Keyword Research

Getting started with keyword research can be extremely overwhelming. There are many options and different routes, but this can confuse business owners even more. Knowing which terms and topics to focus on could be the difference between creating compelling content or falling short. 

Synonyms

• Keyword discovery
• Keyword analysis
• Keyword mapping

What Is SEO Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a fundamental aspect of digital marketing that involves discovering and analyzing the specific terms and phrases that users enter into search engines. This process is instrumental for businesses aiming to optimize their presence online, as it allows them to understand the language and intent of potential customers. By identifying relevant keywords, marketers can tailor their content strategies to align with what their audience is actively searching for, increasing the chances of attracting organic traffic to their websites. Furthermore, keyword research not only aids in content creation but also informs decisions relating to website structure, advertising strategies, and overall marketing approaches.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

The insights gained from keyword research extend beyond merely identifying popular search terms; they also reveal important metrics such as keyword difficulty and competition levels. Understanding how challenging it may be to rank for specific queries helps businesses prioritize which keywords to target based on their current domain authority and resources available for SEO efforts. Moreover, analyzing trends in search behavior over time enables marketers to adapt their strategies proactively, focusing on emerging topics or declining interests as necessary. Overall, effective keyword research is a foundation for comprehensive SEO strategies, paving the way for enhanced visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Elements of Keyword Research

You should pay attention to four main elements when conducting keyword research.

Authority

As the algorithm prioritizes authoritative sites, businesses, and content creators must establish credibility in their niches. You can enhance websites with high-quality, informative content that meets users’ needs. To improve online authority, brands should also dedicate time to promoting their content through strategies like engaging with social media and building relationships within their industry communities.

Volume

When optimizing for search engines, it is important to consider both ranking position and keyword search volume. A high ranking for keywords with low monthly search traffic is ineffective. It is similar to opening up a business where few people live. Even with good positioning, lacking potential customers leads to little interest. Marketers should focus on keywords that are relevant to their content and audience. These keywords should also have significant monthly search volumes. By targeting terms that resonate with visitors, sites can attract genuine organic traffic rather than just aiming for visibility.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty (KD) measures achieving a top rank for a specific keyword in search results.

Keyword difficulty plays a key role in search engine optimization (SEO) as it allows you to determine which search terms you might rank well for in the organic listings of search engine results pages (SERPs). By effectively understanding the keywords you can target, you can allocate more resources to creating content likely to attract increased traffic to your website from search engines.

Higher rankings in organic search results typically result in more clicks, which can lead to increased website conversions and improved business outcomes.

Search Intent

Google’s ranking algorithm prioritizes content relevant to users’ search queries. A key aspect is search intent, the goal or purpose behind a person’s query. For instance, when someone searches for “best burger restaurants near me,” they typically look for recommendations based on their current location instead of general information on grilling burgers.

To earn top ranking for a specific keyword, your content must align with this search intent and effectively address the user’s unique needs and preferences. Otherwise, Google will direct users toward more relevant sources that better fulfill their expectations.

SEO Keyword Research for Beginners

In the video below, Ryan Shelley covers the basics of keyword research and highlights some popular free tools to help you begin your research. Before checking out the video, grab your free keyword research template here. We’ve designed this template for use with Moz Keyword Explorer. You can find that free tool here. Enjoy the video!

Video Transcript:

We will look at keyword research and how we find core topics that push our content into a new realm of engagement for search engines and users. When talking about keyword research, many get deep into the numbers. While the numbers are important and show us trends, they can also uncover some misconceptions.

Just because a term has a lot of traffic doesn’t mean you’ll get that traffic. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get that interaction. First, you need to find the right terms, the right amount of traffic, and the right amount of relevance. Then, build content on top of that, the links, and many other factors. The combination of those factors will play a role in how you rank.

This process is how we define core topics. Let’s take a look at some free tools.

Long-Tail Keyword Research

Taking the long-tail approach is extremely important because long-tail keywords are more specific. Users are starting to search for more precise solutions to their problems.

