Keyword Research for beginners – what is it all about?
There is no denying that Keyword Research is the most crucial part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You can’t start planning for a campaign or writing a new blog post unless you understand which phrase you are targeting.
Conversely, you can’t estimate returns and costs from SEO unless you first determine who is competing against.
The following is an essential crush guide on how to do SEO keyword research for beginners.
#1: What Is Keyword Research In The Context Of SEO?
Keywords are phrases and words that describe the topics you write about and identify what people are searching for.
These keywords bridge the gap between your audience and your content, helping people find your content.
However, keyword research is the practice of finding which phrases are used on search engines when individuals are searching for information, and usually includes finding both relative competitiveness of terms and the search volume.
#2: Why Is It Important To Do Keyword Research For SEO?
Keyword Research is a crucial part of Search Engine Optimization.
When Google is deciding where to rank your content in the search results, keywords are the determinant SEO ranking factors.
Get them correctly, Google will give you some love and will recognize what your content is all about, making it pop up at the top of search results.
Wouldn’t you love to see your content appearing on a page of SERP (Search Engine Result Pages)?
I know I would, hence why it is essential we try to learn the basic fundamentals on how to do Keyword research in the correct way.
In essence, Keyword research links you with your customers or audience by finding topics to include in your SEO strategy.
When you understand what your target audience is looking for, you can optimize your content to deliver the needed answers.
Generally, keyword research supports not only content creation but all promotional and marketing activities such as email marketing.
It also helps with competitive research and
#3: Steps Needed To Do Keyword Research
As you can see, keyword research has a lot to do to meet both you and your audience needs.
Your audience: is searching for content to help them find what they are looking for
When individuals find what they are looking for in the search results, and visit your site and convert, then everyone becomes happy.
So, how do you come up with a list of phrases and words you can use in your SEO strategy?
Admittedly, I must say I have had a love and hate relationship with SEO for some time until one day, it certainly clicked when I began to understand SEO and how to apply it in my online content.
To digress a little bit from our main topic, please note SEO and Keyword research can be applied to:
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Pinterest Pin images and descriptions
- E-commerce Product Descriptions
All are done with the aim of giving you visibility and increasing the odds of your content being found on the search engines by your audience or prospective customer.
This article hopes to provide you with the following crush guide on how you can approach keyword research for SEO.
#4: How To Do Keyword Research For SEO?
Step 1. Identify Your Keyword Universe
Identify an extensive list of phrases and words that are relevant to your business that shows that the visitor of your site is interested in your content.
- Use your intuition
- Google suggest data
- Internal search data
- Analytics data
- Competitor insight
- PPC data
- Any historical data from your company, business or your client
Construct your first “seed word” list
Step 2. Expand the List
To know relative search volumes of all your keyword and to expand the seed word list.
Step 3. Prioritize Your List
The newly expanded list is called keyword universe.
Step 4. Categorize Your Priority Keywords
You are supposed to prioritize your keywords and select the most significant keywords that you will use in your campaign.
You should classify the keywords into sections specific to business goals after you have a priority list of keywords for your campaign.
This allows for more understanding of performance and granular reporting.
#4: Identify Preferred Landing Pages
Finally, you can start mapping the priority keywords to particular posts that they are more relevant to once you have your keywords defined in the above manner.
These pages will be the main target of your optimization activities for your main keywords.
#5: Best Practice For Keyword Research
To describe keywords it is not just enough to understand whether they are a long, medium or short tail.
The characteristics of each category depends on it’s search volume, competition and ranking difficulty.
Short Tail
Broad search terms with only one to two words, tend to have high search volume, competitive and very difficult to rank for such as credit card.
Medium Tail
Search terms with two to three
Long Tail
Search terms with three to more
Understand The Intent Of The Searcher
To get the maximum from keywords for content creation, Search Engine Optimization, and marketing, you have to understand the intent of the searchers.
When you understand their intention, you turn into a mind reader, where you will able to provide what your audience wants.
Construct Grammatically Correct Keyword Phrases
As well as understanding the intent of the searchers it is crucially important to make sure the keyword phrases you are constructing are grammatically correct and read like humans.
People are increasingly using voice search via Siris, Alexa, Cortana, Bixby
This is where the future of search is heading to.
For example: A typical question, I frequently hear my daughter asking via her smart phone is:
Google .. What is the weather today? Is it cold or warm?
When searchers are asking questions via these tools, they are intentionally and naturally speaking correctly based on their chosen language.
#6: Why You Should Focus On Targetting Long Tail Keywords?
