If you’ve done any learning about blogging you’ve probably come across the importance of keywords. The fact is that having a solid keyword strategy can make or break a new site, and determine long term growth. Good keyword research sets you up for success while bad research can waste your time and lead to your site going nowhere.
The obvious question is then: “How do I do good keyword research”? If you’ve ever asked yourself that then you’re in the right place. Throughout this guide, I’m going to walk you through how I do keyword research for my own sites. In it, we’ll talk about generating keyword ideas, determining their viability, and gauging how difficult it will be to rank for them. By the end, you should have your own list of high value keywords, and be ready to start creating content for your own site. Without further fanfare, let’s jump right into it.
No “Right” Method
Before we jump into the meat of the guide it’s important to give you a disclaimer. The method here is my personal flow that I’ve used and have some success with. That doesn’t mean it’s the “right” method and is likely to differ from others. That’s okay.
The nature of SEO and keywords is a bit of science and a bit of art, and consequently there’s many ways to go about it. I encourage you to research outside of this guide and you’ll likely find a lot more details and tips. While I believe you can get by on this guide alone, there’s no harm in doing a bit more learning. Okay, now for real, let’s dive into it.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of looking for keywords that people are entering into search engines. It’s researching the phrases and words people use to search for things online, and gauges whether that particular keyword is a good fit for your site.
There’s a lot that goes into good keyword research, and doing it incorrectly can waste time and effort. Good keyword research on the other hand is essential to growing your site, especially in the early days. The end goal of good keyword research is to compile a list of keywords that are not only relevant to your site and get traffic, but also that you have a chance to actually rank for.
Why Does It Matter?
Keyword research effectively shows you what types of content you should produce, but it also shows you what content is worth producing. As we’ll see, good keyword research takes into account how many people are searching for a term as well as how competitive that keyword is which translates to how hard it is to rank for it. There are millions of keywords out there, but many are either searched too little to care about, or already have tons of high authority competition.
This all ultimately leads to content that is easier to rank and pushes more visitors to your site. This is especially true when you’re starting out and lack the authority to rank for high competition keywords. Good keyword research is going to net you valuable keywords that you have a chance of ranking for, which in turn leads to more traffic and, hopefully, more revenue for your site and business.
What’s Our End Goal
Our end goal with this article is to walk you through the process of doing keyword research and getting you a list of valuable keywords in your own niche. I encourage you to follow along and take action at each step. If you do so, you’ll have a decent list of keywords ready to go after reading this article.
Note, that this article will primarily focus on free methods of research, but it will mention a few paid tools. These tools can greatly speed up the process and you can use them if you like, but it’s not necessary to get value out of this exercise.
My personal recommendation is to go through the process manually first a couple of times, and only move onto paid tools once you understand how to do it. I find that the tools provide so much more value once you understand what they’re telling you. It also gives you a bit more appreciation for how much time they can save you.
What Goes Into a Keyword
Before we start looking at how to find good keywords we need to get some definitions out of the way. The following are a few key terms you’ll come across, as well as some information on how they relate to finding good keywords.
Relevancy
First and foremost, any keywords you target need to be relevant to your site and audience. If you have a site about dog grooming targeting keywords about golf balls is going to get you nowhere, even if those keywords check all the boxes.
It’s important to remember that Google’s (or any search engine) goal is to provide relevant search results that satisfy the user in the quickest time possible. This means that they are always judging sites based on the types of content they have and how relevant they are to the query in question.
Intent
Speaking off search results, intent is another big one that Google has been getting better at over the years. Take these two search queries as examples:
- How To Train a Dog
- Dog Trainers Near Me
They’re both about training dogs, but the intent behind them is very different. The first is probably looking for tips on training their dog, while the second is looking for professional trainers.
This is important as Google wants to match the results with the searcher’s intent to get them the best possible results. Consider this when both selecting your keywords as well as writing content about them. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher and think about what type of content you’d be looking for given a specific keyword.
Intent has increasingly become more important for ranking so don’t neglect this step. Sites that match up with the intent of the searcher tend to rank better, and this is only becoming more important as the search engine algorithms get better at determining intent.
Volume
Volume is the measure of how many people search for a given keyword. This is usually given as average searches per month.
