How to do Keyword Research for SEO – Ultimate guide for Profitable Keywords

Keyword research is one of the crucial parts of SEO.

Well!!! If you’re a digital marketer you might perform basic SEO keyword research. This step is pretty important and should perform regularly to keep up the rankings. In general, keyword research is not just about digital marketing, it is beyond that. It’s the foundation for all the SEO practices or techniques.

Whether you’re planning to create a social media campaign or creating the content for your blog, SEO keyword research should be your first step. In fact, you need to consider it as first priority in your SEO checklist.

If you’re a newbie for digital marketing, you need to concentrate on few important things i.e

  • What is keyword research?
  • Why is SEO keyword research important?
  • How to do keyword research?
  • What are the tools to do keyword research?
  • What is Google keyword research?

And the list goes on and on…

Begin your keyword research journey with this ultimate guide.

What is keyword research?

Definition – Keyword research is the method of discovering the phrases or words that users use when they search for something on Google, Bing, Yahoo or YouTube. These phrases or words are called keywords.

Keyword research is important because digital marketing expert can easily find what customers are looking for? For example, internet users can search for “Latest mobile phone” or “Cheap mobile phone”, these are considered as the keywords. Few keywords can be short or too long.

Whether you’re running a small business or large enterprise, SEO keyword research should be the initial step. Perform keyword research and understand what are the keywords that potential customers are using. When you’ve zero knowledge of what your potential customers are searching for, you may end up with empty hands.

Keyword research is not just about finding the right keyword. You need to do keyword research for other reasons as well, search engines will rank your website when the keywords on your website and user’s keywords match.

Hope you’ve understood what is keyword research? Now, let’s discuss the importance of keyword research.

Why is SEO keyword research important?

Keyword research is the process of discovering and researching industry-specific phrases and terms that are generating traffic to SERP. This is the fundamental step in digital marketing for every website.

The ultimate goal of SEO keyword research is to discover phrases, words and terms that internet users are searching on search engines (Google, Bing, etc). The search terms or phrases can be related to your product or service. Digital marketing experts are making great use of the keywords. It means they can easily understand the requirements of the target audience. Using the keywords in the content and generating good organic traffic.

There are several reasons why keyword research is the fundamental step of digital marketing. Let’s discuss them below:

  • Discovering your keywords thorough keyword research will help you to know about your brand, target audience and more.
  • Knowing keywords will help you understand your business better. But how? Perform keyword research and discover the keywords and understand what are your products or services?
  • Researching the keywords will help you to know the important information. It includes target keywords, rank for your keywords, which keywords you need to use and what keywords your niche competitors are using and ranking for.
  • Keyword research can tell you what people are searching for, rather than what you think they are searching for.
  • Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing can rank your website on the top position when you know what your brand is. Adding keywords on your website and other pages will rank better on search engines.
  • Google will rank your website on the top position when you mention keywords on multiple platforms i.e ads, marketing campaigns, social media posts, content and more.
  • Discover keywords and use them while writing your blog content to drive excellent traffic organically.

As mentioned above, SEO keyword research is your initial and fundamental step for SEO practice. If you want to generate good results, then you need to consider keyword research as an ongoing process. You need to frequently perform keyword research. This is the best way to find out what keywords the audience are using and how well you’re ranking on search engines.

Once you’ve done keyword research, it’s time to create quality content and social media campaigns. Add these keywords to your content, campaigns and important places. When you’ve combined with multiple other digital marketing techniques, you can keep your ranking high and people will find your website easily.

Looking for steps on how to do SEO keyword research? Continue reading…

How to do keyword research?

Understanding how to do keyword research for SEO is important. Follow the steps below and grow your business. List the phrases, terms and words that you need to target. Now, you can easily create and execute a powerful keyword strategy.

Step 1 – Create a list of important and related topics based on your business

Hurray!!! Let’s kick off the keyword research process. Think about your brand, what is your business. List out the topics that you’re planning to rank better on search engines. Make a list of 10 to 15 topics that are found crucial to your brand. Now use the topic titles to get the keywords later.

Do you blog frequently? Yes!!! You might have posted thousands of blogs to date. Not all the blogs you’ve shared generate good results. Therefore you need to put yourself in the audience shoes to generate better conversions. What type of potential audiences are looking for. Create the blog and attract the audience.

The general topics can be

  • Digital marketing (21K)
  • Email marketing (30K)
  • SEO (314K)
  • Social media marketing (80K)
  • Lead generation (18K)

The number in the bracket indicated the search volume per month. Depend on the search volume, choose the topic and create content with those keywords.

