How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Complete Guide

So, how do you find the right keywords, and what are the latest trends in keyword research?

Selecting and implementing the right SEO keywords is usually one of the first tasks for ready a site for the search engines. Although the likely value of a keyword can be estimated in advance using various resources, it can only truly be measured in context i.e., once it has been in place on the site for a few months. SEO keywords selected in haste and without proper planning might lead to poor results in search engine rankings.

Whilst research may indicate that a keyword such as ”traditional bookbinders” will deliver good rates of traffic or that it will deliver less but higher quality traffic, the verdict can’t be made instantaneously. Also, for a niche site in a small market, the value of a keyword will be entirely different from that of a site with a more generic proposition.

Statistics say that 50% of searchers click on the first three search results they get. Moreover, an astonishing 75% never reach the second page of Google results.

These stats clearly show us how important high rankings are. However, with the ever-changing SERPs and the growing number of your competitors, appearing on Google’s first page is not an easy task.

In one example there is a simple product photograph of an mp3 player. If you were selecting SEO keywords to get traffic for the image, your own bias and assumptions would dictate what keywords you would apply. However, Vertical Leap’s research shows that there are at least 21 different permutations that could be used. Remember, these results are human-tested, so they contain misspellings:

• Mp3 player
• USB
• Mp3
• Flash drive
• USB key
• USB mp3
• USB mp3 player
• Flash memory
• Generic Mp3 player
• Budget Mp3 player
• Memory stick
• Memory pen
• USB memory Mp3
• Pixel
• Mp3 player
• Mp3 player
• Pen drive
• USB memory stick
• USB memory stick mp3 player

USB stick: This is why you need a solid keyword research strategy to support your SEO efforts.

So, how to find the right keywords through research and what are the predictions?

Let’s find out!

Discovering Keywords

There are many problems inexperienced marketers face when searching for new keywords to rank for

Sometimes, they choose keywords with a high search volume and don’t get an opportunity to rank high for them.

Others target obscure and generic search terms no one actually uses to find their products. Consequently, their rankings suffer.

So, the first step you need to take is to find the right and profitable keywords.

You can always begin with a simple brainstorming process and write down all keywords you consider relevant. This is a great way to build a foundation for your research and expand on these initial ideas using the right keyword tools and resources.

Target audience segmentation is another immensely important phase of your keyword research strategy. In 2018, Google took a few immensely important steps to improve browsing experiences and make them more user-friendly. Just look at its Mobile-First Index and highly conversational voice searches.

So, for starters, dig deeper and build buyer personas. Include all factors that matter, such as their gender, age, average income, location, education, marital status, interests, common problems they face, what they expect from brands and how you can help them.

While it can’t give all the possible options for every object available on the internet (that is quite an impossible task) it does show how different people will use different keywords to search for what may seem like a more obvious choice to someone else.

It clearly presents the challenges faced in basing SEO keyword research on your own set of assumptions, and it highlights some long tail alternatives. The images provided are simple but the keywords that people use to find them may surprise you. It happens as each person determines the words to describe the image based on his/her own set of assumptions. 

Finding the Right Keyword Discovery Tools

Now that you’ve built the basis for your research, you can move on to its second phase- choosing the right tools. 

Free Keyword Research Tools

If you don't want to spend money on more expensive solutions, consider free options provided by Google, Bing, and other firms. The free keyword tools are initially just for keyword set research. Most of them are user-friendly to beginners and are cheaper.

However, free tools often come with limitations. For example, they may offer less comprehensive data, limited access to advanced features, and reduced accuracy in metrics such as search volume or keyword difficulty. This can hinder your ability to craft a highly effective SEO strategy.

Paid Keyword Research Tools

In contrast, paid tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz provide advanced features designed for professional use. These tools often include:

• Comprehensive keyword difficulty metrics
• Detailed competitor analysis
• Extensive keyword ideas and variations
• Data on organic and paid clicks
• Features like keyword gap analysis and rank tracking

For example, Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer shows not only search volume but also the return rate and the number of backlinks needed to rank on the first page. Moz's Keyword Explorer combines keyword CTR, difficulty, and volume into a "Priority" score, simplifying decision-making.

