Keywords are the foundation of SEO. If no one is searching for the content you’re writing, you can try as hard as you like, but you won’t get any traffic from Google.
This is why mastering the art of keyword research is so important for successfully indexing and ranking websites. The cost of a mistake is priceless; if you choose the wrong keywords, you risk wasting a lot of time and resources.
But be careful, keyword research isn’t a science for geniuses; in fact, just a few minutes of reading this article will be enough to learn how to find them consciously. There are actually some things to pay attention to, and understanding the misconceptions you need to be aware of will help you make more effective SEO decisions.
1. Keyword Research Basics
If you’re new to SEO, you’re probably wondering what keyword research is and why it’s so important. Well, you’ll learn more by reading this short chapter; otherwise, skip ahead to the next one.
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of discovering valuable search queries that your target customers type into search engines like Google to find products, services, and information.
Why is keyword research important?
If you publish a page on a topic that no one is or will be searching for, that article will not receive traffic from Google (or other search engines).
This is a common mistake made by many website owners and is part of the reason why a whopping 90.63% of pages on the internet receive no traffic from Google, according to a study by ahrefs.com .
Keyword research helps you ensure there’s a search query for whatever you’re writing about. Therefore, if your page ends up ranking well in Google for your target keyword, you’ll enjoy a steady stream of highly targeted visitors.
2. How to find keyword ideas
You should start your keyword research by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and trying to understand what words and phrases they might use to find solutions to their requests or problems. Use a keyword research tool, such as those available online, even free ones, and you’ll find plenty of ideas for keywords that are most relevant to your use case.
It’s a simple process, but a couple of things are needed to do it well:
- Good knowledge of your industry
- An understanding of how keyword research tools work
Brainstorm on main keywords: “seed”
Seed keywords , or “head” keywords, are the starting point of the keyword research process. They define your niche and help you identify your competitors. Every keyword research tool requires a head keyword, from which it begins to generate the largest possible list of keyword ideas.
If you already have a product or business you want to promote online, finding key keywords might be easier. Focus primarily on what people are typing into Google to find what you offer.
For example, if you sell coffee and coffee-making equipment, your main keywords might be:
- coffee
- cappuccino
- grinding
- expressed
- etc. etc.
Keep in mind that it may not be worth choosing primary keywords as your website’s target pages. As the name suggests, you’ll be using them as “seeds” for the next steps in this process. So don’t obsess over your primary keywords. It should actually only take a few minutes to identify them. Once you have a few general ideas related to your website’s topic, move on to the next step.
Check which keywords your competitors are ranking for
Seeing which keywords send traffic to your competitors is usually the best way to speed up your keyword research. But obviously, you need to identify those competitors first. This is where your brainstormed master keyword list comes in handy. Simply Google one of your main keywords and see who ranks on the first page.
But if none of the top websites ranking for your main keywords look like your site (or what you’d like your site to look like), then you should try looking for something a little more specific.
Let’s return to our example: if you sell coffee-making equipment on your website, you might find competitors more similar to you in the search results if you type “cappuccino maker” rather than “cappuccino.” This might actually happen because e-commerce stores like yours rank mostly for the former, and blogs rank for the latter.
Once you’ve found a competitor’s website that fits your idea, you should connect it to a competitive intelligence tool—essentially, a competitor website spy—to see which pages are driving the most traffic and what keywords those pages are using for their purposes.
After repeating the process with some of your competitors, you’ll end up with a pretty sizable list of relevant keywords. And you’ve just started your keyword research!
Whether these keyword ideas are purely informational (e.g., blog posts) or have a commercial intent (e.g., product pages) is something we’ll determine in the next steps of our keyword research process. For now, your goal is to gather as many relevant keyword ideas as possible.
Make sure you repeat this process for as many of your competitors as possible, and this will obviously give you the maximum possible keywords to use.
Use keyword research tools
Competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas, but it’s very likely that there are many keywords your competitors haven’t used yet. You can find these using various keyword research tools.
Keyword research tools all work the same way. You enter a primary keyword, and they pull keyword ideas from their database based on that keyword.
Google Keyword Planner (GKP for short) is perhaps the most well-known keyword tool. It’s free, and while it’s designed for people who want to display paid ads on Google, you can also use it to find keywords for SEO purposes .
It’s important to note that GKP can generate keyword ideas that don’t necessarily contain your keyword. Take the keyword “filter,” for example; it probably won’t make you think it’s actually about coffee. This makes GKP a very useful tool for discovering non-obvious keyword ideas.
