to get started right away, read on below.

Read more: Keyword mistakes: 8 pitfalls you can easily avoid »

Meaningful keywords

We often hear people say: we can’t come up with meaningful keywords. Before you do anything, and this is key, you need to know what makes your company unique. Take a step back and look at your business as a whole. You need to have a clear concept of the mission of your company. You need to determine exactly what you have to offer because that’s what’s going to make you rank.

It’s that simple. SEO is just like regular business. If you’re doing everything on the same or inferior level as your competition, you’re not going to stand out. If you’re not the best result, why should people want to find you? Why should Google rank you? It seems simple, but this factor is often forgotten.

What makes your company unique?

If you’re struggling to find the right keywords, try asking yourself the following questions:

• What do you have to offer?
• What is your mission?
• What are your core values and strengths?
• What makes you stand out from the crowd? Think about the niche aspects of your business you excel at.

You don’t have to be better than your competition at absolutely everything, so long as you identify enough points to build a  keyword strategy  around. For smaller companies, this means that you probably have to be better at the things the bigger fish haven’t thought of or aren’t actively looking to do.

The role of your audience in your keyword research

Once you’ve determined what you have to offer, it’s time to consider  your audience . How does your offering connect with the needs and goals of real people? Ultimately, SEO is all about making sure your users are able to find what they’re looking for – but there’s much more to it than just choosing the right keywords. Understanding your audience’s needs is essential for making great user-centric content , which is an important part of good SEO too. So the first thing you have to do is find out which words your potential audience uses to find the information they’re looking for.

Let’s look at an example. At Yoast, we call our  SEO training courses platform “Yoast SEO Academy.” So at first, it might seem logical for us to optimize for the keyword [Yoast SEO Academy]. However, when we analyze traffic data, it turns out that our audience searches for [SEO training] or [SEO courses] way  more often. So it makes much more sense to optimize for that term instead.

Every company has its internal vocabulary, which often doesn’t match the vocabulary of its audience. Therefore, you should always select your keywords from your audience’s perspective . By using the integrated Semrush features in the Yoast SEO plugin , you can find keyword data and suggestions with just a few clicks. You can also try out the Yoast Suggest tool for more ideas.

What about your competition?

Lastly, you simply can’t devise a proper keyword research strategy without considering your competition. All too often, websites optimize for terms they have absolutely no chance of ranking for. For instance, keywords with a high search volume can help a website connect with much bigger audiences, but you’ll only see positive results if you can rank well. The search terms that deliver the highest traffic are highly competitive, so you need to  research your competition and assess the situation.

You could go overboard and make a thorough analysis of all the competitors in your field, and that can certainly be worthwhile. But let’s stick to the basics for now. It’s actually quite easy to get a general idea of your SEO competition. Just Google some search terms you would like to rank for and see which companies show up and compare them with where your site ranks. How big are the companies you are competing with for those top three rankings? Would your company fit within these results? This is all quite easy to determine using only Google search results.

But be aware!  You can’t just blindly trust the search results because Google tailors them to  your personal  search history, which means your site will come up higher for you than for others doing the same search. You can get around this by searching in incognito mode, although there’s still a local search component even in that. If this is likely to be a problem for you, consider using a VPN to conceal your location or use Valentin.app to even choose a location yourself!

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Did you know you get access to all Yoast training courses if you get Yoast SEO Premium? Find out how to do keyword research, optimize your site structure, how to write great copy for SEO, and much more !

Expanding your strategy step-by-step

Big sites can rank for the most general terms. Smaller sites within a very specific niche can do the same. Of course, it’s also easier if you’re writing in a language that is not spoken all over the world. For most smaller sites that are writing in English, however, the general rule of thumb is this: start with a big set of long tail keywords which have little traffic, but you can rank for more easily. Then, work yourself up to the rankings step-by-step. Once you’ve gained some SEO authority, start optimizing for more general keywords. And in the end, maybe you will even be able to rank for your head keywords!

Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

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Willemien was the Manager Content of yoast.com. She loves creating user-friendly content and making it easy to find for people and search engines.

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Bfcm prepathon by cloudways, webinar: how to start with seo (september 11, 2024), 10 responses to what is keyword research.

“I like your blog and especially your thought on this topic about keyword research. Because keywords are a very essential part of on-page SEO. This blog very helpful for Keyword research thanks for sharing.”

Thanks for the feedback! Getting your keywords right is definitely a key step for good SEO results. We have a collection of blog posts about keyword research , if you’d like to read more.

A very well-written article. I think the most important thing in keyword research is creating value. Am I right??

Creating an article that can be of value to your audience is definitely important! It’s what differentiates your content from other search results. But it’s also important to choose the right words to focus on, words that your audience is using. Thanks for your addition and lots of luck with your keyword research :)

thanks for the post. It will help out in my future writings!

You’re welcome and good luck with your writing :)

This is another really helpful post. A great guide for those who are just starting out. It is really important to know what keywords to put on your posts. Thank you for this! Great post!

You’re very welcome!

Keywords analysis is really important. Do long-tail keywords help in SEO?

Hi there! They can help you with your rankings, especially when you’re in a competitive market or just getting started with your SEO :) Read more in our post on long-tail keywords .

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How To Do Keyword Research For SEO

Published: Aug 14, 2024, 8:25am

Table of Contents

What is keyword research, how to do keyword research for seo in 5 steps, bottom line, frequently asked questions (faqs).

If you’re just getting started building a website or are upgrading it, you’re likely asking yourself how people will find it. Even if you’re selling the coolest, most innovative products on the internet, no one will know about them if they can’t get to your website. Keyword research is an essential part of ensuring the people looking for the information or services you offer can find them. Read on to learn more about how to get started with keyword research.

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Keyword research is an essential part of a larger SEO and digital marketing strategy. It is the process of researching and analyzing the terms and phrases your ideal audience and potential customers are looking up online to find the information they need.

When people want to find a product or service online, they generally start by typing a few words into a search engine. The results they find are the ones most relevant to the terms they looked for. As a business owner, your goal should be to rank highly for the keywords that represent the products and services you offer. But which ones are they? Conducting keyword research is how you figure this out.

Keyword research is also important because it can reveal marketing insights and customer trends, tell you what potential customers are interested in and help drive traffic to your website by curating your content and copy to this interest.

Keyword research starts generally and then gets more specific. Here are the main steps to take when starting your keyword research.

 1. Brainstorm the Main Keywords That Are Most Relevant to Business

The first part of keyword research is brainstorming the very basic terms that are relevant to your business. This general list will come in handy later when you search for more targeted keywords. For example, say you are running an online jewelry company. An initial list of general keywords may look like this:

• Engagement rings

You’ll want to come up with five to 10 terms. Since this is only the first step in keyword research, don’t worry about making this list perfect or spending too much time on it.

 2. Research Related Keywords Customers and Competitors Are Using

Now that you have a starting point, it’s time to get more specific by adding relevant keywords. You can start drafting this list of more specific keywords by looking up the search terms in your original list. The idea is to get an understanding of how your customers think about the products or services you offer and what specific terms they are searching for to find what they need. For example, when you type “necklace” into a search engine, you may find the term “pendant” is often an associated term. That’s helpful information for keyword research and a term that can be included on your list.

While “necklaces” is a very general term, there are many more specific keywords. “Gold necklace,” “silver necklace” and “pearl necklace” are three examples that could be relevant for your website, depending on what you offer.

In SEO, there are short-tail keywords (keywords with one or two words) and long-tail keywords, which are full phrases or sentences. Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for since there’s usually less competition. Later, you’ll look at how difficult each term is to rank for. But for now, keep an eye out for long-tail keywords, or sentences people may be searching for related to your product or service.

As you write down more specific terms, you can look up these new terms to generate even more ideas for keywords and get even more specific. What are examples of some of the common keywords that come up when you search for “gold necklace”? Some terms you might come across include:

• 14k gold necklaces
• yellow gold necklaces
• gold necklace women
• gold necklace men

This is also a good time to look at what companies offering similar services or products are ranking for. There may be terms you haven’t considered, or this process may even inspire you to come up with new terms that you do not see online. As this is still the brainstorming phase, write down as many terms as you find or can come up with.

Later, you’ll look at these terms from a marketing strategy perspective and consider which ones are worth ranking for.

3. Expand Your List With Long-Tail Keywords

Remember long-tail keywords? Once you have a list of a few dozen keywords and phrases, you can expand your brainstorming by thinking about which long-tail keywords people might be searching for.

A few online tools can help with this.

Answer the Public is a helpful website to find out what people are searching for online, especially what questions they are asking. For example, if you type in “14k gold necklaces,” you’ll find dozens of popular questions people ask about this topic, such as “how much are 14k gold necklaces?” and “what is 14k gold jewelry?” These questions can be great starting points for brainstorming blog topics or an FAQ page on your website. The free version lets you look up three terms per day.

Soovle is another popular free tool that shows the phrases people search for across multiple platforms including Google, Yahoo and YouTube. When you type a keyword, Soovle will show you keywords that are often paired with yours in the search. For example, for the term 14k gold necklace, the phrases “14k gold necklace extender” and “14k vs 18k gold necklace” come up. This shows you what people are searching for and gives insight into what your potential customers want.

 4. Use Keyword Tools To Gather Data on Terms

Now that you’ve created a list, it’s time to evaluate which ones are worth trying to rank for based on your business objectives. There are many online tools you can use to gain insight into keywords. The goal is to identify which keywords are less competitive to rank for in a search engine, but also relate most closely to your company and business objectives.

Ahrefs and Semrush are two SEO analytic tools that charge a monthly (or annual) subscription fee and provide all the data and analytics you might need for extensive keyword research, including identifying valuable keywords. Ahrefs and Semrush provide a few free features, but the main software costs money. There are a few free tools that can provide more data. Google Keyword Planner can help you find ideas for keywords as well as the search volume for these terms. Google Trends can also help you identify popular key terms.

Once you gather this data, you’ll have a better idea about which keywords make sense to focus on trying to rank for. You may be surprised that a term you thought was uncommon is very difficult to rank for. On the other hand, terms you thought would be too hard to rank for might be less competitive. This research process may also lead to new keywords you can add to your list. Both Ahrefs and Semrush , for example, will list keywords related to the ones you’re searching for, which can help you streamline your list.

5. Choose the Keywords You Want To Focus on First

Once you’ve narrowed your list of keywords, you’ll want to choose a few to focus on for your website. You should select these based on which terms have high traffic and low competition but also represent your brand accurately. For example, “14k gold necklace extenders” could be a competitive term, but it won’t be relevant to your business if you don’t sell necklace extenders.

Keyword research is one of the first steps in the process of driving traffic to your website. The general steps of keyword research are to go from very general terms to a narrowed-down list of more specific phrases and sentences. The goal is to end up with short-tail and long-tail keywords you can incorporate into your website that will help drive traffic.

How long does keyword research take?

The amount of time it will take you to conduct keyword research will depend on a number of factors, including what stage you are in your business, how thorough you want to be and whether you already have experience researching keywords. A ballpark estimate would be to carve out one week for keyword research as part of an overall SEO strategy.

Is Ahrefs a good SEO tool?

Ahrefs is one of the best tools available for keyword research. However, while the company offers many free tools, the main software may be costly for some small businesses just starting out with keyword research. If that’s the case, check out our article on top Ahrefs alternatives .

What is a long-tail keyword?

A long-tail keyword is a phrase or sentence that is longer and more specific than one word or phrase. For example, a long-tail keyword could be “how to take care of a 14k gold necklace” while a short-tail keyword would simply be “gold necklace.” Long-tail keywords are typically easier to rank for in search engines since they don’t receive as much competition.

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Keyword Research: The Complete Guide to Find the Best Keywords

Keyword research is the first and most important part of your SEO strategy.

Before you start writing content for your website, you will need to identify suitable high-volume search terms .

The SEO keywords will inform the direction of your content, ensuring that the content produced will be relevant and easily searchable on Google. And that is, in summary, what keyword research is all about.

It’s usually a pretty time-consuming task and involves a lot of effort to pour through details, numbers, and comparing long lists of keywords. But it’s incredibly important to do it well. A thorough keyword research will be the foundation of your SEO strategy and content development.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is defined as the activity of analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords for the purpose of SEO copywriting . The keywords, or search terms, often become a guide for the direction of your content and marketing strategy.

A keyword can consist of a single word but more often than not it’s made out of several words. For example, “ search terms ” is a keyword, as is “ best keyword search tool “.

Why is keyword research important?

Finding high-volume search terms itself is not enough. You need to ensure that the SEO keywords used in your content matches with your brand, product, or service to the keywords that your customer use. And this is where keyword research happens.

Once you have performed adequate and thorough research, only then will you be able to craft a viable SEO strategy. With a good strategy, you can then create a detailed plan of action to achieve your goals.

For example, if you are in the business of leasing out vacation homes, you may choose your focus keyword as “ vacation house. ” However, by doing a quick keyword research, we find out that the keyword ‘vacation home’ is much better to use in terms of search volume data.

Both terms might mean the same thing, but your target audience is searching for something different, as you can see above. Search volume for ‘vacation home’ is 33,100, whereas search volume for ‘vacation house’ is 6,600.