Paid tools are more efficient for in-depth analysis and are worth considering for businesses aiming to scale their online presence or invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

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Here are a few ideas you will want to try out:

i. Ubersuggest

You just need to enter your major keyword in the search bar, and this tool will provide you with the search volume, SEO keywords difficulty, paid difficulty, and CPC. It also tells you your chances of ranking in the first 20 results for a certain keyword and provides a list of alternatives for it.

ii. Google Search Suggestions

Google search is your best friend when looking for long-tail phrases your users search for. All you need to do is type your desired keyword in the Google search box, which will provide you with ten related phrases. To make this process faster, you can use Keywordtool.io to research for you.

iii. Google Keyword Planner Tool

Google Ads is one of the first tools SEO newbies use when entering the keyword research waters. The tool provides you with numerous relevant information about the keyword, including how many advertisers are bidding for it, its global monthly searches, its local monthly searches, and the approximate cost-per-click.

Recommended: Stop Internal Keyword Competition in Google AdWords Campaign

iv. Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer

Ahrefs takes keyword optimization to a whole new level. It informs you about the search volume, return rate, and organic and paid clicks.

Most importantly, it has a cool keyword difficulty feature that shows exactly how many backlinks you will need to rank on the #1 page for a certain keyword.

v. Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz Keyword Explorer is also a cool addition to your keyword research toolbox. It gives you some out-of-box keyword suggestions for your keywords.

What I love most about it is its Priority feature, which uses the keyword CTR, search volume, and difficulty to create a score for your keyword and tell you whether to optimize it.

Does an SEO company help businesses online?

When it comes to being successful online one of the smartest moves that a business can make is to hire an SEO Company to help with their marketing campaign. While many underestimate the usage of an SEO firm, it cannot be denied that they have a major impact on how well online businesses perform, giving them a huge advantage over their competition. The reason for this is that SEO is necessary to get maximum exposure from organic sources such as Google. Is Google making us stupid? I don`t think so. This is what separates the winners from the losers in the world of online marketing in many cases.

An SEO firm's first priority is to increase its client's exposure through organic search traffic. This means conducting extensive keyword research to determine which keywords should be targeted for maximum traffic and minimum competition. Once the keywords are selected, the client’s website is optimized for them in a smart, search-friendly way.

This will indicate to search engines what keywords to rank the website for. Thanks to the keywords used, this leads to tons of new, targeted traffic. Getting exposure like this can be great for sales, branding, and other marketing activities.

Thanks to the changes to SEO recently, it can be very easy for businesses to shoot themselves in the foot when coming up with SEO strategies. Many of the old methods not only don’t work anymore, they can come across as spammy and cause search engines to penalize the website instead. SEO firms know exactly what strategies to avoid and can ensure that no spammy tactics have been used. This will ensure that the search engines continue to favor the client’s website and not penalize it for factors that the owner may not even be aware of.

Keywords are All about Intent

The abovementioned metrics, such as search volume, CTR, difficulty, and competitiveness, are important to your decision-making process, but your keyword research goes beyond them.

Discussing PPC keyword research trends for Search Engine Journal, Aaron Levy claims:

“It’s been a long time coming; search engines have given us too many additional levers to handle along with keywords. I believe next year will be the beginning of the end for keywords as a primary search lever.”

Keywords are far from being dead. However, you need to make them less about rankings and more about your users. What does this mean?

Well, every keyword we google has multiple intents. For example, a person searching for “email marketing” may want to learn the basics of this marketing practice, learn how to use it to boost their brand visibility or even find the most popular email marketing tools.

Google’s major goal is to learn the intent behind most searches and provide its users with relevant and authoritative results. When defining sites that fully meet searcher intent, the search engine emphasizes that the result needs to satisfy almost all users, be friendly to mobile users, and be clear and unambiguous.

Therefore, keyword ranking is no longer focused on ranking pages with the most backlinks. It prioritizes those pages that align with searchers’ intent.