The higher the volume, generally, the more valuable a keyword is as more people are interested in it. This often translated to increased competition, but not always. The ideal keywords are high volume and low competition, but these are very rare.
More likely, you’re going to be looking for keywords with low to moderate traffic that have low competition. These are much easier to find and rank for, and make up the bread and butter of a lot of blog content.
Keep in mind that just because a keyword has low volume doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing. I’ve had great success with keywords that are only about 20-30 searches per month. That might not seem like a lot, but if you have enough of them it can really add up. They are also usually quite easy to rank for, so there’s not much effort you need to put in after publishing.
Competition
Competition is the measure of how difficult a keyword is to rank for. Unlike volume, competition is a lot more complicated and takes into account a lot of factors.
Loosely, it looks at how authoritative the other sites ranking for a keyword are. The stronger those sites are the harder it’s going to be to rank for a keyword. If that’s a little confusing then don’t worry, we’ll be going more in depth on how to gauge a keywords difficulty and competition later on.
Authority
We’ve mentioned it a few times above, but authority is basically how much trust Google has in a particular site. A highly authoritative site is going to rank easier and faster than less authority ones. They’ve basically shown over time that they’re a quality site that produces relevant, quality content.
Authority is not something that you can really speed up either, it takes time. You need to prove that you’re a site that deserves it by consistently putting out good content. This where targeting low end keywords can help as you can rank for these and start to show the authority your site has. Sites that consistently produce good content and match up well with searcher intent will tend to become more authoritative over time.
Performing Keyword Research
Now, onto the meat of the article. These next sessions will guide you through putting together your own list of keywords and doing proper research on them. As I said before, I encourage you to follow along and take action at every step. If you do, by the end you’ll have a good list of valuable keywords that you can act on.
When working through these I typically just dump everything into a spreadsheet. This helps me stay organized, and also lets me search and filter once I’m done.
1. Start with content buckers
The first step is to create broad content buckets that define the types of content you want to write about. These should be the core topics, and aren’t necessarily the keywords you’re going to target, but will help you get to them.
For example, for this site I might come up with the following buckets
- Online marketing
- SEO
- Small business marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Just to name a few. These are my broad content ideas, and most articles will likely fit into one of these buckets. I can always think of and any more later too. Remember that keyword research is an ongoing process and will evolve as you go.
If you have a number of article ideas already then you can use these as buckets as well. I might know I want to write a “beginners SEO guide”, but I’m not sure what keywords to use. I can add these ideas to my buckets, and then can explore more deeply later.
Look to try and start with 10 buckets. This will help generate you a good amount of keywords later. Get as many as you can here if you can’t hit the full 10. That’s okay, and you’ll likely discover more as you become more familiar with your niche.
2. Flesh out Keywords In these topics
Once you have your buckets, it’s time to drill down and start generating keyword ideas. We’ll take a look at pruning this list later, so don’t worry about going overboard here; add as many as you like. The goal here is to create a list of any and all keyword ideas, and then later evaluate which ones are worth focusing on.
There are a number of ways to generate keyword ideas, and they can all be used together to generate a lot of ideas very quickly. To start, brainstorm things related to each of your buckets that you might think people are searching for. Try to put yourself in the position of your ideal audience and think about what types of problems they have and the searches they might make to solve them. It’s likely you’ll be able to brainstorm a number of initial ideas this way alone.
Outside of that, there are a number of services that can help generate new keyword ideas. The simplest is probably Google’s own related searches functionality. Simply input your existing buckets and keyword ideas into the search bar and it will populate with relevant ideas for other searches. You can also keep doing this by plugging in suggestions to get even more ideas.
If you’re looking for more ideas, there are also a number of 3rd party services that work to generate new ideas. Services like Ubersuggest can take seed keywords or websites, and then spit out hundreds of related keywords. These services are a great way to generate tons of ideas quickly although many of them are paid. For beginners, I’d suggest working with free solutions until you get to the point where you need the added power of a paid service.