You would have never guessed the difference if not for keyword research.

Keywords that you choose to use should be those that your target audience is searching . Only then will it make the effort of optimizing your page worthwhile.

But more importantly, two similar keywords often have different search volumes, trends, and competition levels. Choosing a more relevant, higher volume keyword could give you better results compared to its other semantic or related keywords.

How to do keyword research

There are many ways to do it, either manually or using a keyword research tool like Keyword Tool . But whichever way you choose, there are a number of important steps that you need to take.

From outlining your goals to executing your keyword plan, follow these detailed step-by-step guide to performing a proper and thorough keyword research:

Step 1: Study your niche

Before you figure out what are the best keywords to optimize your page, it’s best that you start by diving deep to learn more about your topic or niche. It can give you out-of-the-box ideas and help discover angles to your marketing and SEO strategy that you might not have thought about before.

Here are a few ideas on how to study your niche :

• Talk with your existing customers and get to know them better. Find out the terms that they use when describing your brand, company, product or service.
• Try to think from the perspective of your potential customers. If you were to share the brand’s offering to a friend, how will you talk about it?
• Get involved in your topic or niche’s online communities, like forums and social media networks. Read the discussions and find out any pain points that are mentioned regarding your niche.

Step 2: Define your goals

A plan needs to always begin by defining the end goal . But before that, you should ask important and introspective questions like:

• Who are you?
• What is your brand about?
• What makes you special?
• What is your website about?
• What promises do you make on your website?

Once you have effectively answered these questions, then you need to specify what is your brand’s mission . Do you want to increase the number of subscribers? Or do you have a sales target by a certain date?

It’s important to define your goal because it will provide a direction for your SEO strategy and plan. The search terms that you will eventually use should be aligned to your goals, ideally segmented into different content marketing funnels . Your goals will also inform the purpose of your SEO copywriting and content.

Write down your goals. Draw charts. Document them. These will provide the framework and direction needed for your top-level content and online marketing strategy.

Step 3: Make a list of relevant topics

Based on your the main category of your brand and the goals you aim to achieve, break it down to smaller topic buckets . Make a list of all the topics related to your brand that you want to rank on Google.

For example, if you’re an FMCG brand specializing in men’s personal care products, some topics that are related to your brand can be:

• men’s facial wash
• antiperspirant deodorant
• male pattern baldness

They need to be topics that are important to your business and related to your buyer personas . Think about what type of topics will your target audience search for on Google? These topic buckets can then later be broken down to keywords that are related to those topics.

Step 4: Create a list of seed keywords

Now that you’ve broken down your main category to different buckets of sub-topics, you can start creating a list of seed keywords. These keywords need to be related to your various topics , and more importantly, are terms that your target audience might be searching on Google.

Seed keywords, or focus keywords, are important as they will become the foundation of your keyword research. They define your niche and identify your competitors.

If you’re wondering how to find the seed or focus keywords of your brand or product, it’s actually a lot easier than you think. All you need to do is describe your offering as simple as possible and brainstorm how other people might search for it on Google.

Step 5: Use good keyword research tools

You might assume, “ shouldn’t keyword research begin with using a keyword tool? ” There’s no right or wrong answer there, to be honest. But there is an obvious advantage to researching search terms from your brand or business perspective first and foremost .

It avoids you from getting too bogged down with keywords and helps you gain a wider perspective for your content and SEO strategy.

Once you have identified your goals, topics, and a list of seed keywords, it’s time to use keyword research tools to further refine your search terms .

One option is to use Google Keyword Planner . Unfortunately, Google only gives approximated search volumes. Instead, you can use a tool like Keyword Tool . It will give you a lot more details and help you narrow down on the right direction for your search terms. On top of that, it can also give additional ideas on related keywords.

All you need to do is type in the topic (or seed keyword) into the search box and it will give you a list of alternative keywords, including those that contain prepositions and questions :

Step 6: Study the search intent

Plugging in high-volume keywords to bump up rankings for a page used to work pretty easily. But it’s not so simple anymore these days. Today, Google’s machine learning search algorithms compare search terms with user queries to learn about search intent.

Search intent is defined as the intent or reason behind why people search for a specific term. There are many driving factors behind people’s search habits, such as:

• Why are they searching?
• Are they searching because they have a question and want an answer to that question?
• Are they searching for a specific website?
• Are they searching because they want to buy something?

Try to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Why would they search for your topic? How will they key in the terms? Are they looking to buy something? Or are they looking for a service to solve a specific problem?

Once you have a good idea of the search intent behind potential readers or customers, you will be able to use it to fine-tune your keyword research . Getting a list of high-volume keywords related to your brand or topic is great. But finding keywords that directly match  your target audience’s search intent is even better.

Step 7: Identify long tail keywords

Seed keywords are often shorter search terms that are closely related to your brand’s main topic or category. Long tail keywords , on the other hand, are more descriptive and often related to your brand’s smaller buckets of sub-topics. Matching your target audience’s search intent to long tail keywords is far easier compared to seed keywords.

For example, if your website published content about golf equipment reviews, using long tail keywords like “ what is the best 9 iron golf club ” will attract a more relevant audience compared to the seed keyword “ golf club .”

Long tail keywords usually get fewer clicks, but since they are focused on a specific topic or product, they often get a higher conversion rate .

Step 8: Find out about your competitors

Doing keyword research on Google about your brand alone is not nearly enough. You also need to be aware of what your competitors are doing . The better you understand the content landscape of your industry, the better it will be for your SEO.

Understanding the competitiveness of different keywords will also allow you to identify search terms that might be too difficult to rank . But most importantly, you will be able to find keyword opportunity gaps . These opportunities occur when you find related keywords that are related to your brand or industry with low to medium competition level .

To find these keyword opportunities, you can perform a keyword search on your competitors . The paid version of  Keyword Tool Pro  has a competitor analysis function that does exactly that. Key in the URL of your competitor into the search box and the results will show all the keywords that the page ranks for.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, you should have enough insights to craft a good content and SEO strategy . You would also have gotten adequate data for SEO copywriting for your content.

Whether you’re running a content-focused blog, a small business, or a brand marketer, you will need keyword research to kick-start your content and marketing activities.

Doing keyword research can be a tedious and time-consuming task. But more often than not, it pays off handsomely in the long run.

Frequently Asked Questions

⭐ what is keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people use when searching online. Keywords can be used to create content that will attract visitors from the search engines.

⭐ Why keyword research is the most important part of SEO?

To get more traffic from search engines, you need to understand what people are searching for online and produce content that targets popular keywords. If you produce content without doing a prior keyword research, your chances of getting meaningful traffic from the search engines are slim.

⭐ What is the best source of keywords?

The search engines themselves are the best source of keyword ideas. To easiest way to find good keywords from various search engines is to use the tools like Keyword Tool .

⭐ How do I know how many people search for a particular keyword on Google in a given month?

The easiest and probably the cheapest way of getting this data is using Keyword Tool Pro . Alternatively, you can start running paid Google Ads, and might be able to eventually see the number of searches for a keyword in Google Keyword Planner.

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• Keyword Research

How to Get Started With Keyword Research for SEO

Keyword research is an ongoing process for marketers. Learn the basics of good SEO keyword research and analysis here.

Despite all the many changes to SEO practice over the years, keyword research remains one of the most fundamental SEO tasks.

Some form of keyword research is still one of the first things SEO professionals at all skill levels do – especially for a new site (or for any site for which they want to improve or expand search rankings).

So learning to do good SEO keyword research and analysis is one of the most valuable skills you can build.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a process of discovering and determining the keywords that matter most for the objectives of a given website.

In other words, it’s finding not only the keywords you want to rank for but also the ones you should rank for (what people who want what you have to offer actually search for).

Properly done, keyword research also yields the topics for which you should be creating content on your site.

Competitive analysis is an area closely related to keyword research.

During your research you can uncover what your competitors are ranking for that you are not, which may lead to key insights not only for your SEO strategy but for your business as well.

This guide will get you started with everything you need to know to do keyword research to build a solid foundation for your SEO.

Why Keyword Research is Important

Keyword research enables you to understand the specific terms people are using to solve their problem – and the context behind those terms.

It is important to research keywords to dispel any misunderstandings or assumptions you may have about your users’ needs and the language they use to express them.

Keyword research informs your content optimizations every step of the way.

The Keyword Research Process

Good keyword research follows an orderly process, a set of steps that help accomplish all the goals mentioned above.

However, this is not a one-and-done process.

You will need to continually revisit these steps.

Because your market situation will change over time.

Some of the changes that can necessitate new keyword research include:

• Shifting needs or desires of your target consumers.
• New queries that hadn’t appeared before or new terms searchers are using to look for what you offer.
• New competitors entering the market.
• Changes to search engine algorithms or search features.
• And many more.

Make the keyword research process one of your regular habits for good SEO health and growth.

There are many legitimate ways to approach keyword research, but in this guide, we will follow these steps:

• Analyze current keywords.
• Formulate your goals.
• Build your keyword “wish” list.
• Assess the competitive landscape.
• Expand your keyword horizons.
• Prioritize by opportunities vs. investment.

Note: The remainder of this chapter is from the perspective of a business website trying to sell products or services to potential customers. However, the basic principles apply to non-business sites as well. Just substitute your cause or passion or interest for the products and services.

Ultimately, if you’re looking for organic search traffic, you’re still trying to “sell” something!

Step 1: Analyze Current Keywords

This is where you should begin if you already have a set of keywords you’ve been trying to rank for.

If you’re starting totally from scratch, skip to Step 2

If you’re taking over an existing site or working on a site for a while, you probably have some list of keywords in mind that you’ve been trying to rank for.

The first thing you should do is list those keywords and run an analysis to see how they’ve been performing.

To analyze larger applications you’ll probably want a paid tool.

But for a more basic site, there are many free rank tracking tools available.

If your list of keywords is relatively small, you could search for them on Google to see where they are currently ranking (although that won’t give you any ranking history).

Look at the ranking history and search volume for these keywords from your tool of choice.

Next, use Google Search Console to determine what keywords your site already ranks for (if any).

Your goal here is to establish a baseline of keyword performance.

You can use this for growing your keyword universe in the other steps below.

Use the metrics you’ve gathered on your existing keywords to separate good-performing keywords from poor-but-worthwhile ones.

These are keywords that have sufficient search volume and impressions but have lower ranking and/or click-through rates.

Put the poor-but-worthwhile keywords aside to add to the list you’ll develop in the steps below.

The new keywords you’ll discover in your keyword research become the guide for all your subsequent SEO work (at least in regards to things like content optimization and link building ).

Your goal here is to establish a baseline of keyword performance that you can use for growing your keyword universe in the other steps below.

Step 2: Formulate Your Goals

You might think you’re ready to start real keyword research now.

However, without some carefully crafted goals – the specific business and brand needs you want to earn organic traffic for – it will be a futile effort.

Why does this matter?

Because those goals will give you a sense of direction in your research.

Many times keyword research will turn up keywords that you could rank for, but if they are not keywords that will attract visitors who can become the solutions to the needs stated in your goals, they won’t be worth the effort you’d put into trying to rank for them.

In my opinion, this is the most overlooked step in typical keyword research efforts.

Having goals will help improve your chances of SEO success.

Plus, you’ll save more time and effort than necessary – and avoid targeting irrelevant terms (so-called vanity keywords) or keywords with little or no return on investment (ROI).

Here are a few questions to ask when formulating your goals for keyword research:

• Who is our target audience ? Who buys what we sell, and why?
• What do we sell, and what is our unique value proposition in our marketplace?
• What are the chief needs and/or desires of people who become our customers?
• What are their secondary, related needs?
• What are the things our target consumers need to know to feel confident in who they choose to buy from?

Knowing the answers to these questions can help you focus on the keywords that will really matter to your business.

Step 3: Build Your Keyword “Wish List”

This step is truly internal research.

That is, it begins in your own head (or the collective heads of your team, if you have one).

Using the answers to the questions in Step 2, combined with the experience of your business or industry, list out the keywords you think best describe what your potential customers search for when they are in various phases of their buyer journey.

• What would they search for when they are just trying to educate themselves about the kinds of things you sell?
• What would they search for when they are trying to make an informed decision about who to buy from?
• What would they search for when they want to buy specific things you sell?

The purpose of these brainstormed lists is similar to the purpose of Step 2: To provide some guidance in your research in determining what matters for your business.

Don’t assume that the keywords you come up with from this exercise are all actually valuable.

Step 6 will, among other things, help you determine that.

Step 4: Assess the Competitive Landscape

One of the best sources to find keywords you should be ranking for but aren’t yet is your competitors.

If they’ve been in the game longer than you, they have probably uncovered and capitalized on many more opportunities, whether they found them by careful research or just stumbled upon them.

Many SEO tools will show you the top-ranking keywords for a given domain, but you may need to invest in one of the paid tools to delve deeper.

Let’s look at some different ways of approaching competitive keyword research.

Using Google

We’ll start with the simplest free method of competitive keyword discovery: Google itself.

This method can uncover a lot of opportunities, but since it is dependent on a certain amount of guesswork on your part, it isn’t going to give the full picture.

Nevertheless, it can be a good way to start if you don’t have good tools handy.

