What is Keyword Research?And what is the best keyword reserach

 

Keyword research is the process of finding the phrases your target audience is using to search for information, products or services that are relevant to your business, online. This process involves collecting data from multiple resources about the search habits and intent of your audience as well as Google’s search and intent analysis and then analyzing and grouping the data to show the keywords that are relevant to your business and provide the best value against keywords that are not relevant or ones that miss your target audience search intents/habits.

 Since using relevant keywords (otherwise known as search terms) in your content and matching your audience’s search intent is what gives your offering the best chances to rank at the top of Google search results and generate new business, the research is a critical step our way to building a successful SEO strategy. Keyword research is a pillar in SEO – it is the basis from which all optimization activities launch, the rock on which it leans and also it’s growth engine, which means that if you kick off your keyword research properly, your ongoing efforts will be fairly easy to execute.

The research you do during your kickoff should be comprehensive because it is your starting point and the primary research you will use going forward in your search engine optimization strategy. Think of it as the base of all your future subject-specific SEO efforts to bring you new leads like a passive income. During this initial phase of research, your goal is to gather as many relevant keyword phrases as you can that would be relevant to your desired audience.

There’s no need to feel overwhelmed. In this blog we will walk you through how to:

1.Know your asset – Gain a deep understanding of your website

2.Find keywords through Google Search Console

3.Use competitor analysis tools

4.Think big – Discover the most relevant phrases using a keyword generation tool

5.Consolidate your keyword data – Add everything to one keyword research file

6.Keyword grouping – Break down your research into useful keyword groups

7.Put your keyword research to work

1. Know your asset – Gain a deep understanding of your website and audience

To start your keyword research process, simply open your current website and see what the main categories are (such as digital marketing), and note any very obvious keywords you will need to include. The keywords you find during this process are the first ones you should add to your initial list of keywords to gain a high-level insight into your website’s main goals. At this stage don’t focus on the specific terminology used, you can tweak the wording later, focus on understanding what your website is aiming to do and/or sell to understand how you will generate search traffic.

Pro Tip: Keep an eye on how your content is organized. Look for where the content is placed on the website and where your product pages are found. If you have a menu, those keywords are (yes, you guessed it) key. Additionally, see what type of content is featured on your homepage and go over your blogs, product pages, feature descriptions, mission statements, and FAQ in detail to find any additional crucial industry words that you can use to derive relevant keywords. If you sell a product, both the product and its category would be included.

Below you can see an example of four red boxes that highlight important keywords Similarweb would need to include during this stage of SEO research. These are keywords that relate to how our content is organized. As you go through your own website these are the types of phrases you are searching for in this stage of your keyword research.

2. Use your owned data – Find keywords through Google Search Console

Take a look at the data you already have. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, yet. If you have access to Google Search Console, found in your Google Analytics account, navigate to the performance section and look at the search results reported there. The list you create here will give you a thorough review of what’s already working and what your best keywords currently are. If a term is performing well, you need to ensure you continue to include it in your SEO strategy, and possibly, even double down on your content efforts to win traffic from the term.

Pro Tip: To use the Performance section effectively, set the data range for the page at 6 months, exclude all branded queries to compile a list of general terms that your audience is searching for, and then download the list it creates as a CSV file.

3. Use competitor analysis tools – Find and add relevant phrases to your research

Use a competitive data tool to scan your website and gain more insight into your current performance. Keep in mind that the keywords you will find differ for macro-level SEO and local SEO. You could conduct macro-level keyword research for specific countries using Similarweb. This will help you drill down and understand the topics and keyword opportunities that are trending in countries that interest you.

To do this, you can use Similarweb’s website analysis tool, and first insert your own URL. Next, click on the Keywords section and filter out all branded keywords. After that, navigate to the “Competitors” section of your website analysis. Note the top three competitors you have and then run an audit on their websites too. For each audit you run, go to the Keyword Analysis section, filter out the branded search queries and export the reports for internal use. Remember that competitors’ traffic data can be as valuable as ranking data for your analysis, so don’t give up on any exported dataset yet – many of them will come in handy for your SEO strategy.

Pro Tip: It can also be useful to filter out results that fall outside of the top 50 ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) to weed out many irrelevant queries.

Combine the keyword list you created for each of your competitors’ sites with the one you made for your own site. You can easily do this by merging the exported excel files into one. Now you can consolidate the ranking and traffic data for each of your competitors, and then remove any duplicate keywords (You can choose not to consolidate your competitors’ ranking and traffic data and use only the keyword data). At this point you have the basis of the research: You found out what your website is ranked for, what phrases your competitors’ websites are ranked for and what real people search for. Now it’s time to inspect your entire search potential.

You can also perform micro-level research using an SEO tool like Navads. Navads, recently acquired by Uberall, is the leading location data provider for the databases that power the navigation and mapping industry. It has a local search tool that helps you rank higher in map search results.

4. Think big – discover the most relevant phrases using a Keyword Generation Tool

Your next step is to use a keyword tool to discover more keyword ideas, synonyms, and suggestions. You can use Google Keyword Planner to discover new keyword ideas. Another, often easier, option is to use a keyword research tool like  Similarweb’s Keyword Generator Tool and insert keywords by the categories you found on your website during stage one. Diving into more specific categories ensures the keywords the tool suggests are relevant to your topic. 

