We can say that keywords are the fuel that helps you to get your vehicle running. If your keywords are not searched in Google by people, your content will not be ranked high no matter how hard you try or focus on writing SEO content.
In this article, we will help you in doing better and high-quality keyword research and improving your website traffic with consistent visitors.
We will provide you a brief detail on How you can do keyword research in a better way to rank higher divided into some steps.
What are the keywords?
Keywords, that are also known as search queries and SEO keywords, are the words and phrases that are entered into the Search engine by people.
What is keyword research?
The process of finding words or phrases(keywords) that you want to rank higher in search engines known as Keyword research.
In other words, the process of analyzing and comparing the potential of keywords to rank higher and gain long-term customers.
What is the Importance of keyword research?
Without doing keyword research, it’s next to impossible to understand the customers’ needs and what they are trying to search for in the search engine. Doing keyword research helps you in avoiding unnecessary content writing and uploading that very few will reach out to.
Marketing companies and websites are making the same mistake, that is why according to some recent studies, 90% of the bloggers do not get traffic from Google.
Doing proper keyword research will help you out with the following questions.
- What will be the level of obstacles in your way while writing content?
- What will the expected traffic that you will get after ranking for Google?
- What are the requirements of the content you are writing?
- Are the people searching for the keyword you want to write on?
How to get keywords Ideas?
Keyword research is executed by understanding what people may search for any information in the search engine. After preparing the ideas and plans, you can combine your efforts with SEO tools to generate several interesting keywords to use. And at the last, you pick the one as the best.
The picking up of keywords for your business starts with four simple steps:
- Pick-up SEED keywords
- Analyze what your competitors are ranking for
- Use keyword research tools
- Learn more about your niche
Pick-up SEED keywords
Seed keywords are the building blocks of the keyword research process and help to understand the niche appropriately. They also help you in identifying your competitors. You can put the seed keywords in a keyword research tool to find thousands of keyword ideas.
If you already have a business or website you want to promote, it’s easier to get your product promoted using the seed keywords. Analyze what the people would enter about your product in the search engine.
If your website offers Mobile devices and parts, the seed keywords might be like:
- Mobiles
- Android
- Earphones
- Battery
- Phones
Set-up the Google search console and click on the Search results reports to view the stats of thousands of keywords to get multiple seed keyword ideas.
Pro-tip: Don’t be annoyed too much over getting seed keywords. It would only take some minutes to get some good ones.
Evaluate what the competitors are ranking for
It is the best way to start keyword research by Evaluating which keywords are bringing good traffic to your competitors’ website.
But before starting this process, you need to identify your competitors first. This is the process where the selected seed keywords come in handy.
Enter the seed keywords in the search engine to view the top-ranked websites related to that niche. The top-ranked websites are your competitors and now it’s time to prepare for the next step.
You can copy the top-ranked websites to Ahrefs’ site explorer to view the inside details of each website by heading to the Top pages report option. The tool provides you the most popular pages of that website with their estimated monthly traffic.
The tool also provides you their Top keyword that they use to attract mass organic traffic.
Using the above strategy, you can get enough keywords that can keep you busy for some weeks from one competitor. If you want to discover more, get to the Competing domains report and get more sites like your competitor.
Use keyword research tools
Do you think you can get all the required, important, and attractive keywords from your competitors? Our reply will be “NO”. There are still tons of unused keywords that are better than you are using after Evaluating your competitors’ keyword ideas.
Using keyword research tools can turn out to be a great source of keyword ideas for you boosting you higher in the rankings.
How do keyword research tools work?
Keyword research tools work easily without wasting lots of time. Just enter the seed keywords in the search bar of the tool and get the results in a few seconds.
Note: After you enter a seed keyword, the tool will generate keywords that contain the seed keyword in them, these are known as Phrase-Match keywords.
Some of the popular keyword research tools
- We’ll suggest you use Google Keyword Planner for generating great keyword ideas. The tool is free to use and is a great source of keyword ideas for advertisement websites and companies as well as for SEO.
- Answer the Public will be our second choice. It comes in both free and pro(paid) versions. The tool will provide keyword ideas in the form of questions asked by customers.
- Our 3rd suggestion will be Ahrefs’ keywords explorer that contains over ten billion keyword ideas across 170+ countries in the world.
Learn more about your niche
Things we have studied so far in this article taught us to generate almost an unlimited number of keyword ideas from both competitors and tools.