Google is most helpful in identifying who your top online competitors are.

Keep in mind these may not be the same in every case as your “real world” competition (if you and others are selling your wares through brick and mortar stores, for example).

Start by searching for the products or services you sell, and see who comes up in the top few results consistently.

For example, let’s say one of your products is garage door openers:

Skipping past the paid ads, it’s evident that Home Depot and Lowes are your top organic search competition for this product.

If you sell multiple products or services and these two show up again and again in searches, add them to a list of top competitors.

Be sure to also search any alternative names searchers might use for your products or services.

Next, do a Google site search for each product and its alternative names for each competitor domain.

To do this, enter into Google the search term and then site:domainname.com (using the domain of the competitor).

This search tells us the alternative keywords that the competitor ranks for in Google for this product.

In the example above, we see that Google might show Home Depot’s garage door opener products to people searching for belt-drive garage door openers, chain-drive garage door openers, and 4-garage door openers. Add all of these to your keyword list.

Using Keyword Tools

For more sophisticated competitive research, you’ll need a third-party tool.

Some of the free tools can provide you with limited access to this intelligence, whereas almost all of the paid tools can show you a much more complete competitive picture.

Many tools allow you to input a competitor’s domain to discover the keywords they rank highest for.

Here’s how that looks in seoClarity, for example. (Disclaimer: I work for seoClarity, but most of the paid keyword tools will give you similar output.)

Add any relevant keywords and variations to your list.

With these tools, you usually can dig to another level where you can discover:

• Keywords both you and a competitor rank for (if you rank lower, what would it take to boost you above them?).
• Keywords where they rank, but you don’t (time to create or improve some pages to get in that game!).

Step 5: Expand Your Keyword Horizons

While keywords are still foundational to good SEO, optimizing for them alone will only get you so far.

Over the years, Google has vastly improved its ability to recognize topics and all their related terms, so now every keyword is really the gateway to a topical universe.

There are a number of free tools designed specifically for suggesting related topics for any given keyword.

Some of the most popular include:

• Answer the Public.
• Keyword Explorer.
• Keywords Everywhere.
• Find more in this list of tools here on Search Engine Journal.

Most of these tools work by scraping Google SERPs (and sometimes the sites that rank highest there) to discover the search terms and questions searchers use most frequently for a given topic or keyword.

As always, some paid tools will give you more depth, including terms semantically related to your keywords.

As a final step, look through your now-expanded keyword list to pick out the high-level topics, then group the remaining keywords under these according to relevance.

You can use this organized list later to guide you in building out interlinked content that will give you broader topical relevancy with search engines.

Step 6: Prioritize by Opportunities vs. Investment

This final step is not really research per se, but it is a critical bridge to converting what you discovered in your research into actions that lead to results.

In this process, your first priority should be the best opportunities, but these always must be weighed against the cost of winning those opportunities.

In other words, a particular keyword may have a high traffic potential, but if you will have to spend too much time trying to win a good rank for it or you won’t be able to convert that traffic into one of your business goals, then it isn’t worth the cost.

Gather the Metrics & Sort

Put all the keywords you’ve accumulated into a spreadsheet and create columns for key indicators of value and cost, such as:

• Average search volume.
• Impressions.
• CPC bid price.

Even though CPC isn’t an organic search metric, it can serve as a good indicator of how competitive the keyword is.

The higher the CPC, the more competitive it is, and the more difficult it may be to win a good organic position for it.

Another metric you may want to look at is trends.

• How has this keyword performed over time?
• Is it growing in search volume?
• Has its CPC risen or fallen?

If you don’t have a tool that tracks such trends, Google Trends can at least give you an idea of search interest in a topic over time, though you won’t find every keyword there.

Don’t just prioritize by these metrics, however. Go back to the goals you formulated in Step 2.

Which keywords are most likely to contribute at each step in a buyer’s journey to you accomplishing your business goals?

Match up with Your Existing Content

Decide which keywords from your list relate to content you already have.

Looking at what ranks in the SERPs for a keyword, determine its primary search intent as Google sees it. Is it:

• Transactional (something people enter when they are looking to buy)?
• Informational (something people enter when they want to learn more)?
• Local (something people enter when they want to find a nearby store or facility)?
• Navigational (something people enter when they know exactly what they want and who they want to get it from)?

Now evaluate whether each piece of content is well-optimized for the keyword(s) you mapped to it and if that content also fits the search intent of the keyword.

If it doesn’t, then plan to either improve that piece of content or build something new to do the job better.

Start Your Keyword Flywheel

Keyword research is a process that should never end.

Fluctuations in the marketplace, new competitors, changes to Google, changes in your business, all of these, and more can necessitate further research and prioritization of keywords.

Ongoing keyword research is one of the best ways never to lose your competitive edge.

Build the muscle now, exercise it regularly, and it will keep building your benefits year after year.

Featured image credit:  Paulo Bobita

Mark Traphagen is VP of Product Marketing & Training for seoClarity, a leading enterprise SEO platform. Mark is a sought-after ...

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Future-Proofing Your SEO: How to Do Keyword Research

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If you lack knowledge of the SEO basics  and a good strategy, people won’t be able to find your website or online store. That’s why SEO keyword research is so important, no matter if your site is built using a website builder or a CMS. People search for a specific word or phrase and search engines direct them toward related content. And, hopefully, that’s your website’s content.

In this article, we’ll go over the keyword basics, learning what they are, why they’re so critical to websites, and how to do SEO keyword research yourself. Let’s get started!  

What Is Keyword Research?

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines to get information. They help search engines understand the content on a web page so that they can decide if it’s relevant to the query.   

When you strategically use these keywords in your website content, you drive up your site’s visibility. This helps search engines drive traffic to you.  

SEO keyword research is simply the act of finding and analyzing the search words that people enter into search engines, then using those terms in your website, content-making, and marketing. SEO keyword research helps you immediately understand what your potential customers are looking for online, and target them to guide them back to you. 

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Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research can guide your content strategy. If done properly, you’ll get insight into the habits, choices, and preferences of your audience . This helps you get a better idea of how to get your audience’s attention and best solve their problems.  

Keyword research can guide your content, product development, and marketing. Your business should be creating products and content that your target audience will find valuable.  

There’s so much noise online, so we understand it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. But by using the most relevant keywords, you help users find your content. You’re speaking their language, and you’re making a roadmap that leads them straight to your website.  

When Should Keyword Research Be Used?

Once you understand how to find keywords for SEO, you have a lot to gain. The great thing about keyword research is there there are plenty of applications for it, including:   

• SEO Optimization: When you use the right keywords in your website content, meta descriptions, and tags, those rankings go up, and so does organic traffic to your site.  
• Content Strategy: Keyword research can tell you about the topics that interest your audience. You can create content around these keywords, attracting even more visitors. Targeted content means relevant information that keeps your audience on your site, and that means more visibility on your pages and a higher chance of conversion.  
• Paid Campaigns: When you’re ready for paid advertising campaigns like Google Ads or social media ads, keyword research gives you the best words to use. This expands the reach of your ads and ups the return on investment (ROI).  
• Long-Tail Keywords: These are longer and more specific phrases that have less competition. When you go for long-tail keywords, you’ll rank higher for specific queries. Generally speaking, the more specific a product search query, the more likely the visitor is to convert. For instance, “best website builders” is fairly broad, but “best website builders for food delivery businesses” is a specific query that leans toward a purchase.   

How To Conduct Keyword Research: The Main Steps

By now you might be chomping at the bit to get into how to find keywords for SEO. Here’s a handy step-by-step list to walk you through the process of SEO keyword research:  

Finding Keywords  

Of course you want to find keywords for SEO! You can begin by brainstorming possible keywords that are relevant to your business and audience. If you were searching to find your business or looking for related information, which keywords would you naturally use?  

Analyzing Keywords  

Once you’ve formulated a list of possible keywords, it’s time to use tools to analyze them (we’ll discuss these in more detail in the next section). Pay attention to search volume (how many people search for the term), difficulty (how competitive is the keyword), and relevance to your business.  

Considering User Intent  

When choosing your SEO keywords, consider the audience’s intent behind using them. For example, if people search for “best website builders”, are they looking for an expert opinion or are they ready to sign up to a platform? The keywords you prioritize can depend on the user journey and the stage the reader is at.  

Comparing Keywords  

Have a look at which keywords your competitors are using and ranking for. What are they missing? Are there any gaps in the market that you can take advantage of? What is everyone talking about? What’s trending? Where can your content rank highly?  

Targeting Keywords  

After finding and analyzing your keywords, the next step is to pick the most promising keywords to use in your content. With your research, you should be able to determine which keywords work best for your audience and website.  

Prioritizing and Optimizing Keywords  

Go beyond just picking the right keywords. Prioritize those keywords depending on their SEO impact. Some terms will perform better than others, so we recommend tailoring your content around these.   

Verifying Search Intent  

Now, make sure that your keywords match the audience’s searches by regularly reviewing your keywords. Popular keywords change over time, so adapting and targeting new search terms will help your website rank well and meet your audience’s needs.  

Tools for Keyword Research

You might be wondering how to do keyword research for SEO – as in what type of help is available?   

For accurate SEO keyword research, we recommend using a dedicated SEO tool to help determine and analyze your targeted terms. Here are a few of the most popular options:  

Ahrefs  

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO keyword tool with a huge keyword database and accurate search volume data. Its “Keyword Explorer” tool gives you keyword data including keyword difficulty, search volume, and clicks-per-search.   

You’ll also get the top-ranking pages for a specific keyword and insights into how many backlinks would help your pages rank better.  

Semrush  

Semrush has robust SEO keyword research capabilities, a user-friendly interface, highly-detailed keyword reports, and competitor analysis (to help you analyze your competitors’ keywords and strategies).   

We recommend using its “Keyword Magic Tool”, which will cover all of your basic keyword research needs. It helps you find the right keywords by showing the broad match, phrase match, and exact match keywords, along with their search volume, trend data, and difficulty score.    

Google Keyword Planner  

Google Keyword Planner is not only a free tool, but it’s extremely powerful because its insights come directly from Google, the world’s most popular search engine.   

Though it’s technically meant for paid search campaigns, it finds keywords related to your business or industry and gives search volume and competition-level info for each keyword.  

Moz Keyword Explorer   

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a great tool for SEO keyword research thanks to its predictive metrics, which can let you know which keywords are worth targeting in the first place. No more wasted time!   

It gives you a wide variety of data, including monthly search volume, difficulty, priority, and click-through rate. And it also suggests related keywords and which websites are high-rankers for the target keyword.  

KWFinder  

Are you a small business with limited resources? KWFinder has a user-friendly interface and focuses on finding less competitive keywords . That means you can be a big fish in a smaller pond instead of competing against the big sharks.   

KWFinder finds those long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty so that you can spot good opportunities. On top of that, it will give you keyword suggestions, search volume data, and information on trends.   

How To Maintain Keyword Rankings

SEO keyword research isn’t a one-time thing. Once you’ve done the hard work of finding, analyzing, and implementing your keywords, you’ve got to keep your rankings as high as possible.  

That means part of how to do keyword research is to regularly revisit your SEO keyword research , lightly (or completely!) refresh your content, keep checking out what your competitors are doing (and what they’re missing), and stay on top of SEO trends.  

As we’ve discussed, knowing how to do keyword research for SEO is an essential part of a successful SEO strategy. You want to drive appropriate visitors to your website – all it takes is knowing the best keywords to target them effectively, and how to use them across your website and content.  

SEO keyword research is a goldmine of information that every website should tap into, giving you all the insights you need to target your ideal audience.   

When you understand your audience’s language and meet them where they are, you can boost your visibility, drive traffic to your site, and ultimately, grow your online business.  

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Keyword Research for SEO: A-Z Keyword Research Guide (2020)

27 Jan 2020

 Chapter 1: Basics of Keyword Research

The first chapter covers the basic fundamentals of SEO keyword research. Before we dig into it, I will answer these basic questions: what keyword research is and why it is so important for SEO. If you are new in SEO, you might want to check our SEO Guide in All Aspects for Beginners blog post. You'll also learn how to conduct keyword research, what it's used for, and how it plays an important role in growing your site. If you're ready, let's start with our first question.

What Is A Keyword?

A keyword is a word or phrase that users use to find information on the web via search engines.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a process of finding keywords about the topic, URL or a website to find new content ideas, content optimization opportunities and tracking keywords of a website. For this reason, this is usually the first step of every SEO work. Keywords are the words or phrases that users use when searching for information. Well, you might ask that how to use it. Let's continue digging. When Google crawls your site, it indexes pages that are open for indexing so that it will appear in relevant searches, by identifying what keywords are relevant and identifying the keyword density in the text. Especially the pages that rank at the first spot know this. They create their content to include high volume keywords and relevant keywords and then start their SEO work. This is what we call keyword research and analysis.

Why Keyword Research Should Be Done?

We do keyword research and analysis to determine how to build our content. In this way, we can discover which keywords users are searching for and create comprehensive and quality content that will respond to their searches.

How To Do Keyword Research?

