Definitive guide to keyword research

It is crucial when maintaining a blog to recognize what your audience wants to find and how to reach these readers. The best way to figure out strategic keywords to use in your website’s content is to understand how keywords work so that you know how to craft content to please both users and search engines.

The first step for keyword research is to know what your target market is and how they look into your niche content, services, or products.

Some of the typical questions you need to answer while doing keyword research is to what are people searching, how many people are using it and what ways do they do it. This will give you precise search data that can help you answer these questions.

Read further to know about all the tools and strategies you need for this information, as well as become skilled at tactics that will help you keep away from keyword research quirks and construct strong content. Once you have discovered what your target audience is searching for in terms of your content, you will find that you can implement some game changing SEO tactics!

Before you start keyword research, ask the right questions.

Before you can enable a business to develop through SEO, you initially need to comprehend what their identity is, who their clients are, and their objectives. 

A large number of individuals sidestep this essential arranging step since watchword research requires significant time commitment, and why invest the energy when you definitely know what you need to rank for? 

The appropriate response is that what you need to rank for and what your crowd really needs are two very different things. Zeroing in on your crowd and afterward utilizing keyword research to sharpen those bits of knowledge will make for considerably more effective results than zeroing in on the commonly used keywords. 

Take for example a stationary shop that has found out about SEO and needs help improving and how regularly they appear in search engine queries. So as to support them, you have to initially comprehend somewhat more about their clients. To do so, it is important to ask the right questions, for example,

• What types of pens, pencils etc. are people searching for?
• Who is searching for these terms?
• When are people searching for pens, pencils, books, etc.?
• Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
• How are people searching for stationary products?
• What specific words do they use?
• What questions do they ask?
• Are mobile devices being used for searches?
• Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

Then there’s the big question— how can you help provide the best content about stationary to grow a community and accomplish what all those people are searching for? Addressing these issues is a critical planning step that will steer your keyword research and assist you craft superior content.

What specific terms are people looking up?

There may be several ways to describe what you do, but it is important to understand how the audience searches for the product, service, or information you offer. Answering this query is a vital first step in the keyword research progression.

Discovering keywords

You will already know a few keywords in mind that you would like to rank for. These will be associated with things like your products, services, or other topics your website or blog deals with, and they are great seed keywords for your research, so you can from there! You can utilize a keyword research tool and enter those keywords to find out average monthly search volume and related keywords. During the breakthrough phase, it can help you decide which variations of your keywords are most well-liked amongst searchers.

Once you go into your seed keywords into a keyword research tool, you will start on to find out other keywords, frequent questions, and topics for your content that you might have not noticed or realized.

For example of a caterer that specializes in birthdays.

Typing “catering” and “birthday” into a keyword research tool, you may find out highly significant, highly searched for related terms such as:

• Birthday Planning
• Birthday cake and caterers
• Birthday Caterer shop

In the course of finding new relevant keywords for your content, you will likely become aware that the search volume of those keywords differs to a great extent. You can absolutely target terms that your audience is searching for, in some cases, it may be more beneficial to target terms with lower search volume because they are far less cutthroat.

Since both high- and low-competition keywords can be useful for your website, learning more about search volume can help you focus on the right keywords and pick the ones that will give your website the main tactical advantage.

How often are those terms searched?

Uncover the search volume of different terms

The higher the search volume for a given keyword or keyword phrase, the more work is characteristically necessary to attain higher rankings. This is frequently referred to as keyword complexity and seldom incorporates SERP features. Big brands frequently take up the top 10 results for high-volume keywords, so if you are just beginning on the web and going after the same keywords, the ranking of your dreams can take years of effort.

Normally, the superior the search volume, the bigger the competition and endeavor required to accomplish organic ranking success. If you use really low ranked words, you risk not drawing any readers to your site. Lot of times, it may be most beneficial to aim for extremely precise, lower competition search terms commonly known as long-tail keywords.

Understand how the long tail keywords work.

Do you think it would be great to rank #1 for the keyword “wallets”… or would that not be useful?

It’s magnificent to deal with keywords that have 50,000 searches a month, or even 5,000 searches a month, but in actuality, these well-liked search terms only make up a fraction of all searches achieved on the web. In fact, keywords with very soaring search volumes may even point toward uncertain intent, which, if you target these terms, it could put you at risk for drawing visitors to your site whose purpose does not go with the content your page offers.

Does the searcher want to know the prize of a wallet? Order a wallet? Find a shop that sells wallets? Google doesn’t know, so they present these features to help you filter. Targeting “wallet” means that you are using a wide range.