Step 2 – Add keywords to your topic list

Now you have a list of topics that you need to concentrate on. Now, it’s time to discover target keywords according to the topic. Make sure the keyword and topic are related. These are the important keyword terms or phrases that help your website rank better on search results. Because your potential audience is performing multiple searches for such terms or phrases.

Let’s consider, if you choose email marketing from the listed topics, you need to use keyword phrases that the audience would type in Google or other search engines to such topics. It might include,

  • What are the types of email marketing?
  • What is email marketing?
  • How to use email marketing software?
  • Content ideas for email marketing?
  • Email marketing automation?

The list goes on and on. Keep a note, this keyword phrase might not be your final set of keywords. This is just an assumption that your target audience might search for content that is related to your list of topics. It’s no surprise, a wide range of keywords are being encrypted by search engines every moment, it’s the smart way to list out keyword ideas to discover the list of keywords that your business is already found. You need to use website analytics tools to know your traffic sources, identify your audience and more.

Step 3 – Understand and learn how user intent affects keyword research

User intent is the primary factor to rank better on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These days, it’s even more important that your content on the website should address the problem a user intended to solve.

Refining the keywords from the list can be a simple task. But this is not the case now, because keywords can have multiple meanings. Simply put, the intention behind the user search query is pretty much important to boost your rankings on search engines. Hence you should pay attention and be extra careful while interpreting the target keywords.

Let’s consider, you might be discovering the keyword “how to make money” for a blog post that you would like to create. “Money” can be a blog post or “Making Money Website”. Here the user intention will influence your content. Question yourself, does the user want to learn more about how to start a money-making website or does they’re looking for tips to make money?

Finding the user intent can be a daunting task. No more worries!!! Verifying the user’s intention is easy. All you need to do is enter the keyword in Google or other search engines and check the results. Keep a note, the type of content search engine is related to matches with the keyword that you would like to create.

Step 4 – Research related and relevant search terms

Think creatively while researching the related search terms. It’s time to fill out the keyword list.

If you’re struggling with multiple keywords and assuming several people might be interested in a specific topic. No worries!!! Have a look at search results and look at the related keywords and terms that are displayed on Google. Whenever you type a keyword or phrase and click on the “Search” button, there might be thousands of results displayed on the search results. Also, you can notice suggestions for related searches to get accurate input. This list of keywords can make your work easier. Consider these keywords in your marketing efforts. If you want to get more keywords, you can type the related terms in the search and note down the terms.

Step 5 – Use keyword research software

Keyword research is an important process to improve website traffic. The right keyword will help you create quality and valuable content to increase traffic organically. Finding the right keyword can be pretty tricky. The keyword research tool is here to rescue. These tools are an excellent way to find the industry-related topics that target audiences are searching for on Google, Bing and other search engines.

The popular keyword research tools are Ahrefs, Ubersugest, SEMrush, Moz, Wordtracker and more. These tools will help you with a wide range of keywords. Also, you can come up with excellent keyword ideas depending on the phrase and exact keywords. All you need to do is enter the keyword and find different ideas that your target audience are looking for. The idea can be creating content for a blog post or social media. This way you can easily plan your marketing strategy or practice to cover those keywords in your topic or post.

It’s no surprise that keyword research tools are an excellent option to get seed keywords, medium-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Also, you can have a look at what your competitors are using and for which keyword they’re ranking top on the search results. Add such keywords to your content and steal their organic traffic.

Using Google

Let’s start discovering quality keywords using Google. In general, Google keyword research is one of the efficient tools to get competitive keywords without hassles. But Google doesn’t give you a complete picture of keywords, it’s like guesswork. But, it can be an amazing opportunity for a beginner or expert to start when you don’t have keyword research tools. On the other hand, search engine Google, Yahoo, etc are used to identify your industry-related competitors.

Let’s get started

Begin your search by entering your product or service on Google and look at the top results. Ignore the advertisements, always consider the organic results. 

Consider, one of your products is a mobile phone. Look at the top 3 search results. These are probably your top competitors for mobile phones. Also, you can search by giving alternative names i.e “smartphone” while searching for alternative results. This search will help you to find competitors ranking for alternative keywords on Google.

LSI Keywords

LSI stands for “latent semantic indexing”.

Digital marketing experts say LSI keywords will have a great impact on your strategy. They assume that Google sometimes relies on these keywords for understanding the webpage.

Definition

LSI keywords are efficient keywords that are semantically linked to your primary keyword or target keyword. In other words, LSI keywords are the keywords that are similar, relevant or related to your primary keyword. As mentioned earlier, search engines such as Google use LSI to understand and analyse alternative words or phrases that search users are using across the topic. For example, “love” and “relationship” are considered LSI keywords.