In this guide, I will actually provide a very comprehensive answer to this question. But to put it simply, it is the process of finding and analyzing the keywords that our site and competitors rank via using paid and free keyword research tools. It can also be used to find the most searched keywords related to a content topic that we have in mind and to create the basic structure of the content (such as creating Title-H1-2-3 titles). We will talk about this in detail in the rest of our content.

Historical Google Updates About Content Which Affects Keyword Research And Analysis

With the development of technology and our demands becoming more complicated, keyword research and content creation have changed dramatically over time. For example, if we were doing keyword research in the early 2000s, it would probably be best to find the high volume keywords and do some keyword stuffing. As the expectations of Googlers change, they constantly updated their own algorithm in this direction and has brought updates that are particularly effective. Important updates that affect keyword research and content are as follows;

• Google Panda - has penalized thin content, duplicate text, and low-quality content
• Google Penguin - penalized unnaturally keyword usage, ie keyword stuffing
• Google Hummingbird - improved semantic search and focused on user intent
• Google Bert - natural language processing skills were improved and more appropriate results started to listed for the searched keywords.

Nowadays, it is more important to place the right keywords in the right places rather than just placing high volume keywords in the content. As time goes on and technology evolves, Google as a search engine, develops itself rapidly and shows high-quality results by better understanding what people want.

Google Rankbrain

Google Rankbrain is another algorithm update developed by Google based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. With this update, Google has gained two key features to improve search results;

• Started to learn how users interact with organic search results
• Better understanding of users' intent and showing more relevant results

If we collect all these updates together, we can summarize briefly as follows; Keyword research and analysis is now more complex than before. It is now more focused on the topic than the keyword focus, and it is MORE and MORE important to address a topic in all its aspects in the most detailed and high-quality form. So now these updates finished the period of finding high volume keywords and spreading it to the content; this is time to create high-quality and well-organized content that covers all aspects of the subject. So, briefly, what does a keyword research and analysis process covers?

Stages Of Keyword Research And Analysis

The steps of the keyword research process are briefly as follows: 1- Researching related keywords and creating a keyword pool 2- Analyzing the obtained keywords according to various criteria as I will explain in the following sections and selecting the most accurate, in-depth keywords 3- Determining how the keywords will be used in the content like where and how often. Here we will focus on the first two steps because the third part is more about creating SEO-compatible content. We may prepare a comprehensive guide on this subject in the future. But first of all, let's start with the most basic question.

                                                                      Chapter 2: How To Find New Keyword Ideas?

Now let's see how we can find new keyword ideas. In this section, I will explain how we find new keyword ideas and what methods we use. I've listed 3 different methods where you can find keyword ideas for you. Let’s look at the free and paid ways of finding new keyword ideas for SEO.

Brainstorming

This is the part where we list the ideas that we have in mind and note the appropriate ideas for us. First, we can take note of what may be the topics related to our business and purpose. In the meantime, you should ask yourself, “Which topics can help my target audience to find me online?” For example, let's assume that you run a digital marketing agency. Some of the topics that you can think of might be these;

• Content Marketing
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Growth Hacking

Once you've identified basic keywords that are relevant to your business, you can create a keyword pool with finding more keywords relevant to your topic.

To find relevant keywords, you can use Ahrefs Having Same Terms feature to find relevant keywords.

First, you need to type your keyword into “keywords explorer” tool.

For example; "Email outreach templates" can be a good keyword for your content if you are targeting email marketing. But there is one more way to find keyword ideas.

Competitor Keyword Research

If you've created a new website and don't have a lot of content, analyzing larger websites that are in the same industry with you, can make it easier for you to find new keyword ideas. To do this, you must determine which websites are your competitors and take a look at their content. But using a tool like Ahrefs, you can do it even easier. In Ahrefs, for example, you can analyze your competitor's domain to find the keywords and pages in which they receive the most traffic or you can use the content gap feature to discover keywords that you aren't ranked for but your competitor's website is already ranked.

Finding Content Gap

If you know your competitors and your competitors are larger than you, then you can use Ahrefs’s great content gap feature to find new content ideas. We first search our own website in Ahrefs.

Then click on the "content gap" in the left menu.

Now by entering your competitors in the related fields, we can find keywords that we don't have content about that keyword.

And we can find that a meaningful keyword ideas like this:

Let's take a closer look at our competitors for more keyword ideas.

                                                                        Chapter 3: How To Find Relevant Keywords

After finding your target keyword, it’s time to create a keyword pool with finding relevant keywords. Also known as LSI keywords. There are many paid and unpaid keyword research tools and methods to find LSI keywords, and we will cover all of them in this chapter. First, let’s start with the most basic ones.

Google Suggestions And Youtube Suggestions

Right after finding our target keyword, now search this keyword on Google 

You can now see keywords recommended by Google.

These are great keywords to add to your keyword list. Because Google suggests these keywords by examining similar searches and finding the most relevant keywords. Therefore, these keywords are both relevant to your content and probably highly searched by users. In addition, you can diversify suggestions using advanced search characters. For example, if you add “ * ”, ie asterisk, to the end of the keyword, you can see suggestions created with additions to the end of the word.

Now let's put the same mark in front of our keyword;

But you don't just have to settle for them. You can also find more keywords using Youtube, the world's second-largest search engine.

Are we limited to this? No way! Google offers more keyword ideas than this. We can make more by using Google as a free keyword tool. How is it done? Here you go.

Benefiting From Searches Related To

As another great method, we can use the "searches related to" feature offered by Google in each SERP. The keywords here show us the relevant keywords most frequently searched for by users. Let's say we're searching for "SEO".

When you get to the bottom of the page, you will see a section like the one above. This section gives us another great opportunity to expand our keyword pool. Plus, for more keywords, you can also click on any of these keywords and look at “searches related to" section again to find more and more related keywords. Cool, right? These are basic methods we can use, but how can you use social networks where your target audience is likely to hang out? Let's see how we can find more keywords through Reddit.

Finding Keywords On Reddit

Reddit is one of the most widely used social platforms and it may be a place that your target audience can use extensively. This is also a great place to find niche topics and relevant keywords, especially if your topic is a well-known topic. Let's go with the same example and search for “SEO" in the Reddit.

In our search result, you can see the popular subreddits opened on the related topic. Let's choose a general and popular subreddit that has the largest content. When you sort topics by popularity, you can get new keyword ideas from the most popular topics. For example;

You can now add the keyword "Outreach SEO techniques" to your keyword list and use it to enrich our content.

By using the keyworddit.com as a free keyword tool, you can get the most frequently used keywords and volumes by typing the name of the subreddit we found in the above study. 

Isn't that really a great way?

Wikipedia’s Table of Contents

Wikipedia is famous for being the world's largest online free encyclopedia. And, of course, it has tailor-made content that many industry experts give their opinion. Here we can use "table of content" to find niche topics and enrich our keyword pool. Now let's have a look our keyword “SEO’ on Wikipedia. 

After we searched, we access the content page which contains very detailed information about our topic.

Now, if we go down a little further on the page, we can see the carefully crafted topics in the contents section.

We can use this section to find new keyword ideas. For example, the keyword we have highlighted above has not appeared in our previous research. You can also find different keywords from the table of contents of other relevant content by clicking on one of the internal links.

It is really useful, right? Keep reading to learn other awesome methods.

Find Popular Topics By Using Forums

Forums are live platforms that are available 24/7 at your fingertips and are likely to include topics that your audience is talking about. You can use the following queries to identify the forums on Google where your audience can be found; “keyword forum” “keyword” + “forum” “keyword” + “forums” “keyword” + “board” Once you have found the forums that contain the topic you are researching, make sure to note how the topics are grouped within the forum. Each of these topics might be potential keywords for you.

To go deeper, you can also review the messages under these groups and continue exploring keywords.

Competitor Based Keyword Research

It would be nice to find the keywords your competitor is already ranked, right? Let's find it, then. We can use our favorite tool Ahrefs for this. First, let's find all the keywords of our competitors page according to their volume. We search the URL of the competing page from the dashboard.

Among the results, we can see the overall performance of the page. However,  we're only interested in keywords for now. So we click on Organic Keywords.

When we filter the table by volume, we can see the details such as keywords that the page is ranked by each country.

This is how you can expand your keyword pool by taking advantage of your competitors.

People Also Ask And People Also Search For

Google search results are one of the really great keyword sources for us. In addition to the aforementioned methods, it provides us with two more good opportunities. First, let's take a look at the also " people also search for ” feature. When you click on a result in search results and then return to the results page again, you'll see suggestions like the one below to help users find related results about the topic. 

Google is definitely a smart search engine. It makes every effort to ensure that users get the most accurate and relevant results. We're trying to create content for users to find everything they're looking for. With this goal, Google is our best friend because we have same goals with Google to offer the most relevant and high-quality content for users. So we have to make full use of everything it offers us. These keywords are other relevant keywords that users might be searching for, which we must include in our content. Don't forget to include them in our keyword research and analysis file. Now let's take a look at the " people also ask ” feature.

When we search for the keyword “ Marketing ", we can see this feature in a box exactly like the one above. And not only that. This box also shows more questions each time we open one. Let’s examine it.

This feature shows us the most frequently asked questions which is also best known as FAQ by users. Although this section does not appear in every query, if you have this feature, you can use it to enrich your content with questions. You can add these questions as frequently asked questions at the end of your content, or you can include them as separate headings.

Moreover, if you add questions in this way, you can also enrich your search result with using the FAQ schema structure. Basic usage of FAQ schema as follow:

<script type="application/ld+json">

"@context": "https://schema.org",

"@type": "FAQPage",

"mainEntity": [{

"@type": "Question",

"name": "What is the return policy?",

"acceptedAnswer": {

"@type": "Answer",

"text": "Most unopened items in new condition and returned within <strong>90 days</strong> will receive a refund or exchange. Some items have a modified return policy noted on the receipt or packing slip. Items that are opened or damaged or do not have a receipt may be denied a refund or exchange. Items purchased online or in-store may be returned to any store.<br /><p>Online purchases may be returned via a major parcel carrier. <a href=http://example.com/returns> Click here </a> to initiate a return.</p>"

"name": "How long does it take to process a refund?",

"text": "We will reimburse you for returned items in the same way you paid for them. For example, any amounts deducted from a gift card will be credited back to a gift card. For returns by mail, once we receive your return, we will process it within 4–5 business days. It may take up to 7 days after we process the return to reflect in your account, depending on your financial institution's processing time."

"name": "What is the policy for late/non-delivery of items ordered online?",

"text": "Our local teams work diligently to make sure that your order arrives on time, within our normaldelivery hours of 9AM to 8PM in the recipient's time zone. During  busy holiday periods like Christmas, Valentine's and Mother's Day, we may extend our delivery hours before 9AM and after 8PM to ensure that all gifts are delivered on time. If for any reason your gift does not arrive on time, our dedicated Customer Service agents will do everything they can to help successfully resolve your issue. <br/> <p><a href=https://example.com/orders/>Click here</a> to complete the form with your order-related question(s).</p>"

"name": "When will my credit card be charged?",

"text": "We'll attempt to securely charge your credit card at the point of purchase online. If there's a problem, you'll be notified on the spot and prompted to use another card. Once we receive verification of sufficient funds, your payment will be completed and transferred securely to us. Your account will be charged in 24 to 48 hours."

"name": "Will I be charged sales tax for online orders?",

"text":"Local and State sales tax will be collected if your recipient's mailing address is in: <ul><li>Arizona</li><li>California</li><li>Colorado</li></ul>"}

</script>

  You can use the example above by customizing it with your own questions and answers. Simply add the relevant code to the <head> section of your page. You can also test the code to see if it works correctly with the Structural Data Testing Too l. The maximum number of questions recommended for FAQ Schema is 7. Also, you can use this FAQ Schema Generator Tool to generate well-defined FAQ Schema codes easily. For example, when you do this on your page, your FAQ page looks like the following in the search results.

This allows you to increase the CTR of your page, ie click-through-rate, and increase your chances to appear in the “people also ask” section. Well, if your query doesn't have this feature, what should you do? Quora, one of the first social networks that come to mind when it comes to questions and answers, can help you here.

Quora is a social media platform that is open to everyone, in the form of questions and answers, where everyone can ask what they are curious about. How can we benefit from this? When we think about the logic of the search engine, we can see that people use the search engine to get answers to their questions. These questions are expressed in short keywords as well as direct questions. For example, "what is the basic meaning of marketing?" There can be hard questions that hard to find good answers in Google SERP at the first look. Quora is the only platform that can help us explore these kind of questions. Let's try it. When we search our keyword "SEO" in Quora, we can see the list of questions listed by their popularity.

Some of these questions are not easy to find in keyword research. Now let's get into one and look at the details.

Before the answers, we see the Answer Wiki section that Quora compiled for users from the answers. If we examine the answers, it is possible to see topics, keywords, and answers that we have not thought of before. You can also use the section below to see similar questions and expand your question pool.

This is a part of what we call 10x content, it is possible to generate 10 times more powerful content from your competitors and not leave almost unanswered questions.

You can use this platform to answer questions relevant to your sector. Also, you can add a link of your relevant post/product page to get traffic from Quora. It can be impressively useful for getting traffic. You can review the platform and see what different businesses do to get traffic from Quora. One more tip about it, just don't be spammy.