One important thing to keep in mind when researching keywords is to focus on the intent behind the keyword. Google’s goal is to show relevant content, so it will attempt to show content that is related to the end goal of the user. Take the following two queries for example:
- “How headphones work”
- “Cheap quality headphones”
Both of these terms are related to headphones, but the intent behind the search is clearly different. If you run a shop that is selling headphones one of these terms is going to be more valuable than the other. Keep this in mind as you want to make sure the keywords you’re working to target match up with the intent of the users. This also influences your content as the article you write targeting this keyword should provide value given a user’s intent.
Lastly, you also want to make sure that you have a nice mix of long tail keywords Vs. Short ones. Long tail keywords are simply search phrases that have multiple words in them.
- “Headphones for sales”
- “Over-ear noise canceling headphones for sale”
The latter of these two queries is the long tail keyword and has a much more specific search. While long tail keywords see less searches due to their specificness, they are typically much easier to rank for meaning smaller sites have more chances to do so. This is a decent trade off, and is a reason many sites initially start by targeting long tail keywords.
New blogs should look to target a good mix of both to secure both long term and short term gains. Some long tail keywords can help you get some initial traffic, while also having some more competitive keywords can lead to larger traffic in the future once your site is well established.
Overall, look to have a decent number of keywords to start with. It’s also okay to add to and update this list as you go. As you write more articles, you’ll likely think of new keyword ideas, and should be regularly adding them to your list.
3. Determine Search Volume
The next step is to determine the overall value of a particular keyword which is its volume. Volume is the amount of searches the keyword gets, usually expressed as an average per month. The higher the volume, the more valuable a keyword is likely to be.
The best free way to gauge volume is to use Google’s own keyword planner tool. What we’ll do here is plug in our keywords and it will spit out values for monthly search volume. This is presented as a tool for paid ads, but can be used for our purposes as well
Do this for all of your keywords, and record the volume down. The higher the volume the more people searching for a keyword and the more valuable it’s likely to be. That said, for new sites it’s often a good idea to target low volume keywords. Even those under 100 can be good as they are generally easier to rank for.
Long Tail Keywords
A good strategy that a lot of SEO experts employ is to specifically look for long tail keywords. These are longer phrases, compare:
- Fitness Tips
- Fitness Tips for men over 40
The second one there is more specific and while it’s going to be searched less it’s also going to have less competition. Keep in mind these longer keywords as they are great places to start for a new blog that can bring in traffic without being overly competitive.
Some Things To Watch Out For
While you’re noting down your volume there are a couple of other things to be wary of. These items below can influence the value of keywords, and make one that looks promising into a throwaway.
Seasonal Results: One thing to keep in mind is that most keyword search volumes are going to be averaged over the year. This can mean that for certain seasonal keywords you can expect surges in some months and lulls in others. Google search trends is a tool that can show this data, and graphs out how popular a query is over the year. Here’s an example of “Christmas Trees”.
As expected, there are severe peaks for this phrase followed by huge lows. That’s not to say this is a bad keyword to target, but it’s important to understand when creating your overall strategy. If you have too many seasonal keywords then you’ll end up with large lulls in traffic during the off-months.
Declining Interest: A single value for search volume also doesn’t tell you the whole story in terms of popularity. Another important characteristic is the overall sustainability of a keyword. Things like current events or news might see a lot of traffic now, but a few months later might not. Here’s a trends graph for the term “Everquest” which was a popular video game some years ago.
As you can see, the overall popularity has dropped dramatically to the point where it’s near zero. This is a bit of a dramatic example, but it’s important to keep in mind when creating your blog. If all of your content is heavily reliant on it being current then you won’t be able to take any breaks in producing it or you’ll suffer traffic drops.
This isn’t necessarily bad, capitalizing on current events is a good strategy for getting bursts of traffic. However, you need to be careful with this by either being consistent (like a news site), or balancing it with evergreen content to keep traffic coming after the hype has died down.
Featured Snippets: Another important thing to watch for on search results is featured snippets. These are special results that appear at the top of the page and generally try to show information for a search without needing the user to click through to the page.
Search for example “Brad Pitt age”. You’ll see at the top a special snippet that displays this information to you.
The problem with these for marketers is that in a lot of cases they eat up a lot of clicks. Given the example above, how likely do you think that the user’s question is answered and they don’t continue on to a site? Probably pretty likely, and that means ranking for this search term isn’t all that valuable.