Precisely because of that, the abovementioned tools are not the only source of your keyword information. There are numerous keyword research goldmines you should exploit.

For example, niche-specific blogs, Q&A sites like Quora, search engines and any other platform where people meet to discuss brands, products, and topics will help you see what your customers are searching for and find perfect long-tail keywords.

Google Trends can also be helpful. It allows you to see how popular a certain phrase is among your audiences and how its popularity changes over time.

The Need for Voice Search Optimization Rises

A while ago, Matt Cutts explained in a video how keyword optimization works:

“You don’t want just to say ‘Mount Everest elevation.’ You want to say words like ‘how high is Mount Everest’ because people are going to type ‘how high is Mount Everest?’”

These words will be more important than ever, and the reason for this is voice search.

Have you ever asked yourself why our textual searches are short? We use short-tail keywords to get relevant answers as quickly as possible. And, for marketers, optimizing for such keywords has been of paramount priority for years.

However, with the rise of voice search, things are changing rapidly. Using their voice to conduct searches, users don’t have to look at their phones to find the desired information. Above all, they’ve allowed talking to voice assistants naturally. And, stats back me up on that, showing that 70% of voice searches use natural language.

This is why you must focus on combining your exact-match and long-tail keywords with conversational ones. In other words, you need to optimize for those phrases that unveil new levels of intent. As most voice searches are question-based, you should use powerful words like who, what, which, define, where, how, types, etc.

SEO specialist good for Google

It is often forgotten that there is a simple and effective way to improve a website's position on the Internet, and Google in particular.

a. The Page Rank:

Google assigns each website a note called “page rank”. This page rank determines positioning on its website. If the page rank is high, the site will appear in the top results. If it is low, the site will appear only after several pages. The calculation of this note is based on the notion of popularity. In other words, the more popular a site is, the more it links it will accumulate, which will point to it on the internet.

Logically, to get a high page rank, you must have traffic links from other sites pointing to yours. Not easy I hear you say, and to implement this mechanism can be lengthy and costly. Fortunately, there is a shortcut! To enrich ranking websites, most search engines use third-party directories.

These directories rank websites by topic and have very stringent controls to ensure the quality of sites included. Accordingly, other search engines believe that these directories are trustworthy, and the mere presence of a website in them is enough to make it gain page rank.

The trick is simply to list your website in these directories. From a practical point of view, it is very simple since it is sufficient to submit an electronic form with details of the website: an URL, description, title, and it is gone.

b. The strength of directories:

Note that even when the submission site does not guarantee inclusion in the directory. Indeed, as mentioned above, the strength of these directories is based on the quality of the websites that are listed. It is a prerequisite to submit a site of interest to users.

The calculation algorithm of a page rank is based primarily on two directories: Yahoo directory and Dmoz. The first is the book of the famous firm of the same name. The second, Dmoz, is a directory maintained by a community of volunteers.

Enrollment in the Yahoo directory is free for non-commercial websites if they pay the modest sum of 200 Euros. In exchange, insertion will be performed within 48 hours. Home Dmoz is a bit more complicated and may take some time. It depends on the goodwill of volunteers, who are usually very busy and manage waiting lists of up to several thousand websites.

c. The integration:

The mere presence of your website in these directories can save you up to two points on page rank (out of 10). It is a very good time to report/results. It is obviously one of the largest and most used search engines on the internet. What makes Google’s search engine so amazing is its “top-secret” search algorithm that searches through a course on content pages. Yes, no page sites.

Many newcomers to search engine optimization in Melbourne (SEO, or for short) seem to think that search engines or Google search your entire site, including identifying keys.

Over to You:

Ranking on Google's first page is not simple. Google’s algorithms constantly change, and adapting to these changes can be difficult.

Still, with the right keyword optimization formula, you can improve your online performance and put yourself in front of the right audiences.

How will you update your keyword research?

About authors

This article is a collaboration between Lauren Wiseman and Nicole Clark. Learn more about the authors here: Lauren Wiseman | Nicole Clark.