                                                                                Chapter 4: Keyword Research Tools

The keyword tools make all these keyword research processes quite easy for us, especially when they are made on a large scale. In this section, we have listed the best paid and free keyword research tools for you. First, let's start with free keyword research tools.

Best Free Keyword Research Tools

Ubersuggest keyword tool by neil patel.

Ubersuggest is one of the most popular and awesome free keyword research tools we’ve tried so far. This tool, offered by Neil Patel, one of the most frequently followed names in SEO, provides us with keyword volumes on a country-by-country basis.

You can get very detailed results by typing your keyword in the target country and language. For example, let's search for the keyword "marketing" .

Here you can see our keyword's search volume, difficulty, paid difficulty, and estimated average CPC. But better than that, the orange chart shows monthly trends of the keyword's search. This is a great data for us because it shows us the seasonality of our keyword. So if we search for winter sports instead of marketing, we can make an inference about when should we target this keyword or what should be our expectation. For example, if we created the content about the winter sports search in the summer, we can't expect to get high traffic suddenly, right? Because generally, search trends fall in the summer season.

Returning to our keyword "marketing", another cool feature that this tool offers us is that it provides detailed keywords that contain our query.

You can find all related keywords which include your query in this section. Here you can work on trends, search volumes and many other metrics by downloading all keywords. And that's it? Of course no. This completely free keyword tool offers us a free topic suggestion feature.

 Here, when we go down a little further on the page, we have access to content suggestions, links and social media sharing data related to our keyword "marketing". For example, if your aim is to increase your brand awareness, it would be wise to give your effort on the most shared topic.

Google Keyword Planner

The performance marketing tool Google Adwords which is used for Google ads offers a variety of features that is free to use and we can use it's some features as a keyword research tool. Like Google Keyword Planner in Adwords. Let's see how we can find keyword volumes and new keyword ideas by using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool.

When we enter the tool, we see that there are two options: discover new keywords and get search volume and forecast. Let's try the discover new keywords feature that we use the most.

As a keyword, we’ve searched "marketing" and click the get results button.

In the incoming screen, we can see the search graph, the relevant keyword ideas presented to us with search volumes and trend graphs. So how can we use it? Let's explain. One of the things we need to pay attention to when choosing our keywords or finding new topic ideas is definitely the trend graph .

Search the keyword "marketing consultant" . When we look at the search volume, we see that it has a really crazy volume, right? Is it something we need to include in our content or write a new one? Not really. The reason for this is the trend graph. We see that this keyword, which has experienced a significant peak recently, has a falling trend. Very soon the average search volume will not remain at this level. So if we write on a topic that has increasing search volume, we can achieve more impressive results.

Keywordtool.io

Although the keyword tool, a free keyword research tool, doesn't show the search volume of keywords in the free version, it allows us to do keyword searches in many popular search engines, including Google, Youtube, Bing, Amazon, and eBay.

In addition to finding relevant keywords, we can also make use of the tool to find relevant questions which people are searching for.

These question patterns are really useful for finding content ideas and enriching existing content. Pro Tip After finding keywords and questions, you can get the search volume of these keywords for free by using the Google Keyword Planner tool. If you click on get keyword volume and forecast and add your keywords, you can get both search volume and future search volume estimates.

Best Paid Keyword Research Tools

Ahrefs keyword research tool.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools. Not only is it a keyword research tool, but it also offers many great features such as site audit, link audit and rank tracker. However, a vehicle that you have to pay even to try, unfortunately. There are many ways to do keyword research in Ahrefs. The first one is URL-based keyword research.

Click on the “organic keywords” section to see all organic keywords that the URL is ranked for.

Here are all the keywords which eBay ranked for! With this method, it is possible to conduct competitor keyword research quite easily. Let's see what else. This time we select the “keyword explorer" feature in the top menu.

Here you can search for keywords by selecting the country and search engine of your choice. Really a great tool to make keyword research.

As an alternative to Ahrefs, Semrush is a very common keyword research tool that you can try for free.

Likewise, we can use this tool to perform competitor keyword research and analysis or to get suggestions for a particular keyword. Plus, like Ahrefs, Semrush offers rank tracking besides all these features. You can make keyword research for the country or region of your choice by creating a free account. You can make keyword research by the page URL or keyword you want to research in the field that appears on the main screen.

Serpstat is similar in functionality to Semrash and Ahrefs and contains 40+ tools to solve absolutely any of your marketing tasks: from studying competitors and keywords to selecting resources for external links.

Its Keyword Research Tool provides metrics such as volume, popularity, competition, and keyword difficulty. It also shows related searches so you can get the right keywords for your campaign.

It can also help you find the right search term to focus on so that your blog posts rank for organic traffic. You can also use Serpstat to determine a keyword’s trend and seasonality to know what people are searching for and when they’re doing so.

You also get access to the Rank Tracking and Competitive Research tools to give you the edge you need to succeed.

KWfinder, developed by Mangools for those who are looking for a different alternative, offers us quite nice features.

You can perform keyword research for both keyword-based and URL-based using this keyword research tool. Also, you can benefit from a 10-day trial period free of charge.

Moz Keyword Research Tool

Moz especially well-known with their great content about SEO also offers us a keyword research tool developed by itself.

Zeo Keyword Tools

In addition to all these great tools, as Zeo Agency, we developed some free and awesome tools for SEO experts. These tools have been developed to facilitate keyword analysis and visualization and are completely free.

Zeo Keyword Filter

With this great keyword filter tool, you can upload or copy/paste your keyword in the field and then filter them super easily. After finishing your keyword filtering process, you can download your clean export file in CSV or other formats.

Zeo Keyword Visualizer

This tool developed by SEO experts from Zeo Agency especially for SEO consultants to visualize and present their keywords in a better way. It helps to create awesome visual materials and graphs depending on your keyword research findings to present your administrators or your customers.

Zeo Keyword Detail Finder

As we mentioned in this post, seasonality is important data to develop effective SEO strategies. This great tool show you the seasonal data as a graph if it is able to reach it. You can download this graph to your computer in .jpg format. You can use it to discover seasonal search data of your keyword and you can enrich your presentations about your keyword research.

                                                                Chapter 5: Keyword Difficulty and Types of Keywords

After telling you a lot about how to do keyword research, I want to tell you briefly about the types of keywords. We'll also discuss the keyword difficulty besides keyword types in this section.

Head Keyword

Head keywords is a general name that we give to keywords that usually consist of a single word and have a very wide coverage. For example, "SEO" and "marketing” keywords are head keywords. The common point of these keywords is that they have the highest search volume, but it is really difficult to get high rankings. At the same time, these keywords have very low conversion rates. If you do not have a very high domain authority, I suggest that you do not target these words at the beginning. It will be more efficient to evaluate the effort you will spend on these keywords in long-tail keywords in order to grow fast and get high rankings easily.

Body Keyword

Body keywords are more specific keywords, usually consisting of a combination of 2-3 words. For example, "on-page SEO” and “digital marketing" are keywords in this category. Unlike head keywords, it is often less competitive to rank with these keywords and search volume of these keywords are relatively lower (usually more than 2,000 search volumes).

Long Tail Keyword

Longtail keywords are usually contains 2-3 words and those are about the specific or niche topics than broad terms. For example, "onpage seo wordpress plugin” or “digital marketing strategy example ” are long-tail keywords. Although the search volumes are generally very low, the competition is equally low and the conversion rates are very high. So it will be very efficient and profitable to produce content that specifically targets long-tail keywords for small websites. Moreover, with the long-tail keywords will be easier to rank in Google SERP and increase your website traffic quickly.

Evergreen Keywords

The keywords we call Evergreen, as the name suggests, are not trendy or non-temporary keywords with a regular and specific search volume. For example, “what is marketing” is a keyword that has a continuous volume regardless of seasonality and any other factor. That's why we call these keywords evergreen keywords. So how can we benefit? Although it is important to catch trends, your website needs to be ranked with evergreen keywords to receive continuous traffic. Evergreen content comes into play at this point and gives us opportunities to continuously drive traffic. This is important that you should consider when planning your content strategy, and I recommend to consider evergreen keywords as part of your long-term growth strategy. Now, after discussing the types of keywords and the keyword difficulty, let's dig deeper.

Authority of Sites on Google SERP

Another important thing is that you should pay attention to your keywords and content before getting into a fight with your competitors. Another important keyword difficulty is the authority of the websites on the first page. For example, let's search for the keyword "marketing". 

When we look at the results at the Google SERP, we see that one of the top-ranking sites is Wikipedia which has super high website authority. Although if we have an actually authoritarian site, high authority websites reduces the chances of getting traffic from keyword "marketing", because we will probably not be able to pass high authority websites like Wikipedia, or we will have to spend a lot of resources. However, if these results were, for example, various low-authority blog pages and too many non-authoritarian sites, we might have thought that this keyword would be worth our efforts and we could receive a significant portion of the incoming traffic. So before focusing on a topic or keyword, even if we rely on our website and our work, we should also look at factors such as the authority of competitors in the SERP to we can accurately predict our chance for ranking on the first page.

Rich Results and Pixel Rank in Google SERP

In addition to keyword difficulty, you have to take into account the rich results and pixel rank in Google SERP.

As you can see in this query, before coming to organic results, the featured snippet area and the people also ask area cover a significant portion of the screen, which gives us very detailed information. If this is the case with your focus keyword, you should also consider that these results will take up a significant portion of the search volume, and you cannot compete directly in these areas. Assume that first spot take, for example, 20% of total search traffic. Would it still make sense to focus on that keyword? To understand this, I recommend that you calculate your keyword's search volume and CTR on average, and evaluate it along with keyword difficulty.

Can I Rank? Keyword Research And Topic Suggestion Tool

Can I rank is an artificial intelligence based keyword research and analysis tool that I recently discovered and really liked it.

This tool, which you can try by simply opening a free membership, asks for basic informations at the beginning. These are your site, a URL from your category page, a sample content URL, and competitors. Based on this data, the analysis tool provides suggestions specifically for your site by considering your competitors, categories and page type. It's also a great tool that uses keyword difficulty as a metric by analyzing keywords that can be sorted more easily. In this way, you can discover keywords where you can get traffic faster and get higher rankings easily.

In addition to keyword suggestions, this tool gives us valuable insights about our competitors.

As you can see here, it provides us with critical metrics for both our website and our competitors in the target keyword. This gives us the important ranking metrics about competitors we will compete on this keyword. Using these metrics, we can prioritize keywords by determining competitors that we can easily avoid. Or we can learn effective site and page development ideas from our powerful competitors.

                                                                           Chapter 6: How To Choose A Keyword?

So, we’ve learned how to make keyword research and analyzes, we listed free keyword research tools and the paid ones! Now let's take a look at how to select and prioritize our keywords to target as a result of our research. First step, as expected, search volume.

Search Volume

Search volume is an important metric that we all usually look at first. Because we want to prepare our content and pages to earn more traffic and grow our web site visitors as much as possible. That's why we tend to choose keywords with more search volume. However, just considering search volume is certainly not the right method to determine the right and effective SEO strategy. So is it really worth to spend a lot of time for a keyword that you will probably not get much traffic as much as many long-tail keywords, even on the first page? I don't think it's worth it. In addition, the search volume varies from sector to sector. In other words, a keyword search volume that is seen as too low for a sector can be considered high for your sector.

Let's look at the examples. First of all, let's look for a keyword about diet and look at the monthly average search volume.

Not bad, right? Now, let's look at another query from a different sector.

As you can see, there are significant volume differences from the sector to the sector. In addition, when it comes to making decisions, it is much more efficient to make a decision by not only looking at the search volume metric but also by looking at the other metrics below.

Organic Click-Through-Rate

It's no secret that organic searches have lower click-through rates day by day due to zero results, rich snippets and ads in Google searches.

 So the search volume is now only part of the story. It is also important to know the clickthrough rates of the top-ranked pages, because a query that users don't even need to click on a site to find what they're looking for, will not beneficial for you. Even if the search volume is high. So how do we understand CTR (click-through-rate)? First, I suggest you to look up Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) results by searching for your keyword.

Tools for organic CTR

Second, you can use keyword research tools. Both Ahrefs and Moz pro tools will give you whatever metric you want.

Nevertheless, it would not be wrong to say that; It wouldn't make sense to abandon a keyword that is searched extremely high just because it has a low CTR.

Keyword Difficulty

We have discussed this issue before, but let's make a recap. If your site is new or has low authority, you should focus on keywords with lower difficulty, and easy to rank on the first page. Easy-to-rank keywords help you grow your website faster, even if your search volume is small, as your competitors won't be challenging websites. Moreover, if you discover niche topics and dominate these areas, you can attract visitors with high conversion rates and increase your chances of earning backlinks. In this way, of course, your brand awareness will begin to increase.

CPC Value As Selection Factor

CPC (cost-per-click) is a very important metric that answers an important question for us; “Do visitors who search for this word actually spend money at the end of these queries?” So yes, let's say the search volume is good and high. However, if people searching for this keyword don't spend money at the end of their queries, then we may not need to target that keyword. You can also get a high ROI from a keyword with a really high CPC, even if the search volume is too low. For example, let's look at the keyword “SEO keyword research tool”.