It is always advisable to choose long tail keywords as you are more likely to have much
This will, in turn, increase your chances of your content being ranked high even if search volume is low.
The following video explains how to do long tail keyword research.
#7: Keyword Research Tools
There are numerous keyword research tools in SEO, but below are the top eight favorites to get you started.
Google Adwords Keyword Planner – This FREE tool enables you to evaluate monthly global and local search volumes for keywords, an estimated cost per click, and competition levels.
Brian Dean from Backlinco explains how to do keyword research with Google Keyword Planner in the right way.
Jaaxy – Great
Ahrefs – Awesome tool that completely suits keyword research, SEO and content tools.
Answer The Public – To enable you to target content that provides answers. This tool breaks down its results by type of question.
SEMrush – A tool that helps you find keywords related to your main search terms by providing keyword data.
KeySearch – To help find relative keywords.
KWFinder – Excellent SEO tool, to help find long tail keywords with low SEO
It will tell you if the chosen keyword is easy or difficult to rank for.
The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – This tool provides estimated value, related terms, search volumes and more.
#7: Keyword Research Tools – Update
I reserve this section to add, additional tools as we find them.
Shout out in the comments box below when you come across a tool that you think will be helpful for SEO. This will allow us to compile a library of useful SEO tools for beginners.
Moz Explorer – Great helpful tool to discover the right keywords, find harmful technical issues and track your rankings and competitive reports.
Ubbersuggest – Neil Patel’s awesome FREE keyword tool that generates more suggestions and keyword ideas to help with your digital marketing strategy and content creation.
I like the upgrade. It now shows you SEO difficulty, SERP analysis, paid difficulty, search volume and paid per click cost.
You can also see what your competitors are ranking for and their (DA) – Domain Authority.
See examples below when searching for how to do keyword research phrase
Results by Search Volume
Results by Keyword Ideas – Here you can toggle to see Suggestions and Related keywords
Results by SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Analysis
Take Home Message
You hopefully now begin to understand how to do keyword research for SEO.
This is so to enable you to select the right phrases and words for the search engines and help your target audience find your online content.
Don’t feel discouraged when you see your content are not ranked in google or other search engines.
As I explained to one of our fellow bloggers. It takes time for the search engines to rank your articles especially when your domain is quite new.
Plus there are many factors that could also contribute
We will discuss these factors in our next article on SEO.
Invest some time learning how to do keyword research in the right way using the tools listed above.
Pick one or two , that you like and can use with ease.
Ensure your chosen main focus keyword and related keywords are sprinkled in several places in your article.
Tip: To determine any faults that might be affecting your rankings and traffic do not forget to occasionally perform an SEO audit.
Related:
- Quick Guide On How To Start a Blog For Beginner’s Step by Step
- Beginners Guide To SEO: The Top Fundamentals To Focus On, In 2019
What do you think of the keyword research crush guide for beginners? Have you any more tips to add to the list? Leave me your comments below.
Please do not forget to share the article with your friends. Thank you.
Hi Rabia,
Awesome guide on keyword research! As I’m just starting out with my blog, keyword research is an area in which I am trying to improve but it can be confusing. This post has been very helpful and cleared a few things up for me. I am definitely going to share this with my friends who are also just starting out in the blogging world. Thank you so much!
Hi Dan
Welcome to the blogging world. You will get good at it as time goes by. I am still learning as I go along and I realized now, had I grasped the concept of keyword research, my articles would have been in a better position today. I encourage you to take your time learning the basics and the fundamentals on how to do keyword research and SEO in the correct way. It will pay for itself in the long run. I am so glad to hear the article has helped to clear a few things for you. Thank you for your feedback and for sharing the article with your friends. Do stop by again.
Best wishes.
Thanks Rabia,
I found your article for keyword search very helpful. I seem to struggle with finding the right keywords to use. When I think I have the perfect keyword “title” to use and spend a lot of time creating a post using it, I still don’t find my articles on page one in Google. It is very frustrating and discouraging!
I will try your way and see if it makes a difference for me. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Thanks for this very helpful information! It is much appreciated.