Searchers may use a broad term initially–to get an idea of the information they seek. But with the broad terms, you’ve got more results to weed through. There’s less competition as you get more specific.

The number of people searching for that term may not be as high, but those searching that keyword are way more action-oriented. That’s why long-tail keywords are so important. Popular, generic search terms comprise only about 30 percent of daily searches. The remaining 70 percent is long-tailed, specific queries. People seek particular answers to their problems, so long-tail terms will typically rank higher easily.

They tend to be way more conceptually relevant to your audience, and they also tend to be more action-oriented. And that’s what you want in search. It’s great to have people visit your site, but what’s the point if they don’t act? 

Why is keyword research so important? Well, let’s look at Google’s algorithm in September of 2013. Google made a major change to its search for them, and it was called Hummingbird. Google designed Hummingbird to deliver more contextually appropriate results, not just keyword-specific ones.

In the past, you could have terms related to several industries. Maybe you have searched using one word in marketing, but also in sales and maybe in another business realm, and you’ve had mixed results. 

If you would type in “Thunderbird,” there’s a car known as a Thunderbird, but there’s also a camp Thunderbird. Google would give you mixed results because they didn’t know which Thunderbird you were searching. Because of Hummingbird, that changed. It helps Google understand the context of a user’s query. It also changed the way we approach keyword research.

Mobile voice played a huge role in pushing this change, and we know now that mobile voice search is increasing in popularity, which means the context will continue to be increasingly important. As search has become more contextual, Google has had to respond to that to remain the king of search. However, as site owners, marketers, salespeople, and small business owners, we must also understand our users’ intent. We need to adapt accordingly. We need to ensure we’re not just writing content or going after keywords because they have a lot of traffic.

We need to know what our users want and then deliver that to them and educate them. Google wants the co-occurrence of keywords rather than repetition. So what does that mean? Last week, we talked about LSI keywords. I have a video on my YouTube channel about LSI keywords, and it’s all about finding those latent semantic index words where they’re related. A co-occurrence word will be a similar word. For example, SEO,  search engine optimization, and search marketing are co-occurrences of the word SEO.

And so instead of me repeating SEO, SEO, SEO, you’ve probably seen this a lot with this content that has been keyword stuffed. Google knows that, but they don’t like it. Users don’t want that. When I read something like that, I usually leave. We need to be more natural when using our keywords. This is where code co-occurrence comes in and where it’s important to understand the long-tail benefits where we may want to rank for a specific broad term. It’s more beneficial to us to go after the long-tail keywords than to add a bunch of co-occurrence terms because we can end up ranking for many different terms. This can bring a lot of quality, engaging traffic to our side.

What are some tools that we can use to do this? Google has a great tool. It’s Google’s keyword planner, and it’s free. And all you have to do is sign up for an Adwords account. You don’t even have to put in your credit card information. It gives you search trends and volume and ad costs and estimates. It’s a cool tool. It’s a very helpful tool. They’ve made some updates that make it a little harder to know exactly what a keyword range would be or the exact number of queries per month. But it’s still a very good tool, and it can be used to do some great research, and we’ll take a look at it.

The second one is Google Trends, which is another great tool. This allows you to see how keywords trend over time and geography. So, you can compare two or more terms. You could estimate traffic by location. It’s a free tool, and once again, it’s very helpful, especially when looking at seasonal or location-based searches. You can see what’s happening in specific areas, and you can adapt your content strategy to that.

The last tool is also free: Moz Keyword Explorer. Again, you can research terms and see a snapshot of the SERPs. It gives you an estimate of the minimum and maximum traffic and lets you input relevant metrics to help you understand how relevant that term may be to your business.

Again, Moz is free, but you don’t get as much data. It’s a great tool, but the free version is really good to start. Our keyword research tool template that we’ve built in Excel will be based on Moz Keyword Explorer because of some of the insights we have there, and that way, you can copy and paste the data into this tool. That’s going to help break down the metrics for you.