But it’s not enough to be the one among all. The processes keep you limited to your seed keywords and you may still miss some great keyword ideas.
You can fill the missing part by learning about your niche more deeply. A preferred starting point for this process will be to search for Q&A sites, industry forums, and groups. Finding out these things can help you in finding the problems that your specific audience faces in that niche and the ideas that don’t show up in keyword tools.
You might not find relevant seed keywords that users use to ask questions. Questions usually do not contain seed keywords as they are asked genuinely after facing problems.
For example: Take a seed keyword ‘Gaming Desktop’
Now let’s see some questions based on it.
- Workstation 64GB under $800
- Desktop for gaming
- Best computers for gaming on a budget
- Powerspec G353 vs G354
All the questions are related to a Gaming desktop but do not contain the seed keyword in them.
There is a trend between topics of the same niche, you just have to understand it and implement it as a new seed keyword to generate keyword ideas.
Your customers can be a great source of keyword ideas. The people you are already doing business with can help you in finding more questions and topics to cover to attract more audiences.
We are providing you some tips on how you can generate ideas and insights from customers.
- Be connected to your clients regularly.
- Chat with the clients face-to-face
- Review your past emails with your clients
- View customer care support requests and try to solve them
- Gather common questions from past conversations
- Pay attention to the language of conversations that your clients use while talking to you
Doing these simple steps may turn your worry into the confidence of doing something great.
How to Evaluate keywords?
In the above parts of the article, you have learned how to generate tons of great keywords using seed keywords, evaluating your competitors, using research tools, and contacting your customers. But how will you know which is best to use? It’s near to impossible, isn’t it?
But as it is said, every problem rises along with its solution. Just like that, picking up the best keyword from tons can be simple. Use SEO metrics and data to specify some best from tons.
The Six SEO metrics that are used to identify the perfect keyword for you are provided below.
- Search volume
- Trend
- Clicks
- Traffic potential
- Keyword difficulty
- Cost per click(CPC)
Search volume
Search volume helps you in knowing the average number of times a keyword is clicked per month.
Even if your article ranks number one in the SEO, the traffic will rarely exceed 30% of it if you are lucky enough.
Different keyword research tools show different search volumes because all of them calculate the metric in different ways.
Trend
Keyword search volumes help you in evaluating monthly site clicks on annual averages. There are high possibilities that the site clicks differ from time to time.
Trending keywords
Change your keyword ideas according to the trend in the market.
For example; The estimated search volume for ‘MacBook pro 16’ in the US is 19k. The stat shows an annual average and it is clear that there have been more searches in the past months.
Seasonal keywords
Some keywords come in trend in a particular season, they are called seasonal keywords.
For example; Let’s take a seed keyword i.e ‘World cup’. Now if you search for the keyword in research tools, there will be only one spike that appeared every four years.
Tip: Keep your keywords changing according to the season.
Clicks
The click metric shows how many average monthly clicks your keyword gets in the keyword search results. The clicks on your keyword do not depend on the search volume of the keyword.
Even if your keyword crosses over 500k search volume, your keyword may not even cross 100k clicks. It all happens because Google answers the questions right in the search results.
Note: You should be careful of keywords where paid ads steal your lots of clicks.
Traffic potential
Using search volumes and clicks, you can evaluate your keyword’s popularity. But using a single keyword may not be able to affect your site rankings much as there are tons of synonyms and variations for that keyword and it is too difficult to cover all of them on one page.
Studies over search queries have shown that the average top-ranking page in the top-10 for more than a thousand different keywords.
Pro-tip: Avoid judging keywords on their search volumes or clicks only, check the top-ranking results to evaluate the search traffic potential of that keyword.
Keyword Difficulties
It is an SEO metric that evaluates the relative ranking difficulty of a keyword. It is scored from zero to a hundred on a scale with higher being the hardest to rank for.
You can manage keywords manually before selecting them as there are several factors affecting it. Do not always run before high-difficulties keywords. You should select a balanced difficulty keyword after evaluating its business value.
Cost per click(CPC)
Cost per click is more a metric factor for business advertisers and less for SEOs. CPC shows you what amount the advertisers are willing to pay for ad clicks from a keyword.
As compared to search volume, CPC is more volatile as it can be changed anytime. The CPC is not a foolproof way to evaluate a keyword’s stats.