Keyword Research Tips – How to Perform Keyword Research

The keyword is what you type on the search bar and the results are shown on the search page according to the search term. Keyword research is a process of finding relevant search terms that are relevant to your niche and business.

Is keyword research easy?

Umm, No!

Picking the right SEO keywords is not easy if you need your website to rank for the targeted audience. You should choose a keyword that is applicable to what you offer with the goal that you can start to rank for that specific search term.

So my aim for this post is to provide you with a useful “how-to” and “tips” and a couple of tools to make your keyword research easy.

How to Do Keyword Research the Right Way

I have divided the keyword research into different stages that would help you get as many relevant keywords as possible for your content.

Stage 1:  Brainstorm It – Know Your Niche

For any niche website, the main goal is to get an abundance of traffic from organic search. To achieve that one should have in-depth knowledge of the niche.

Start with collecting terms related to what you know about your business and what services you are going to offer.

For instance, suppose you are thinking about starting a photography business. You are a pro photographer and offer photography services. The keywords would instantly come to your mind would be:

• Photography services
• Wedding Photography services
• Bridal Shower Photography
• Newborn photography California
• Family portraits
• Photography Studio California
• Bridal Photoshoots

Write down as many related keywords/topics that are closely related to your services or products. These are your seed keywords. This exercise will help you get a bag full of topics and terms your niche customers might use to search for your services.

To make the early stages of thorough brainstorming easy, you can use the UberSuggest tool which you can use to get a wide collection of related keywords for your business.

Ubersuggest is super easy to use, free and does not require registration.

Following the seed keywords example mentioned above, type photography services and search.

You will get related terms, search volume and also shows the PPC (Pay Per Click) completion and CPC.

Other free tools you can use for brainstorming process:

• AnswerthePublic.com
• google.com/trends/correlate (Google Correlate)

I would suggest a couple of paid keyword research tools as well.

• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Wordtracker

Stage 2:  Contemplate user intent

When we pick target search terms, there is the inclination to pursue those with noteworthy volumes, yet substantially more imperative than the keyword search volume is the goal behind it – user intent.

Since clients have become more experienced with the Internet, so have the idea of their online searches. That is one main idea behind why concentrating on generic search queries is definitely not an option for your business for a long haul success.

User intent defines what user is actually searching for online and everyone has the different intention of searching using search queries.

It’s basically the war of capturing the user’s attention with the keywords they might be searching for and why.  Understanding your target audience is another key to find money keywords that could increase your traffic and generate revenue.

User intent can be differentiated on classes:

• Navigational: User is specifically looking for the certain website they already know about
• Educational or informational: searches done to get knowledge about something or answer for a question.
• Transactional: search is done to purchase something online.

The other types of user intent keywords are commercial intent keywords. For example: Buy gold earnings, get discounts, deals, etc. These are the terms that drive the user to take action and purchase the product.

With the latest change in Google updates, mobile searches and voice searches are also gaining more popularity. You can read more about these here.

Stage 3: Long-Tail Keywords –Short Tail Keywords

Keywords are usually short terms consist of only two words and long-tail keywords comprises more than two words.

While you can easily search and add short terms in your content, it’s more difficult to find good long-tail keywords.

Search engine optimization beginners are new to the idea of long-tail phrases and don’t understand the massive potential these long-tail words hold in SEO.

Long-tail keywords often known as key phrases are people use when they have intended to buying something.

Long-tail keywords are focused on the user is actually looking for. Let’s say a user is looking for a coffee shop, the term coffee shop will pull out all the coffee shops. This is a highly competitive term and not easy to rank on.

“Gluten-free coffee shop” will show all the coffee shops which serve gluten-free coffee.

You can make a list of what you’re customers searching for with the help of Google autocomplete.

And search-related queries at the bottom of a search result page.

You can also use keyword research tools which I have mentioned above to search for relevant long-tail terms

Why focus on Long-tail keywords for SEO marketing?

For a business that has just entered the marketing world should focus on long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords with less completion and easy to rank for. Long-tail keywords produce a high conversion rate.

Long-tail keywords work best with location-specific terms. Google gives preference to local searches as many users are more inclined to buy or visit a place near them.

Example: a gluten-free coffee shop in New York

Stage 4: Use Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner

You can use Google planner to find the volume, and see how many people are bidding on a particular term.

You can start by searching for new keywords and click on the “Get started” button to begin the search.

You will get the keyword-based on relevancy. Take not of average monthly searches, competitions, page bid.

Using this tool you’ll get a long list of keywords for the content of your business. Focus on the high bid keywords as they have high commercial intent.

Sage 5: Filter Out the Relevant Keywords

Now that you have a bunch of keywords, it’s time to filter out only the most relevant keywords. Keep only the keywords that are not only closely related to your business but what users search are also to find services or products.

Along with this basic keywords research strategy I want to share a couple of methods that I have used to get more money keywords.

Bonus Keywords Research Tips

• Keeping Up with the Competitors

Stalk your competitors

Yes, you’ve read it right. Your competitors are the best source to find the search terms which they are using in their content.

Your competitors have already gone through the keyword research phase and are already ranking on the keywords which they have on their website pages.

Focus on their Meta description and Meta title. Their blog is another good source for mining good topics and keywords for your website content.

• Tap the Untapped Keywords

These are the keywords you’ll most likely find in places like Quora.com, Medium, Amazon, etc. This is where you see what your target audience is searching for and what are they asking for.

Your target customer uses these places to search for your service or product-related things.

Go to place your target customer spend more time like Pinterest, WeHeartit, Reddit, YouTube, and niche-specific forums.

You will get the most important or most discussed topic and then you search for the related keyword on the topic. Google suggest comes handy in this case.

Keep an eye on other search-related keywords which you can find at the bottom of the page.

What’s Next?

Developing a respectable list of a relevant keyword can feel like a hard to accomplish the assignment.

Now that we have provided you with the guide to stack up good keywords, it should give an idea from where to begin your keyword strategy for SEO.

Focus on long-tail keywords and local searches. Begin aggregating a list of words you need to rank for and locate the correct fit.