Below you can see an example of how Similarweb’s tool provides keyword suggestions. You can sort by the type of keyword match (phrase match, related keywords, trending keywords and question queries) as well as the metrics such as volume, yearly traffic trend, CPC, organic vs paid, and the website winning the most traffic

Try to think about your target audience: Who are they? How do they search for what they need? What words or phrasing do they use? Are they primarily on desktop or mobile? This is also the perfect time to further research “interesting” phrases you may have found through competitive research. 

Pro Tip: Since branded terms are usually irrelevant to SEO, be sure to filter out brand terms when you conduct your keyword research. You should also filter out irrelevant keyword phrase suggestions such as price and jobs. 

Again, in this stage, the goal is to compile a very comprehensive keyword list for each of your chosen categories, so add as many relevant keywords as possible to your list. During this stage you will probably discover that the broad category you started off with needs to be broken down into subtopics to make your keyword list usable for technical SEO and content marketing purposes. For example, digital marketing is a HUGE category, that includes SEO, PPC, media planning, marketing strategies, and more. So, each of those subjects should become their own subcategory at this stage since they each require research into specific keyword terms.

After you’ve broken down your main category into more bite-sized subcategories, each subcategory should have its own keyword list that you can download. Now, it’s time to download those lists and take some time to review each.

Pro Tip: If you find that one of your categories is still quite wide, meaning it contains many search queries and very large volumes, divide it again into more detailed subcategories until you feel it’s manageable. 

Once you’re happy with your subcategory lists go to Google Keyword Planner. Google Keyword Planner allows up to 10 base phrases per ‘research’, so group all phrases from the same subcategory together to find the best relevant keyword suggestions. ‘Research’ in SEO keyword planning refers to the maximum number of starting keywords that you can use in Google Keyword Planner to find related keyword suggestions. 

5. Consolidate your keyword data – Add everything to one keyword research file

At this point, you’re probably wondering why you have so many keyword lists, but don’t worry that means you’re on the right track! These lists are your data sources for all search volumes and trends, and also for your competitors’ ranking and performance data. In fact, now it’s time to combine all of the lists that fall into the same subcategory by migrating all the data to one master excel file. Once you’ve combined them remove any duplicate keywords. The reason you are merging the lists you’ve made is so you can effectively organize and implement your keyword research when it’s go time.

Pro Tip: Perform search trend and rank calculations on your data lists, then consolidate the sources and remove duplicate phrase entries, then pull all the competitive data related to your research (competitors ranking, traffic shares etc.). Now you can calculate competitive keyword difficulty and value easily and build a data-driven SEO strategy. For example, you can now identify recent changes in search volumes as well as competitor’s weak-spots, and adjust your strategy accordingly

To understand how to most effectively implement your keyword research, map out your data and insights against the current content on your website – Which terms do you already have pages for? Which ones do you need to create pages for? That will allow you to understand how to prioritize your efforts and successfully execute your keyword strategy. 

6. Keyword grouping – break down search intent and relevancy

First of all, congratulations! This is the last stage you need to complete to have finished your keyword research. So how do you wrap this up? Start by dividing the phrases you’ve compiled into smaller groups based on semantic similarities so you can better understand the users’ search intent for every query and effectively reach your potential customers.

Matching Search Intent

People can use the same keywords to mean different things, so an important part of this process is decoding the user’s search intent. For example, if someone searches toilet paper what do they mean? Are they looking for places to order from, popular brands, or keeping tabs on which stores have toilet paper in stock? This is why you must understand search intent to reach your relevant target audience. Once you understand your target audience’s intent you can analyze the most relevant search phrases for them and for your business, and decide what are the right keywords for you.

In general, there are four main intent categories:

Informational: How-tos, What’s. For example, how to disinfect plastic.

Commercial investigation: Specific Attributes, versus, best. For example, Walmart vs Target.

Transactional: Buy, Download, etc. For example, buying waterproof kid’s toys.

Navigational: Branded Queries. For example, Facebook updates.

Pro Tip: Taking the time to thoroughly complete this step will help you to achieve very high clarity into your groups and ensure your SEO optimization efforts will have the largest impact possible. A few examples of the groups that you may create for the subcategory of SEO include: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, and Link Building for SEO.

Pro Tip: Remove all remaining terms that are still irrelevant to your SEO goals such as queries that include times, locations, and competitor names. What you deem irrelevant will change based on your individual site and industry, so there is not a hard and fast rule to follow. 

At this point your initial keyword research is considered complete, so you will now work to understand search intents, areas for content improvement, and SEO optimization gaps. 

Optimization gaps are pages that are optimized for the wrong search intent, that have missing content, or are missing the right meta elements. To do this, continue re-dividing your keyword groups into smaller and smaller groups, until you’re left only with groups of semantically related search queries. 

As a reminder, that means throughout your keyword research you’ve divided your research as follows:

Digital marketing

SEO (subcategories)

“Keyword Research”, “On-Page SEO”, “Technical SEO”, “Backlinks” (Term groups, meaning SEO was broken down into and other commonly searched topics.)

“How-to do technical SEO”, “What is technical SEO”, “Technical SEO Checklist”, “Technical SEO audit Price”. (Intent + Semantic similarities)

Now all the data you had collected about your search potential and your competitors’ traffic and ranking, as well as your additional calculations and scores, is clearly sorted. This means you can easily estimate difficulty as well as value of ranking for a keyword or a topic, and build an SEO strategy that takes everything into account and can be easily deployed. You can make smarter choices creating or optimizing content, easily discover and address content gaps, and scale your activity without duplication hazards. Well done!

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