According to Ahrefs, if you look at this word which has a search volume of 80 clicks, you can say that it is really terrible. However, when we look at the CPC value, we see that advertisers spend an average of 9 dollars for each click that comes from this query. However, it is highly possible to target this keyword organically in these results because it has a very low search volume. Here, each conversion you receive will save you $9 and provide high ROI value. In fact, we can say that the CPC value compensates for the low volume of the search.

Business Fit

This is an important thing to look for in order to understand the possibility that a person can become your customer. Yes, CPC gives us a significant insight, but it is worth looking at the other side of the coin. Let's go with the same example.

Now, when we consider it in terms of CPC, we can say that this keyword is actually really good. The other side of the coin for Zeo Agency. This keyword is not really suitable for us. Because Zeo Agency is not offering a keyword research tool. So it's not a keyword that fits with our business model. Therefore, it would be meaningless to target this keyword. Because we're a digital marketing consulting agency. Instead, "keyword research" is a more appropriate keyword for us. The reason for this is that it is a service which we offer among our consultancy services.

Moreover, the search volume is high and the CPC value is not bad at all. Business fit is very important in this respect. Keywords cannot be selected simply because the values ​​are good. If this keyword is not suitable for our business, it will not help us, but our efforts will be in vain.

Keyword Trends

If you want to see whether your keyword a fast-growing keyword or a slowly dying one, I can recommend a great tool offered by Google for free.

Using Google Trends, we can compare keywords against trend data by country, see search volumes by country, and see relevant keyword searches.

In addition, we can see the competition of keywords with each other at the subregional level.

All cool features are very helpful in deciding our keyword. Before you decide on your keywords, I suggest you check them with the Google Trends tool and discard those that are going down and target the trendy keywords. You will certainly see its effect. None of us want to waste our resources for a keyword that will die after a while, right?

                                                                                    Chapter 7: Advanced Tips

After talking about all the basics of keyword research, I would like to tell you some advanced concepts. For those who want to take a few steps forward in keyword research and analysis, let's dig some advanced tips one by one.

Rich Results and Barnacle SEO

Let's say you've found the keyword that's great for you. And you're even in the top three. Everything seems okay, right? Not actually. If we talk about SEO, there is always more. Let's start with Barnacle SEO. It is possible to dominate Google SERP with this strategy previously described by Backlinko. In fact, Barnacle SEO is basically making use of the power of other sites. For example, even you are at the first-place in SERP, the pixel you occupy in the SERP is still a spot.

Here we can increase our pixel space by using rich snippets.  

After that, by using the Barnacle SEO technique, we can take advantage of the power of other sites and take up more space in SERP as pixels. For example, by producing videos that are relevant to your post or page, you can also dominate more pixel space with the help of video results in the same query.

 What really matters here is, with the help of an increase in rich result types, how much pixel space you occupy in SERP and your pixel rank. This is now very important because, as we mentioned before, all these rich results and advertisements are taking up a lot of space in the SERP. Therefore, you may be in the first position but because of the rich results in the SERP your actual pixel position can be equal to fourth to fifth position (in a SERP that does not have rich results and ads).

Therefore, I recommend that you pay attention to the pixel width and the pixel in which you are ranked. Today's most popular rank tracker tools still don't offer us this feature, but using seo.do developed by ZEO Agency, you'll be able to track which pixel you're in as well as what your SERP position. I suggest you check out our seo.do rank tracker tool.

Google Search Console Keyword List

We enter our Google Search Console and click on the performance section.

This report shows us which keywords are we ranked for, our average position, the impressions, and the clicks we receive.

If we now filter the results by impression, we can identify keywords that have got a high impression but received fewer clicks.

Now, by writing new and focused content around this keyword, which we've already ranked and receiving high impression, we can increase both our ranking and clicks. Or we can achieve this by revising a post that covers this topic, increasing our keyword density and expanding our content in this focus. This method is actually a quick win. Because Google already ranked our site on this keyword and sees that our related page is relevant. The next thing to do is to create a more focused page and turn these great potential clicks (impressions) into traffic for our site. This will be easier for us than trying to rank on a completely new keyword.

Optimize Content Around Synonyms and Related Keywords

When creating content, it is important to decide which keyword is right for you. Usually, we choose high-volume keywords that are relevant to our topic, and we don't pay much attention to low-volume or niche keywords. We may be missing important opportunities here by doing this. This may be causing that we are missing the relevancy factor that is one of the very important ranking factors for Google Algorithm. Especially in keywords where we have difficulty in competition can provide a very important competitive advantage that expanding the content with including the synonyms and more niche keywords. This is because when someone searches for a keyword, it is as important as many other factors to determine the relevance and coverage of the content by Google. The keywords we find or derive here must be directly relevant to the topic. It's also a great way to increase your page's traffic potential by getting your page ranked on more keywords.

Keyword Research Based On Search Intent/User Intent

Here is the question we should ask ourselves:

• “What does someone want to see when they search for a keyword?”

It's really important to understand. For example, is the user looking for information? Want to buy? or is it searching for a specific page? (such as registration or login page).

For example, let's look at the keyword “keyword research tool”.

Let's check Google SERP to understand what people might be looking for in this query.

When we look at the first 3 results, we see that all results are keyword research tools. So the conclusion we can draw here is that those who search for this keyword are really looking for a keyword research tool. They are not looking to buy something or any other information about keyword research tools. They just want to make a research about keyword research tools in the market. So they do not seek informative content, transactional or navigational results. This is a commercial search. For a better understanding, let's take a look at the following table.

Now let's see how we can use this information. For example, if we are an e-commerce website and we are creating content on our product pages, then what category of keywords should we use? The answer is simple: our goal should be transactional and commercial words, absolutely. Especially the transactional ones. If we focus on informational keywords for the product page content just because they are high volume keywords or because we find them suitable in terms of other metrics, this will prevent our page from getting a good ranking. In short, a keyword search based on user intent, or search intent, and the content you create in this context will perform much better. So how do you do keyword research and analysis? If you have a method other than the methods mentioned here, we would appreciate it if you share it as a comment and we can enrich our content with your help. If you have any questions and comments on this post, we will be glad to help.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/free-keyword-research-tools/ https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research https://mangools.com/blog/keyword-research/ https://backlinko.com/keyword-research

How to Analyze Long-tail Words in R

Learn how to analyze the performance of long-tail words and strengthen your content strategy with R Studio.

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What Is Keyword Research And How To Do It

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• December 8, 2023

When creating content, whether for a blog, website, or marketing campaign, it is essential that we put in the effort to research and select the right keywords to focus on. By taking the time to understand search intent and analyze the competitive landscape, we can craft content that ranks highly and attracts qualified organic traffic. In this post, we will walk through a step-by-step keyword research process to show how it can be done effectively.

What are Keywords?

Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of online content. They are the words and phrases that encapsulate the essence of your content, making it discoverable to search engines and, consequently, to your audience.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of identifying and analyzing words and phrases that users input into search engines when looking for information, products, or services. This fundamental aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) helps website owners and marketers understand the language and queries their target audience uses.

How to Conduct Keyword Research

Step 1: brainstorm potential topics and ideas.

The first step is simply sitting down and coming up with a list of topics that would be relevant for your site, product, or overall goals. Think about the types of questions your ideal customers ask and the language they use. Also consider synergies with existing content assets that could be expanded or repurposed. The goal here is to develop a broad list of keyword ideas that capture various themes and search intents.

Step 2: Use Keyword Research Tools to Expand Your List

Next, take those seed keywords and use online research tools to discover additional keyword variations and opportunities. Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush are two excellent free options. Analyze the suggested keywords for monthly search volume data and click potential. Look for rising trends and topics with solid traffic numbers. Mine the related and alternative keyword ideas for additional gems.

Step 3: Narrow Your Focus with Opportunity Analysis

Now comes the fun part – sorting through all those keywords to identify ones that offer the best possible opportunity. Pull out the high volume keywords and combine them with medium and low volume ones that have great relevance. Use the competition metrics in keyword tools to find “low-hanging fruit” that are less competitive. Create groups of keywords around topics that align with your goals.

Step 4: Cluster Keywords and Develop Content Themes

With a refined keyword list in hand, look for ways to cluster related keywords together under a shared theme or content focus. For example, review keywords may center around best products, guides, or user ratings. Support keywords could include troubleshooting, how-to, or installation. Identify 4-5 core themes that lend themselves to distinct content assets like blog posts, guides, or videos.

Step 5: Expand On Your Topics with LSI Keyword Research

Now expand your content keyword clusters by finding latent semantic index (LSI) keywords and variations. LSI analysis looks for synonyms and other closely related keywords that search engines associate with your targets. For example, “best laptop” may also trigger pages about “top rated laptops” or “most popular laptop computers”. Work these LSI keywords into your core content to improve relevance.

Step 6: Research and Analyze Your Competition

For each of your main keyword targets, dig into competitor content that currently ranks well in search engine results. Look for common elements across top 10 results in terms of keywords used, page structure, media assets, and formatting. Discover what is working for ranking success and opportunities to differentiate. For example, you may find competitors all focus on specs and reviews but lack buyer guides.

Step 7: Structure Optimized Content Around Keyword Targets

Armed with detailed keyword research and competitive analysis, map out your content. Determine what keywords will be the primary and secondary focus per piece of content. Develop an outline hitting key questions, media elements, and keyword targets throughout each section. Follow search best practices like using keywords in subheadings, URLs, meta descriptions, and image file names.

Step 8: Promote and Monitor Performance Over Time

You’ve created amazing content chock full of relevant keywords, now get the word out! Promote your new pages and posts through social media, email newsletters, guest posts, and outreach. Over time, monitor traffic sources and keyword rankings. See which terms and topics attract visitors and serve as conversion drivers. Feed those learnings back into an evolving, evergreen keyword strategy. Rinse and repeat!

Types of Keywords for SEO Content

Now that we’ve covered the keyword research process from start to finish, let’s provide more detail on the key types of keywords you want to focus on when optimizing content. Keep these categories in mind during research and brainstorming.

Head term keywords are the prominent main keywords for a page, occurring in titles, headers, URLs, meta descriptions, and liberally throughout the content. These terms have high search volume and relevance to the topic. Target 1-2 primary head terms per page.

Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are more specific multi-word phrases, like “best lightweight laptop for college students” or “how to fix laptop trackpad not clicking”. They have lower individual search volume but collectively can drive significant traffic. Long-tail keywords enable pages to rank for more specific intent queries.

LAT Keywords

LAT stands for lowest average tier and refers to keywords with low SEO difficulty scores and competition. Though search volume is lower, ranking potential is much higher. LAT keywords extend reach for pages by capturing additional queries.

LSI Keywords

As described earlier, LSI or latent semantic index keywords have a close semantic relationship with other terms. They include synonyms as well as conceptually related words and phrases. Adding relevant LSI keywords improves overall content relevance and opportunities for search visibility.

Topic Clusters

Topic clusters represent groups of keywords around a shared central theme, focus area, or subtopic. For example, laptop-related keywords may cluster around pricing, hardware, operating systems, technical support, and so on based on search intent.

Optimize Keyword Placement For Maximum Exposure

Now that we understand the key types of keywords to focus on, where exactly should they be worked into our content? Proper keyword placement is critical for signaling relevance to search engines. Here are the key areas to optimize.

Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

A page’s title tag and meta description offer prime real estate for showcasing primary keywords to both search engine bots and users in results. Avoid over-optimization, but do ensure keywords featured here match page content.

Headers & Subheaders

Properly structure content in an outline format with H1, H2, H3 tags for headers and subheaders. Incorporate keywords into descriptive headings that communicate the topic focus areas per section.

Image File Names & Alt Text

Take keyword optimization beyond text content. Ensure keywords are used in image file names and alternative (ALT) text that displays when images don’t load properly.

Body Content

Keywords should flow naturally in body content as well around related term variations and LSI keywords. Aim for 1-3% keyword density in body text for optimum results without over-optimizing.

Outbound Links & Anchor Text

Be strategic with external links and anchor text. Choose descriptive anchor text incorporating keywords you want associated with the site rather than generic terms like “click here” .

URL Structure

When possible, work primary and secondary keywords into the page URL structure, separated by hyphens instead of underscores or spaces.

By focusing keyword placement across all of these elements in an integrated way, pages send strong topical relevance signals to search engines while also enhancing the user experience.

Evolve Your Keyword Strategy With Ongoing Analysis

Keyword research certainly demands a time investment up front. However, with the right process and tools, it is not as daunting as it seems. More importantly, keywords are not a set-it-and-forget-it aspect of content marketing success. To keep your content and rankings fresh, revisit keyword performance on an ongoing basis.

Here are a few best practices for evolving your approach over time:

Review Search Analytics

With Google Analytics, you can easily monitor which keywords and keyword phrases are driving traffic to your site over time. Look for new opportunities around rising queries warranting more focus.

Stay On Top Of Trends

Search intent changes over time as new technologies, products, and trends emerge. Revisit keyword research tools to identify rising keywords that may require new content development. Insert emerging keywords into existing evergreen content as well.

Expand Based On Referral Traffic Sources

Analyze your best referral sources sending visitors to your content. Look for keyword patterns from blogs, social media, or influencers that can inform expansion to new high-potential topics.