Importance of LSI keywords

Hope you’ve understood what the LSI keyword is. Now let’s discuss why LSI keywords are important.

It’s an open fact that LSI keywords are increasing their popularity in modern SEO. These keywords help search engines to understand what your webpage is all about. Additionally, users searching for similar or relevant keywords other than the primary keyword can visit your webpage organically.

How do you find LSI keywords?

Now let’s have a look at how to find your LSI keywords in an easy way. Good news!!! There are several tools available in the market for finding your LSI keywords. All you need to do is use the main keyword and get a list of LSI keywords within a single click. Sounds amazing right!!! Apart from that, you can also look at LSI keywords on Google. Yes, you’ve heard it right. Enter the main keyword on Google and look at the bottom of the page. Now, you can find a list of “LSI keywords” for your primary keyword. Use these ideas or phrases while creating the content for a blog post or running a social media ad campaign.

Where to use LSI Keywords?

Create an excel sheet and note down the LSI keyword. Now it’s time to include these keywords in your content, landing pages, social media posts, blog posts and more. Never ever use the LSI keyword in your main heading. Make sure your main heading has your primary keyword. Use LSI keywords while writing your sub-headings, anchor text, page content, image files and more.

Using a primary keyword might be your first step. Along with that using LSI keywords will boost your traffic organically.  Use the keywords that are closely related to your content. Using the main keyword several times can look embarrassing, using a related keyword will look natural and organic. Simply put, it’s an excellent way to use your LSI keyword for better SEO practice. Using the LSI keyword strategically will improve your organic traffic and conversions.

Apart from finding the keywords on Google, many experts are using Google keyword research for better results.

Google trends

It’s pretty sure that you might have done Google keyword research several times. Also, you’ve used Google trends software to check the target audience interest in the keyword. Most SEO experts have never utilized the complete potential of Google trends.

Let’s have a look. Follow the below steps while using Google trends during your keyword research

Identify seasonal trends

Every keyword has a search volume. Have you ever noticed the search volume for every keyword vary according to season? Yes!!! Few keywords probably get affected from time to time. For example, if you’re selling “umbrella”, you need to estimate your product peak and bottom times.

Find relevant trending topics

This is something interesting!!! Google trends help to find the trending topics without hassles. Find the popular, relevant and trending search queries, create the content accordingly. For example, if you’re running a celebrity blog, you can write their latest movie or upcoming movie.

Plan content calendar with Google trends data

When you’re running a celebrity blog, you need to use a content calendar to make your work efficient. It means you can create content on their “upcoming movies” or “latest movies” every time.

Use related search queries to generate new keyword ideas

Google trend is an excellent tool. It reveals the search query information i.e when they’ve searched for your phrase or term. Let’s consider, users who are searching for “watch” also most likely to tend to search for “Apple” and “Fossil”. This is one of the excellent opportunities to find alternative keywords.

Google AdWords

If you’re looking for a good and free option to do keyword research for SEO, Google AdWords could be an amazing option for you. Google keyword planner is an outstanding tool to discover keywords and search volume. On the other hand, the tool offers competitive feedback. Use the tool effectively before running a campaign on search engines such as Google. With Google Ads keyword planner, you can easily find powerful keywords and use them on your PPC campaigns. 

Google AdWords reveals important information about your business and competition. It means you can find the strongest keywords, competition percentage, what amount competitors are paying for keywords. You can find the keywords using other Google keyword research tools such as Google Analytics, Search console and more.

Checklist for Google Adwords keyword research

  • Choose the keywords and look at whether those keywords are having search activities or not. If yes, note down the keywords.
  • Refine all the keywords. It’s time to find the profitable keywords. Check their search volume, bid, competitiveness and more.
  • Never ignore long-tail keywords. Because long-tail keywords are more likely to convert. Let’s consider, the long-tail keyword “dresses under $10” will have more impact than the keyword “dresses”.
  • Optimize your content, social media campaigns and other marketing activities with these keywords.
  • Now, it’s time to track your keyword ranking using Moz and SEMrush.

If you’re a newbie, use any tool for your website or blog. Starting with Google keyword research is the wise decision. Many newbies are using Google Adwords to get a list of keywords, competition and more. As you get familiar with Google Adwords, you can opt for other tools. There are several keyword research tools available in the market. Choose the best one according to your requirement.

Wrapping up

Keyword research is an important element of modern digital marketing. No matter whether you’re giving a fresh look to your old blog post or creating a new social media campaign, a set of good quality keywords are the excellent ways to improve organic traffic, attract an audience and more. Hope this article will help on how to do keyword research for SEO. Gather all the profitable keywords using Google, keyword research tools and more. Use the keywords effectively and generate better results.

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