Tools like Ahrefs show this data in their results, but you can also apply some common sense. Does the featured snippet answer enough of the search query that a user won’t click through to learn more? If it does, then you’ll lose a lot of potential clicks to this.
4. Gauge Competitiveness
At this point you should have a list of keywords that you want to target and a good idea of their monthly search volume. At this point we’re going to start looking at narrowing that list down and determining which words are worth targeting.
Note that gauging competitiveness is more of an art than a science. There are some ways to get an idea of how easy it will be to rank, but there’s no concrete way to tell for sure. Ask a dozen SEO experts and you’ll get a dozen different answers on how to gauge keyword difficulty.
Described below is just one way of doing it, my way that I’ve found works for me. I always suggest experimenting a little, and trying out new techniques if you think it will help your business.
There are also a lot of automated tools for doing this. I like Seranking personally, it’s relatively cheap, easy to use, and provides good info, but that’s just one of many. While these tools can speed up the process, they are by no means necessary. I’d suggest doing this exercise at least a couple of times to get a feel for it, that way when you see a “difficulty score” in a tool later on you have some context for it.
1. Gauge How Many People are Competing for a Keyword
For this exercise we’re going to look at two keywords, one that is highly competitive and one a little less so.
The first step is to get an idea of how many people are actively competing for a keyword. A good way to do this is to see how many people have the exact match of your keyword in their title tag. People that are doing so are in direct competition with you, and are more likely to be actively optimizing for a given word.
Take the following two phrases and type them into Google. Take note of the number of results that are returned for each.
- allintitle: “How to train your dog”
- allintitle: “How to leash train your dog”
The first one gave me about 1.8 million, while the second had less than 300. Right there you can see a big difference in competitiveness.
But what exactly does this search do? Basically, it searches for all the pages on the web that have the exact match of your keyword (How to train your dog) as part of the page title. If you don’t include the “allintitle” you get back all the pages related to the topic, which is generally a much broader search.
I like searching this way because it provides a clearer view of who you’re competing with. These are sites that are likely to be actively targeting your keyword, and have done at least a little optimization towards it. The title tag is one of the first and easiest places to optimize for SEO, so it’s a good indicator of who's done the minimum from an SEO perspective.
Generally, you’re looking for lower numbers as this signals that less people are competing for a keyword. That’s not always the case, there could be a few really good pages that will be hard to beat even if the competition is low, but that’s the exception. The lower the number here the less people are competing for the phrase, and usually the easier it will be to rank.
Record the number for your keywords, and then move onto the next step.
2. Look at DA and PA
For this step we’re going to install the MOZ extension for Chrome. This is a free tool that will show us some important metrics in our search results. While there are other ways to do this, I find this tool easy to use and it’s free.
Once you have it installed go ahead and do a search result. Note that here you should remove the “allintitle” to get an accurate picture of what a searcher is going to see for a given phrase. Your search result should have extra metrics next to every result. That’s the MOZ bar at work pulling from their huge database of data.
What we’re interested in at this step is the Page Authority and Domain Authority, abbreviated PA and DA respectively. This gives us an idea of the overall strength of both the page itself, the PA, and the domain as a whole, the DA.
Generally, the lower the scores are here the better. Moz goes into more depth about the scores here, but the key takeaway is that it is a logarithmic scale not linear. That means going from 30 -> 60 is not double, but magnitudes more.
What we’re looking for is low scores in one or both categories. Low is a relative term, but my general thought is scores in the 20-40 range are generally pretty low. If there’s 2-3+ sites with scores in this range then it’s a good indicator that a “weak” site can rank for the keyword.
Take the next step by recording how many “weak” sites are in this range for your keywords.
3. Take Into Account Linking Profile
Another metric we get from the MOZ toolbar is links, which is the amount of links that are pointing to a given page. These backlinks are a key part of SEO, and work like a vote. A page linking back to another page is seen as a recommendation in Google’s eyes, and helps build authority to the site being linked to.
Naturally, we’re looking for sites that have few links as these are generally easier to knock off. Now, it’s important to remember that not all links are created equally. A link from a more authoritative site is usually worth more than from a lesser one. This toolbar doesn’t expose that information to us, but that’s okay at this stage, getting the raw number is enough.