Optimize Based On Rankings & Click-Through-Rates

Monitor how your target keywords stack up in terms of search engine rankings and organic click-through rates from results pages. Double down on keywords driving conversions. Consider content refreshes for those with dropping positions.

List of Keyword Research Tools: Unlocking Insights for Success

When embarking on the journey of keyword research, having the right tools at your disposal can make all the difference. Here’s a curated list of both free and paid keyword research tools that empower you to unravel valuable insights and elevate your SEO game:

Free Keyword Research Tools:

• Google Keyword Planner: A staple for many, this free tool by Google provides insights into keyword search volumes, competition, and potential ad campaign performance. It’s an excellent starting point for beginners.
• AnswerThePublic: This visually engaging tool helps you explore the questions users ask related to your keywords. It’s a goldmine for content ideas tailored to your audience’s queries.
• Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest offers a range of SEO features, including keyword suggestions, competition analysis, and content ideas. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible to marketers of all levels.

Paid Keyword Research Tools:

• Semrush : A comprehensive SEO toolkit, Semrush provides in-depth keyword research, competitive analysis, and site audit features. It’s a favorite among professionals for its robust data and user-friendly interface.
• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is renowned for its backlink analysis, but it’s also a powerhouse for keyword research. Uncover valuable insights into search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitor strategies.
• Moz Keyword Explorer: Moz’s tool offers detailed keyword suggestions, prioritized by relevance and potential. It also provides insights into the difficulty of ranking for specific keywords.

Pro Tip: Combining Tools for Synergistic Insights

While each tool has its strengths, combining the insights from multiple sources can provide a holistic view of your keyword landscape. Utilize the strengths of free tools for foundational research, and complement them with the advanced features of paid tools for a more nuanced understanding. Remember, the key lies in the seamless integration of these tools into your overall SEO strategy for optimal results.

Conclusion: Elevate Your Online Presence

In conclusion, keyword research is the cornerstone of successful SEO strategies. Rather than a one-and-done task, effective keyword research requires an adaptive and iterative approach that continually evolves. By following structured best practices and revisiting data often, you’ll unlock growing organic visibility and engagement.

If you need help with keyword research, contact 427 Digital today!

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Keyword Research And Analysis: How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Website

Last updated on January 12, 2024.

Which keywords do you want to rank for? To answer this question, a lot of SEOs like to follow their gut instinct. When starting out, this isn’t fundamentally wrong. But if you want to get the most out of keyword research and discover keywords with major potential, you need to take a systematic approach.

Systematic keyword research and analysis will give you the terms that your target group is searching for on Google , giving you the basis for developing a content strategy for your website .

This article will take you step by step through the process of keyword research and give you useful tips and strategies for finding relevant keywords for your website. We’ll also show you how Seobility’s free Keyword Research Tool can help you with this.

You can find an introduction to the tool’s features in the article “ New: Seobility Keyword Research Tool .”

Tip Signing up for a free Seobility Basic plan will let you carry out up to 5 checks per day. And during the free 14-day trial period for Seobility Premium, you’ll have as many as 50 queries per day.

If you’re already familiar with the basics of keyword research, you can jump to the hands-on section here .

Table of Contents

• 1 What is Keyword Research?
• 2 Why You Need Keyword Research
• 3 How Keyword Research Works
• 4 Step 1: Identify the Right Seed Keywords
• 5 Step 2: How to Find Relevant Keywords
• 6 Step 3: Analyze and Prioritize Your Keywords
• 7 Step 4: Develop a Content Plan
• 8 Additional Tools for Keyword Research
• 9 Conclusion

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research means looking for search terms that your target group will enter into a search engine to accomplish their search intent : Buying something, conducting research, finding information, being entertained, or navigating to a specific website (or part of a website). By knowing these search terms, you can offer tailor-made content on your website to draw searchers to your site and, for example, convert them to customers.

Keyword research is typically based on a combination of creative processes and tool use. These tools have the advantage of providing keywords that you may not have found just by putting on your thinking cap, or that might be overlooked by other approaches. They’ll also save you a lot of time, since a tool is typically faster than searching Google manually.

Another major advantage: Tools provide qualitative and quantitative data about the value of keywords that can’t be found in Google search or anywhere else, such as data about the competition for a keyword, the search volume , cost-per-click prices and link data. This makes it easier to assess whether it’s worth optimizing for a keyword, or whether it’s too expensive compared to the potential return.

Why You Need Keyword Research

Keyword research is important for search engine optimization for several reasons.

• Better visibility : Building the right keywords into your web pages increases the probability that these pages will receive a higher ranking for precisely those keywords. From a quantitative perspective, that potentially means more traffic, for one thing.
• Competitor analysis : You can also get a quicker idea of the competition you’re up against by seeing what keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their sites (which is typically part of keyword research). This analysis will help you identify niche keywords that are relatively less competitive and rewarding targets for content and product pages – as well as keywords that you absolutely must rank for in your niche.
• More efficient resource usage : With targeted keyword research, you can better utilize your SEO resources by concentrating on keywords that have more value for your organization. Nobody can rank on everything in the long term. Keyword research in general, and content production in particular, require significant investment of time and money. With the insights gained from keyword research, you can prioritize your use of each of these and also justify necessary compromises. For a short-tail keyword like “bicycle,” the pages that rank will typically be those with lots of links and high domain authority . Experience shows that it is unrealistic for a new website to compete with this.

How Keyword Research Works

Before we get down to business, it’s worth taking a look at the overall process of keyword research. Depending on your needs, it can be very simple – or highly complex. It depends on whether you’re doing keyword research for a few (dozen) keywords or whether your project requires research and categorization of thousands of keywords, as is the case with online shops that carry a lot of products. In this article, we’ll focus on the basic process, which is the same for any type of website.

• Step 1 : The first step in keyword research is to identify your “seed keywords.” Those are the main keywords related to your products and services, and the starting point for deeper research.
• Step 2 : Tools provide you with extensive lists of relevant keywords related to your seed keywords.
• Step 3 : The next step is to prioritize the keywords in these lists to extract ideal keywords, and then to structure them into meaningful keyword clusters.
• Step 4 : As you develop your content plan, determine what content needs to be produced for the most valuable or useful keywords.

Step 1: Identify the Right Seed Keywords

Keyword research always begins with the question: “What should I be optimizing for, anyway?” Usually, no tool can answer this question for you. Ultimately you know best what the goals of your website are.

Based on these goals, you’ll derive your main keywords or “seed keywords”. This basic list (ideally) covers your website’s most important topic areas . It forms the foundation for more in-depth keyword research.

The good news: You don’t need any tools to create your first seed keyword list. Seed keywords are found using classic techniques.

Brainstorming

Perhaps you know your subject so well that you can simply draw relevant terms from your own experience. Alternatively, you can sit down with your customers, colleagues and partners to create an initial list of keywords. The following questions might help you with brainstorming:

• Target group analysis : Who are the primary target groups of your products? What are their needs? How do these target groups search for what you’re offering them?
• Identifying and categorizing core themes : What primary themes emerge from your products and services? How can these core themes be categorized?
• Questions and answers : Which questions related to the core themes are the target groups asking?

These questions should give you a sizable list of keywords and additional questions that your potential customers have. This list will be the basis of your keyword research. If that’s not enough, we have a few more creative ideas for you:

Customer conversations

Conversations with your customers will inevitably lead to discussions about problems that need to be solved. Be sure to take notes in these situations, as discussions can easily lead to content such as FAQs and how-to guides. Actively asking questions can also provide valuable information.

E-mail inquiries

Support or sales inquiries also provide important clues to what visitors/customers are looking for.

Competitor analysis

Reviews and ratings, whether in comments, forums, newsletters or social media, are gold mines for creative keyword research. Don’t just look at your competitors’ own sites, but wherever customers and other interested people are talking about your competitors’ products and services, such as forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Regardless of your competitors, these platforms are always an interesting research resource in general.

Print media

Ideas for keywords and topics can also be found in relevant technical print media. Take a walk sometime to a well-organized bookstore with a large selection of technical journals and magazines. It’s fun, and it will give you ideas that your competitors don’t have because they often limit themselves to online research.

At the end of the process, you should have an extensive list of seed keywords to use as a basis for keyword research.

Step 2: How to Find Relevant Keywords

The next step is to identify relevant search terms associated with your seed keywords. These might be variations of the keyword, similar or related terms, or more specific long-tail keywords .

To provide an example of the process below, let’s imagine a sample project. We’ll assume that we’re starting with a new online shop offering foosball tables for sale. As a break from the heavy SEO work, it’s nice to have a little fun with your colleagues in the office every now and then to recharge your batteries for new ideas 🙂

So the seed keyword is “buy foosball table.” Now using the keyword research tool , we need to find out which variations and sub-keywords there are and how much potential each one has. You’re welcome to follow these steps, using your own seed keyword.

Find similar keywords and variations

First enter your seed keyword in the keyword research tool and choose “similar keywords” as the analysis:

After clicking on the “Keyword Research” button, the tool will show you a list of keywords similar to your seed keyword:

Now you can select all the terms that might be interesting for your website. The data to the right of each keyword gives you valuable information about the keyword’s potential, the underlying search intent, and how difficult it might be to rank for that term:

• Search volume : This is the estimated number of searches per month. For example, the phrase “foosball table for sale” is searched for an average of 2,900 times a month. The higher the search volume, the more traffic you can potentially attract to your website with that keyword. However, there’s usually a lot of competition for high-volume keywords, making it harder to achieve a high ranking.
• Search intent : Here you can find out the search intent behind a keyword. Do searchers want to buy something, find information on a topic, learn about a product, or simply navigate to a website? If multiple intents are served in the search results, you will see multiple entries here.
• Competition : Here you can see whether the competition for a keyword is high, average or low. According to the keyword research tool’s estimate, competition for the phrase “buy foosball table” is high. There are a lot of websites that want to get on the first page for that search.
• CPC (cost per click) : This is the approximate cost of a web ad for the phrase in Google Ads . It’s how much you would have to pay if a user clicks on your ad in the search results. In general, the higher the number of advertisers that bid for a keyword, the higher the CPC will be.

Terms with a high CPC and little competition are particularly valuable (but also rare).

These are the low-hanging fruit. It’s usually worth creating a page for them. This makes sense because advertisers seem to be willing to pay more for search terms (higher CPC), and if these terms have less competition, it’s all the easier to rank for them. That’s why such discoveries should be a high priority. The same applies to terms with high search volume but little competition.

The “Related searches” tab provides additional keyword variations. These are terms from the “Related searches” section that are displayed at the end of Google search results:

These related searches are a bit more general and are good for additional content ideas.

Tip: You can add promising keywords from the Keyword Research Tool directly to your Seobility rank tracking:

I went ahead and selected several additional keyword ideas and then added them to my project by clicking “Save selected search terms”.

The advantage of this is that Seobility will immediately start monitoring the positions of these terms and will inform you of the success of your SEO work, tailored to your keyword list.

Alternatively, you can use the ‘Export CSV’ function to download the keyword lists for further analysis and clustering (more on this in step 3).

But for now, back to the research part.

The “Auto complete” tab returns additional queries based on Google Search’s autocomplete suggestions .

Another interesting research resource is the “People also ask” tab. Here you’ll find common questions that search engine users ask in relation to the keyword.

The question “Which foosball table is the best” seems particularly interesting for content such as an article or post that answers this question in detail.

All these analysis options allow us to quickly find relevant keywords. Even if you don’t do anything further, this step alone will give you a wide range of options to optimize for. Just enter the seed keyword and you’ve got a starting point for the next steps. But wait – there’s more.

Your competitors are already ranking where you’d like to rank. This also means that they have information that you don’t yet have. Fortunately, the Keyword Research Tool offers some features to analyze the ranking performance of these sites. You can use this data to add valuable terms to your keyword list.

Especially interesting are keywords your own website doesn’t yet rank for, but your competition does . You can find these terms by using the “Competitor analysis” function of the Keyword Research Tool.

To do this, enter your domain (or another domain) in “Your domain” (1) and then enter up to two competitors as Domain A and B. Then select “Gap” as the analysis (2).

And look: A top ranking domain for the keyword “buy foosball table” doesn’t yet rank for “foosball football table” compared to the two competitors (3).

The ‘Intersections’ analysis, on the other hand, provides terms for which all three analyzed domains rank. This is particularly useful as you can enter the top 3 domains for a keyword to get a list of the top keywords for which all 3 competitors rank in that area. This is particularly helpful if your site is targeting the same topic but isn’t yet in the top 3.

In our example, this approach helped us discover some of the top brands that consumers are interested in.

If the data from the gap and intersection analysis isn’t enough for you, you can get even more data on each individual competitor in the “URL/Domain” tab. Here you can see in detail which keywords a particular competitor is ranking for in organic search results .

Competitor analysis is an important process in keyword research because it allows you to see what’s already working well for your competitors.

Your analysis should always include finding out why your competitors are currently ranking so well. Take a closer look at the top 3-5. Can you see a strategy, especially when you compare the leaders (in terms of ranking)? For example, are they focusing on long-tail keywords that are more specific and easier to rank for?

But sometimes it’s quite simple: If you’re not targeting a keyword and all your competitors are, then it should probably be one of your top priorities!