And whenever you discover an interesting keyword like that, try using it as your new main keyword and see what kind of new keyword ideas you get from it.
Besides Keyword Planner, there are many other free keyword research tools . These may seem great if you’re just starting out, but you’ll soon realize they’re quite limited in terms of data and features.
So, if you decide to invest in growing search traffic to your website, you can also skip the free tier and use a “professional” keyword research tool.
Corresponding terms
This report will only show you keyword ideas that contain your main keywords. It has two modes: “Term Match” and “Phrase Match.”
“Term Match” shows keyword ideas that contain all the words in your main keyword, regardless of where they appear or in what order. So, if our main keyword is “coffee maker ,” we’ll get these ideas:
- coffee vending machine
- machine gun kelly coffee shop
“Phrase Match” instead only returns keyword ideas that contain the exact phrase of your main keyword in the exact order you entered it. Like this:
- best coffee machine
- coffee machine with grinder
Related terms
This report will show keyword ideas that don’t necessarily contain your primary keywords. It also has two modes: “Also rank for” and “Also talk about.”
- “Also rank for” shows search queries for the top-ranking pages for your main keyword.
- “Also talk about” shows words and phrases that are frequently mentioned on top-ranking pages for your main keywords.
Study your market niche
Everything we’ve discussed so far is enough to generate a nearly unlimited number of keyword ideas. But at the same time, the process keeps you a bit locked into that mindset.
At this point, you need to step outside of this and go to the places where your target audience can be found (industry forums, Q&A groups and sites, etc.) and study their conversations.
A quick search of keywords and I found this search query: “Aeropress coffee/water ratio.” It actually gets “only” 150 searches a month, but the fact that this topic has 42 upvotes on Reddit means people are eager to learn more about it. Furthermore, what you find in that Reddit thread could serve as a basis for my future content.
In addition to browsing industry forums, your current clients, if you already have any, could also be a great source of keyword ideas. So the next time you speak or chat with them, remember to pay attention to the language they use and the common questions they ask; this could lead to some original keyword ideas to cover on your website.
3. How to analyze keywords
Having access to hundreds, even thousands, of keyword ideas is great, but how do you figure out which ones are the best? Hand-picking them all will be a near-impossible task.
The solution is simple: use SEO metrics to narrow your focus and “separate the wheat from the chaff” before adding them to your keyword list.
Let’s look at five keyword parameters you can use to do this.
Search volume
Search volume indicates the average number of times a keyword is searched per month. For a real-world example, “Donald Trump” has a monthly search volume of 3.1 million in the United States alone.
There are four important things to know about the search volume metric:
- It’s the number of searches, not the number of people who searched – There are cases where someone might search for a keyword multiple times a month (for example, “weather in Berlin” ). All these occurrences contribute to the search volume for that keyword, even if it’s the same person doing the searches.
- It’s not the same as how many visits that term will bring you if you rank for it in Google . Even if you manage to rank #1, your traffic from that keyword will rarely exceed 30% of its search volume. And that’s if you’re lucky.
- This is a yearly average : if there are 120,000 searches for a keyword in December and none for the remaining 11 months of the year, the reported monthly search volume will be 10,000 (120,000/12 months).
- It’s country-specific : Keyword tools often show the search volume for the selected country. But some also have the option to show the global search volume, which is clearly the sum of the search volumes across all countries.
Almost all keyword research tools will have a search volume filter to help you focus on ideas with a specific popularity range. This has two main use cases:
- Filtering High-Volume Keywords – If your site is new, you probably don’t want to waste time researching keywords with over 10,000 monthly searches because they’re likely too competitive for you.
- Filtering specifically for low-volume keywords : Perhaps you want to find non-competitive, low-volume keywords where you can easily get some traffic. These terms are often referred to as “long-tail keywords.”
Long-tail keywords are a household name (see SEO glossary ) for anyone familiar with SEO. Yet they’re often overlooked. It seems no one wants to search for a keyword unless it gets at least a hundred searches a month. Even less so if it has zero search volume.
Long-tail, zero-volume keywords will only bring a few visitors per month if you rank for them. But the great thing is, they add up! Basically, if you manage to publish many articles targeting these keywords, your total annual traffic could actually reach thousands of visitors, but highly targeted ones.
Let’s just say it’s a common rookie mistake to ignore low-volume keywords. They’re just as useful as their more popular counterparts. Often, even more so, as they’re more specific and often have high marketing value.
Another important thing to remember about search volumes is that they can vary slightly from tool to tool. This is because each tool calculates and updates this metric differently, but it’s important to remember that search volume is an incredibly important metric in SEO.