If you’re searching for “wallet,” Google thinks you may also be interested in “handbags” which might not be incorrect.

Was your intent to find a shop to buy wallets? The “Discover more places” SERP feature has that covered. The remaining 75% lie in the “long tail” of search.

Don’t misjudge these less popular keywords. Long tail keywords with lower search volume over and over again convert better, because searchers are more precise and planned in their searches. For example, a person searching for “wallets” is probably just browsing. On the other hand, somebody searching for “best price red Prada wallet” practically has their wallet out!

Getting tactical with search volume.

Now that you know the relevant search terms for your site and their equivalent search volumes, you can get even more planned by looking at your opponents and figuring out how searches might fluctuate by season or location.

Keywords by competitor

Now you would have a list of keywords with you. How do you know which to begin with first? It could be an excellent thought to prioritize high-volume keywords that your competitors are not at present ranking for. On the other hand, you could also scrutinize which keywords from your listing your competitors are by now ranking for and prioritize those. The former is better when you want to take advantage of your competitors’ missed prospects, while the second is a belligerent strategy that sets you up to battle for keywords your competitors are by now performing well for.

Keywords by season

Understanding the works of seasonal trends can be valuable in setting a content strategy. For example, if you know that “chocolate eggs” start to spike in March during Easter time in the United Kingdom, you can plan content months in advance and give it a big push during those months.

Keywords by region

You can more advantageously aim a precise location by narrowing down your keyword research to exact towns, counties, or states in the Google Keyword Planner, or assess “interest by sub region” in Google Trends. Geo-specific research can assist to make your content more appropriate to your target readers. For example, you may find out that the preferred term in some areas would differ from the others. is the preferred terminology.

Which format best suits the searcher’s intent?

SERP features are going to help us understand how searchers want to consume information for a particular keyword. The format in which Google chooses to display search results depends on intent, and every query has a unique one. Google describes these intents in their Quality Rater Guidelines as either finding the right information, or trying to accomplish a goal, find a particular website, or visit a local business to get the idea of what is needed.

There are five major categories of intent among thousands of them who are available that needs to be noted:

1. Informational queries: The searcher needs information, such as the name of a band or the height of the Empire State Building.
2. Navigational queries: The searcher wants to go to a particular place on the Internet, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.
3. Transactional queries: The searcher wants to do something, such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
4. Commercial investigation: The searcher wants to compare products and find the best one for their specific needs.
5. Local queries: The searcher wants to find something locally, such as a nearby coffee shop, doctor, or music venue.

A crucial step in the keyword research process is surveying the SERP landscape for the keyword you want to target in order to get a better gauge of searcher intent. If you want to know what type of content your target audience wants, look to the SERPs!

Google has carefully analyzed the behavior of trillions of searches as a way to give  the most desired content for each specific keyword search.

Take the search “shoes,” for example:

By the shopping carousel, you can infer that Google has determined many people who search for “shoes” want to shop for shoes online.

There is also a feature called the Local Pack for this keyword, indicating Google’s interest to help searchers who may be looking for local shoe sellers.

If the query is unclear, Google will also sometimes include the “refine by” feature to help searchers define what they are hunting for further. By doing so, the search engine can provide results that better help the searcher complete their task.

Google has a huge range of result types it can serve up depending on the query, so if you are going to target a keyword, look to the SERP to figure out what type of content you need to make.

Tools for determining the value of a keyword

How much value would a keyword add to your website? These tools can help you answer that question, so they’d make great additions to your keyword research arsenal:

• Moz Keyword Explorer – Input a keyword in Keyword Explorer and get information like monthly search volume and SERP features (like local packs or featured snippets) that are ranking for that term. The tool extracts accurate search volume data by using live clickstream data. To learn more about how we’re producing our keyword data, check out Announcing Keyword Explorer.
• Google Keyword Planner – Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner has historically been the most common starting point for SEO keyword research. However, Keyword Planner does restrict search volume data by lumping keywords together into large search volume range buckets. To learn more, check out Google Keyword Planner’s Dirty Secrets.
• Google Trends – Google’s keyword trend tool is great for finding seasonal keyword fluctuations. For example, “funny Halloween costume ideas” will peak in the weeks before Halloween.
• AnswerThePublic – This free tool populates commonly searched for questions around a specific keyword. Bonus! You can use this tool in tandem with another free tool, Keywords Everywhere, to prioritize ATP’s suggestions by search volume.
• SpyFu Keyword Research Tool – Provides some really neat competitive keyword data.

Frequently Asked Questions