Pro tip: How to find “pain point” keywords

Keyword research tools can be extremely helpful but they can’t replace a thorough understanding of your potential customer’s needs.

As Ané Wiese – SEO Lead at saas.group – explains:

For example: a common challenge with keyword research tools is the source of the search volume. Many SEO specialists want search volume data coming from Google, so a term like “keyword research tool Google search volumes” could be relevant to include in the set.

You can identify challenges that your potential customers face by asking the customer service team, using ChatGPT or you can look at forum websites like Reddit, Quora and Facebook groups.

Once you have your “pain-point” keywords, you can also look for keywords that might not have search volume data available yet, but that does not mean that these terms aren’t searched for. To identify these keywords, you have to use Google Autocomplete suggestions in Google’s search bar. For example, start typing in the beginning of the search term like “keyword research tools that….” or “keyword research tool for…” and see what Google suggests as autocompleted terms in its search bar.

This should serve as a clue to what popular terms there are related to your product. It is also a great way to identify terms that you can create new pages for as these terms are often very specific and descriptive.”

Step 3: Analyze and Prioritize Your Keywords

Now that your keyword search is complete, you probably have one or more long keyword lists. It’s not uncommon for them to contain thousands of entries. That’s why the next step is to select the best keywords. After all, no one can create content for every possible topic at the same time.

For the following examples, I’ve chosen the topic “trekking bikes”, because it gives a lot more results.

Let’s say your website/online shop is new. The site offers a range of trekking bikes for sale and now you want to produce content on trekking bikes to show Google that your company is an expert in this field.

A search for keywords similar to the seed keyword “trekking bike” returns a total of 524 variations.

The big question now is: “What do I do with all these keywords?”

As mentioned above, it’s important to find the best keywords for your website. This means high potential keywords where you have a good chance of attracting as much relevant traffic as possible to your website.

The filter function in the Keyword Research Tool allows you to filter your keyword list by search volume, search intent, CPC, competition and number of words:

For ultimate flexibility, though, use the “CSV Export” function, which I’ll use for this example.

Once you’ve exported the CSV file, you’ll have the full power of the spreadsheet at your disposal, letting you sort and filter your keyword list as much as you like.

About Keyword Priority

Beginners in particular often wonder what the best filtering criteria are . However, experience shows that choosing keywords/topics based on your own editorial skills leads to better results. The priority of your own keywords is highly individual and every website owner has their own objectives, both for the whole website and for individual areas and sub-pages. Your business goals and the resources available for technology, content and links will largely determine how you conduct your analysis.

Here are a few strategic tips based on experience that may be helpful as guidelines:

• If the search volume is high and there’s stiff competition for the keyword, you should only target it if you have the resources for both content and link building. For highly competitive search terms (such as “hotel London,” “loan comparison,” “cheap flights,” “buy bicycle,” “buy foosball table”) it can take years to get to page one or even number one.
• A brand new website or one that doesn’t yet have sufficient domain popularity (i.e. many high-quality links from different domains) will only rank for search terms with low search volume at first. Only over time, it will start to rank for more competitive keywords. So it’s not worth prioritizing a keyword like “buy foosball table” right off the bat. Instead, it makes sense for a new website to start by trying long-tail keywords with low search volume and limited competition. From there, you can gradually work your way up to more difficult keywords. (Of course, it makes sense to optimize for “buy foosball table” if you’ve actually recently started selling foosball tables, but more for business reasons than for SEO).
• How long does it take to rank for competitive terms? Old hands at SEO know that time itself is (or can be) one of the most important ranking factors. Waiting periods of 18 to 24 months to rank for competitive keywords are not uncommon – and that’s assuming you’re constantly working on new content, updates and links.
• Established sites with a certain history and a relatively high number of links compared to their competitors may see a much faster improvement. But even then, it sometimes takes a while if they try to rank for new topic areas. For example, if an online shop has been selling pool tables for 10 years and then adds foosball tables to its product range, it doesn’t automatically mean that the new search terms will get top rankings. You have to earn Google’s trust for each new topic area.
• Start by focusing on terms and combinations for which your competitors don’t offer much quality content. This will often get you closer to your goals than thoroughly analyzing the values from keyword research tools. Especially for beginners, it’s important to have those first small successes. Each one will keep you motivated and make it more likely that you’ll keep at it.
• Give priority to search terms and topics that serve informational search intent . Search terms with a purchase intent are usually more difficult to claim.
• Don’t spend 100% of your resources on your one dream keyword. In the beginning, 90% of your resources should go to the easier keywords and 10% to the difficult ones. Over time, the ratio should shift towards the harder keywords.
• But despite this recommendation, keep trying to rank for more difficult terms as well. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Group Keywords in Topic Clusters

Keyword analysis isn’t just about prioritizing your keywords. It’s also about organizing them effectively by topic , or forming “topic clusters”. A cluster can then be used as the basis for one or more posts or articles. Ideally, you would do all this by hand. Thanks to the AI boom, however, there’s now a long list of tools that can help you with this task, especially for clustering long lists of keywords. The Keyword Clustering Tool , for example, is a recent entrant into the field.

In this example, I uploaded 524 keywords (the tool’s limit is 2,919) and clicked on “Create Clusters.”

Clicking the button “Download All Clustered Topics” gives you an Excel file, which I then uploaded to Google Sheets:

This list is already much easier to read. Of course, we don’t want to rely 100% on the AI, so let’s take another look at the list. Do all the groupings make sense?

Since I’m primarily looking for good topics for editorial content, I’ve chosen a handful of interesting clusters:

Clustering radically simplifies the search for topics. After 10 minutes or so, I’ve reduced the list to these clusters and discovered the following potential article topics:

• What’s the best touring bike in 2023?
• Trekking Bikes: Buying Guide
• The best e-trekking bikes in 2023

This results in three topics to start with for which the new site can now try to achieve a first page ranking.

Step 4: Develop a Content Plan

Once you’ve analyzed and prioritized your keyword lists, you’ll have keyword clusters to use as the basis for your content. So now it’s time to create a content plan.

A content plan is basically a list of what topics you want to create for your website next, and in what order. Content plans are an important topic that definitely deserves its own article. For now, here are a handful of quick tips to help you ramp up your content production:

• You can look at each cluster keyword as a seed keyword for the post or article you’re planning, and carry out another round of keyword research to derive the subtopics that need to be addressed in the article.
• It’s not enough to just use the keywords identified in your research for a post or article. What’s more important is taking a careful look at the SERPs for each topic and analyzing users’ search intent more deeply (building on the search intent category you get from the Keyword Research Tool) before producing content. We describe this process in detail in the article “ Search Intent: How to optimize your content for searchers’ needs ” here on our blog.
• Analyzing users’ search intent will give you a good idea of which points your new post or article should address and in what format the article should appear.

We spoke to Shannon Kelly Ash – Content Marketing Lead at saas.group – about this and she also emphasized the importance of paying attention to search intent in keyword research and content planning:

“When mapping out your keyword clusters, be mindful of intent per keyword. Clusters can help drive topic ideation, but your content will not be contextually relevant without understanding the buyer’s journey. If you can, use this as an opportunity to include long-tail keywords with low volume terms.

For example, if you were selling sofas at Ikea, a basic cluster would look something like: “sofa” –> best sofas, comfy sofa, cheap sofa, sofa for living room, ikea sofa blue, sofas for sale london, sofa pet proof.

Now, if you go a step further with long-tail keywords according to intents, you would use:

● how to choose a pet proof sofa (informational) ● best pet proof sofa in london for small apartments (commercial and location-based) ● buy pet proof sofas for small apartments online (transactional).”

This way, you can align your content with the buyer’s journey and make sure that you provide a relevant piece of content (or transactional page) for each stage of the journey.

Would you like more information about how to create a content plan? Let us know in the comments!

Additional Tools for Keyword Research

There are many tools available for keyword research. Each has its own database and may have slightly different features. Here are a few more tips for finding topics.

Google Trends

Google Trends categorizes searches by time period and by location or region. With this information, you can get a comprehensive view of how the popularity of certain keywords varies by season and the geographic distribution of queries.

Most importantly, you’ll be able to see how search volume changes over time. Here in the screenshot for the term ” foosball table “, you can clearly recognize that it’s a “luxury good” with strong seasonal variations, so that significantly more traffic can be expected around the holiday season. The traffic peaks are in the pre-Christmas period at the end of November and beginning of December (1).

The tool displays additional information about search queries, such as “Related queries” (2). You can download these with a single click and evaluate them yourself:

In this case, I’ve imported the downloaded file relatedQueries.csv into a Google Sheet. Tornado, Harvard, and Sportcraft are popular brands. We can also see that foosball fans are also looking for air hockey and ping pong tables and dart boards. No surprise there!

It’s almost always worth using Google Trends, as you’ll often find keywords in the Trends database that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a classic tool for keyword research. It’s the central tool for Google Ads, after all. So it’s worth incorporating this tool in your analysis.

These days, no topic is complete without mentioning OpenAI’s chatbot. It’s refreshingly helpful for keyword research, but don’t forget that ChatGPT is not a specialized keyword tool. The data it spits out can’t possibly be up-to-date or accurate, as ChatGPT doesn’t have access to Google’s database.

Certainly! I can provide you with some keyword suggestions related to the topic “buy foosball table.” Here are some keywords that may be relevant for your keyword research:

• Buy foosball table
• Foosball table for sale
• Best foosball table
• Affordable foosball table
• Foosball table prices
• Outdoor foosball table
• Indoor foosball table
• Professional foosball table
• Mini foosball table
• Folding foosball table
• Wooden foosball table
• Electronic foosball table
• Used foosball table
• Custom foosball table
• Foosball table dimensions

Remember, these are just some suggestions to get you started. You can further refine your keyword research by adding location-specific keywords or targeting specific customer segments.

It’s interesting that ChatGPT suggests some new ideas for keywords. However, the results are limited to a few keywords and don’t provide a deep insight into a topic area like a specialized tool can.

What’s really surprising, though, is that even though ChatGPT claims not to have access to CPC data, it can still send you data if you ask for it:

Certainly! Please note that the following CPC (Cost Per Click) values are estimates and may not reflect real-time data. However, they can still provide you with a general idea of the potential cost associated with each keyword. Here’s a table with the suggested keywords and their estimated CPC values:

Please note that CPC values can vary greatly depending on various factors such as competition, industry, and location. These estimates are meant to give you a rough idea and should not be considered as definitive values. It is always recommended to use a reliable keyword research tool to get up-to-date and accurate CPC data for your specific targeting parameters.

As you can see, ChatGPT isn’t afraid to just take a guess. We’ll leave it up to you to analyze how close ChatGPT comes to the figures published by Google.

Doing keyword research for the first time to create a content plan can feel a little like looking for 10 tiny needles in 20 different haystacks.

But while the keyword research process may feel complex and time-consuming at first, it’s not as bad as it seems – thanks to the many helpful tools that are available today. Once you’ve been through the process a time or two, it starts to go a lot faster. The fun part is when you start ranking for your keywords. You’re most likely to achieve this if you use keyword research as a source of inspiration and focus as much as possible on your content and the process of creating it. Don’t forget: Always focus on users’ search intent, because that’s the surest and fastest way to success 🙂

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Article contents

The city beautiful movement, 1890–1920.

• John D. Fairfield John D. Fairfield Department of History, Xavier University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.558
• Published online: 26 April 2018

The City Beautiful movement arose in the 1890s in response to the accumulating dirt and disorder in industrial cities, which threatened economic efficiency and social peace. City Beautiful advocates believed that better sanitation, improved circulation of traffic, monumental civic centers, parks, parkways, public spaces, civic art, and the reduction of outdoor advertising would make cities throughout the United States more profitable and harmonious. Engaging architects and planners, businessmen and professionals, and social reformers and journalists, the City Beautiful movement expressed a boosterish desire for landscape beauty and civic grandeur, but also raised aspirations for a more humane and functional city. “Mean streets make mean people,” wrote the movement’s publicist and leading theorist, Charles Mulford Robinson, encapsulating the belief in positive environmentalism that drove the movement. Combining the parks and boulevards of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted with the neoclassical architecture of Daniel H. Burnham’s White City at the Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition in 1893, the City Beautiful movement also encouraged a view of the metropolis as a delicate organism that could be improved by bold, comprehensive planning. Two organizations, the American Park and Outdoor Art Association (founded in 1897) and the American League for Civic Improvements (founded in 1900), provided the movement with a national presence. But the movement also depended on the work of civic-minded women and men in nearly 2,500 municipal improvement associations scattered across the nation. Reaching its zenith in Burnham’s remaking of Washington, D.C., and his coauthored Plan of Chicago (1909), the movement slowly declined in favor of the “City Efficient” and a more technocratic city-planning profession. Aside from a legacy of still-treasured urban spaces and structures, the City Beautiful movement contributed to a range of urban reforms, from civic education and municipal housekeeping to city planning and regionalism.

• city planning
• municipal reform
• urban beautification
• public sculpture
• World’s Columbian Exposition
• urban aesthetics
• Frederick Law Olmsted
• Daniel H. Burnham
• Charles Mulford Robinson

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date: 11 September 2024

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