Devara
Devera, Please don’t feel discouraged by not seeing your articles ranked on the search engines. There are many factors that could affect this, especially if your blog is relatively new. Your (DA) Domain authority is likely to be very low and may not even exist in the search engine’s radar yet. It takes time for your articles to rank and also because of lack of backlinks for new blogs. However, it is important to ensure you carry on doing keyword research for your blog posts in the correct way as I mentioned in the article, focusing on long tail keywords with low competition. Confirm your choice of selected keywords using KWfinder as well as implementing best practice for Onsite Optimization and backlinking strategies. Eventually, your articles will rank you may have to wait for many months. It also depends on the volume of content you publish, the length of the post should be 2000 words or more, high quality and many other factors. My next post to be published will be on SEO, so will see what lessons we can learn from here. Don’t worry yourself too much on this, I am also experiencing the same issue and my domain is one year old. You need to be patient, meanwhile, keep learning about SEO and make sure you implement best SEO practices. Google organic traffic is the best form of traffic to get but it is not easy to rank new domains. Focus on generating quality content and publish frequently, but get your keywords research and SEO in order. We will triumph with SEO one day. Eventually, our efforts will pay off. Best wishes.
Thanks for this post – I have been working on keyword research for quite some time, and regularly use Jaaxy and Ahrefs. The list of other resources out there is helpful, I may need to look into others as well! It is interesting to me how these tools have slightly different information. I guess that is where intuition comes in!
Hi Christen
Welcome. Yes, I have also used Jaaxy and Ahrefs. They are all good in their own way. I tend to use a combination of tools depending on what exactly I am trying to do during the keyword research phase or when implementing SEO or doing an SEO Audit. For keyword research, I like KWFinder for confirming my chosen target keyword. It tells me the straight way if my keywords are easy or difficult rank for. For finding other related keywords I might use other tools or our good old google will do. Just depends on your preference and what you are trying to achieve. There is another tool, I forgot to mention in the post is called Ubbersuggest by Neil Patel. It is pretty good as well. Let me know how you find these tools and if you come across new ones so we can add them to the list.
Best wishes
Hi Rabia,
Great article. I thought I was pretty good with Keywords but this article on keywords for beginners is excellent and I learned a lot. Thank you.
The ‘answer the public’ keyword tool is great. I like to ask questions in my keywords and this is perfect. I had never heard of it before. Keywords really are vital for success and you have explained that really well here. Thanks so much. All the best in 2019,
Kev
Hi Kevin
I am so pleased to hear that I was somehow able to educate a veteran SEO expert such as yourself. I myself amazed sometimes when things are explained differently how I am able to understand it better or see a different perspective of it. Yes ‘The answer the public’ is a great tool not only for keyword research but for other things like constructing blog post titles and the likes. It is very useful. There are so many great tools out there. I will be exploring more of them and mention them in our future articles. Do come again please and if you enjoy reading the article please share it with your friends.
Thank you.
Best wishes for 2019 to you too.
Excellent article about SEO and keyword researching .it is very important SEO researching methods to help draw traffic to a blog or website.This guide will help many on line bloggers including my self to be more successful marketers.
Hi Erick
This is what I hope my humble article will do, to help myself and fellow bloggers and entrepreneurs to really learn how to implement keyword research correctly. I know how important it is as I personally failed to grasp the concept at the beginning. I just didn’t get it until recently. There is so much to learn. I focus on educating the newbies because I realized it is really important to get the foundation right from the onset before you even start implementing SEO. When I started I knew I had to do keyword research but I just I didn’t get it and instead, I focused on implementing SEO, even though it was the right to do, it didn’t help with my rankings and cost me some time. I guess is all part of learning.
Thank you for your feedback
Best wishes
Thanks Rabia – This post has been really helpful for me, and I will certainly refer to it again in the future!
Hey Dee
So humble to hear you found the article helpful. Yes, I do encourage you to visit the site more, I am determined to put out more helpful content for my readers such as yourself.
Thank you.
I aim to learn something new every day and by reading this article, I can honestly say that I did.
Thanks a lot for providing an easy-to-understand guide to a relatively comprehensive topic.
Hi Lars
Thank you for your comments. I am pleased to hear you learned something from the article. This is my aim, to break down the subject matter in a very simple way so beginners alike can follow and implement in their content with ease. The internet is full of information and sometimes far too much than required in my opinion. You can easily get lost and end up being more confused than when you started researching for whatever you were looking for. Do stop by again and don’t forget to share the article with your friends.
Best wishes.
Wonderful resource for me, thank you for this!
You are welcome Kim.
I hope the guide will help a bit in your keyword research endeavors. It is one of the most important areas for many bloggers. We definitely need to take our time to understand and implement it correctly to ensure our articles get found by our audience from the search engines. I wish I grasped the concept very early on in the process when I started my blogging journey. I am slowly getting the hang of it and improving as I go along.
Please do share the article with your friends.
Thank you.