In my experience, anything under 50 or so links is generally in the easy category. The lower the better though, if you notice 2-3 under 10 that’s another good sign.
For this step, record how many sites on the first page are under 50 backlinks.
4. Run an On-page analysis
The next step is a big one as we get to actually see how well optimized these pages are for a given keyword. Pages that are unoptimized usually signal that a page isn’t directly targeting a given keyword and just got lucky that it’s ranked there. These are usually pretty easy to outrank, even if they have more links and authority than us.
A good free tool for this: https://www.wincher.com/free-tools/on-page-seo-checker. There are obviously other tools you can use, but I find this one gives an easy to read result.
Run that tool for the pages above that you’ve marked as having low PA/DA and low links to see how well optimized they are. You can also do this for a few of the higher ranked sites to see what they score. If they score “decent” or below (less than 80), then that’s a good sign that they haven’t put much work into optimizing. This means that there is a good opportunity for you to create a better optimized page that can outrank them.
Now, none of these metrics on their own really tell us much, but if pages hit all 3 that’s a good sign that there is room for you to rank. Checking those sites that fit the previous criteria, markdown how many are not properly optimized. If you’re still hitting 2-3+ sites that fit all of the above then you’ve got a good chance of ranking.
5. Using AHREFs Free Keyword Difficulty Tool
Lastly, I wanted to put an option for automating some of the above that is still free. Ahrefs has a keyword difficulty tool that will tell you roughly how hard it will rank for a keyword. If your above work came out with 2-3 “weak sites” then when you run this tool you’ll likely get an easy to medium result which is exactly what we want.
Now, you might be asking why we went through all the above if this tool will just spit out a number for us. That’s a good question and you could absolutely do that. I do however think it’s still useful to go through the above process a couple of times because it does provide you some benefits.
The difficulty number isn’t always correct. If you compare that number with other tools that offer a keyword difficulty checker you'll find the results differ, sometimes by a large amount. This is because each tool has their own way of ranking keyword difficulty. Each method has its own merits, but that doesn’t guarantee a low score is going to be easy to rank for. Sometimes it’s helpful to be able to double check the automated result with some manual efforts to confirm.
It also gives you a better understanding of what’s going on under the hood of these tools. This can be useful in the future when you’re looking to optimize your pages and understand why you might not be ranking. If you just rely on the tool then you won’t have the knowledge to manually do the work.
The tools can drastically speed up your process, but they’re far from perfect. Being able to manually judge difficulty is going to be beneficial in the long run, so it’s a good idea to at least understand how to do it even if you just turn to the tools most of the time.
Prune Your List Based on The Above
With all that data in mind, it’s time to prune your keyword list and decide what to focus on. If you’re a new site, you’ll want to make sure that you target a good number of low competition keywords. This is going to help get you established, get you ranked, and start bringing in traffic. That’s a big first hurdle as the first bit is always the hardest. Once you get yourself established it gets a bit easier as you start to build up followers and some authority.
On that note, it still is okay to keep some of the medium-hard words as long term goals, especially if they cover important topics in your niche. A good strategy is to target low competition keywords, but then have some higher ones mixed in. This gives you both some long term goals to work towards, but also provides lots of value to your visitors. These harder keywords are often related to very valuable information in a given niche, so not having them is doing a disservice to your readers. A good internal linking strategy is key here to help users navigate your site and find related content.
Onwards
If you’ve followed my advice and worked along with this article then congratulations, you should have a good list of keywords ready to go. Now comes the hard part, actually writing the content.
Remember that all this keyword research was in preparation to write, and that’s where the bulk of your work will be. Take heart though, doing this work upfront is going to make your writing that much more effective and easier. There’s a lot that goes into writing good, SEO optimized content which we’ll cover in another article.
One big key though is that your content absolutely needs to match the search intent of the keyword. If your page isn’t effectively providing a solution to the searcher’s “problem” then eventually Google will catch on and your ranking will drop. Many people have tried to cheat Google’s rankings, and in nearly every case they’ve been penalized and seen their site traffic destroyed.
Hopefully you’ve learned a lot from this article and have set yourself up for success. If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to reach out. I love to hear from my readers and am happy to answer any questions you might have. That’s all from me, get out there, get researching, and get writing!