Google Trends

Let’s look at the tools quickly and examine our key research template. This is Google Trends, which you can find at trends.google.com/trends. It will pull up some trends people have been searching for. You can explore your topic. If I wanted to explore “SEO,” I can see the amount of activity SEO has had over the past two months. 

If I want to see how that compares to “search engine optimization,” it has a similar correlation. I can compare either a list with terms like co-occurrences related to search engine optimization, which SEO would be a part of. But I broke it down even further and said I want to know term versus term, “SEO” has a lot more trend than “search engine optimization” does in the United States. 

If I go to “SEO agency” and type that as a search term, it’s even less interesting. It’s more specific because this is somebody fulfilling somebody’s search engine optimization. You look at categories. You can see web search, image search, and news search; we can break this down even further if we want to. 

Google Trends is a great tool for getting very granular when doing keyword research. I usually use this tool after completing a big research study. I would do my high-level research first and then return to Google Trends to see what’s trending and what’s not. Is this term popular in my area? Is it not popular in my area? This is where we get down to the granular level of what people do on search because this data is pulled straight from the Google search results. It’s real user data and how they interact with different queries over time.

Google Keyword Planner

This is the new Google Adwords interface. As you can see, they’ve made a huge update to it. It’s more user-friendly, but there are also a lot of buttons and some stuff to click. Many people don’t know where to find different tools or how to access them when these changes happen. If you’ve upgraded to Google Adwords Beta and this is what you see and you’re wondering where your tools went, they’re not far away.

If we used Google keywords to do our research, we’ve got several options. We can search for new keywords using a phrase, get search volume data and trends, and build multiple keyword lists and new lists. If you enter or upload keywords into search volume data and trends, it will pull historical stat volume search data and group them into Adword groups for you. This is built for Adwords, but we can still use it for search because it gives us insight into what people seek.

You can also look over here and see the suggested bid price, which could indicate how competitive that term would be. 

Moz Keyword Research Tool

This is Moz. If you look on their main site and you go to the free tools, you will find several cool tools. If you’re starting new, just getting into SEO, and trying to figure out how to use search to promote your business, Moz has a lot of great resources.

You can also get your on-page metrics with the Moz Bar if Chrome is the preferred browser. I’m using Safari on this because I’m logged in on Chrome and don’t feel like logging out of everything. What we have here is a target with keywords. So, if we go a hit this term, it will say I’ve got zero of two queries available today. I can make two queries today, and you can go as broad as you want, or you can go as long as you want in this keyword tool. What we’re going to do is stay broad and keep doing what we’ve done in all the other sites. Just type in, and you will see very quickly that it pulls up a lot of cool information.

It gives you a SERP analysis. SERP stands for search engine ranking pages. It shows you who’s ranking for this term, what their page authority is, what their main authority is, what the URL is, and what’s ranking. 

We want to review the search volume and associated keywords. They suggest keyword relevancy and monthly traffic. Now, you can say how relevant these terms are to your business.

This is where you get to do some work, understand your users, and decide if this term is appropriate or not as relevant. But if you want to export all these terms, you can also do that in Excel. 

Keyword research isn’t just setting a defined set of terms and only going after those keywords. You get very narrow results when you have that narrowed focus on SEO. If you want it to work, and you want it to work long term, and you want it to be more organic, you need to use these terms as a starting point. It’s some basic research to say yes, I’m heading in the right area.

It may be easy to rank for Internet search engine optimization, but is it worth my time if the search volume is ten? The medium volume, so if I add those, we get the divide by two: five visits a month. It doesn’t matter how long-tailed it is. That five visits a month probably isn’t worth the effort I’ve put into ranking for that specific term. However, as an SEO professional, I could rank for this locally now based on how the algorithms work.

I could get myself in those top positions because of local search. Search will change depending on the device, where you’re searching from, what time of day you’re searching, and how you search. Many factors are involved now when we’re talking about rank and where your site will be positioned. 

You never really know until you start digging into it. So, this is the basics of keyword research.