Keyword Research — we’ve done the research for you.
For PPC and SEO, keyword research is one of the basic building blocks that can make or break your campaigns. Without proper keyword research, you are almost certain to fail.
Keyword research isn’t difficult. In fact, we’re going to teach you pretty much everything you need to know about it in this article. (Remember us, when you feel like not doing it yourself!)
Let’s goooo!!
What is Keyword Research?
It’s the process of researching keywords… hmmm, it’s tempting to just leave it at that.
To go a bit deeper, it’s the process of discovering valuable search queries to target with ads or content — ideally these search queries have low competition and high search volume.
By valuable, I mean search queries that match what your product is — we could find a valuable keyword for coffee beans but, if you sell pens, there is no point in targeting those ‘coffee bean’ keywords.
Why is it important to PPC and SEO?
If no one is searching for the term you are targeting, then what is the point?
Research will identify keywords that get a decent amount of traffic with low competition.
Ahrefs predicts that 90% of webpages get no organic traffic.
Not doing proper keyword research is the reason why! It also helps you to:
Understand your audience
Find new topics for marketing content.
Not only does it inform what your audience is searching for and what content to create, it should also inform what the intention of your audience is when they make that search. Knowing the intention is important. You want to match the content you make to the intent of the searcher.
How to find Keywords.
That’s all well and good, but how do you actually find keywords? Great question. One we’ll address now.
There are heaps of strategies to find keywords to target. Let’s go over some of our favourites.
Brainstorm ‘Seed’ Keywords.
Seed keywords are the starting point for any keyword research process. These are the top-level keywords. If you run a coffee subscription service, then your seed keywords would be:
Coffee
Coffee beans
Coffee subscription
And so on…
Write down as many of the seed keywords you can think of as possible. In some cases, these keywords might be worth targeting but, in general, seed keywords will be high competition and not worth targeting. What’s more, targeting long-tail keywords with SEO will naturally start the process of ranking for seed keywords.
Competitor research.
Find your top competitors and look at the keywords they are targeting. Throw their website into a competitor research section of a tool like SEMRush — this will give you a lot of valuable information, such as:
What are their top organic keywords?
Where they are ranking on those keywords?
Who their main competitors are.
Also, take a look at their website and check out what pages are ranking, and what they have written on each page.
Topic buckets.
Once you have a list of seed keywords and have an idea of what your competitors are doing, split the seed keywords into top-level topic buckets.
For example, continuing your coffee business. Maybe you do a coffee subscription service, and you also sell coffee-making equipment. Your topic buckets would be coffee subscription and coffee equipment.
Once you have your top-level topic buckets, it’s time to start filling those buckets in with other keywords that align with those top-level keywords.
Let’s continue the example, in the coffee equipment bucket might be:
Espresso maker
Coffee machine parts
Coffee grinder
French Press
Cafetière
Stove top espresso maker
And so on…
And this is just a list of coffee equipment. You can expand it to things like ‘how to clean an espresso maker’ or ‘how to make coffee with a French press’. You get the idea.
Study your niche.
All the above strategies will give you perfectly serviceable keywords, but these are also the keywords that your competitors will easily find.
To find areas where customers are but your competitors aren’t, you’ll need to study the niche and find the questions your customers are asking.
There are a few main places to check for any niche and then find the more specialist websites, such as industry forums.
Where to look:
Reddit: find a subreddit that matches your industry. For example, if you run a café you might go to /r/coffee and see the sorts of questions people are asking and what people are writing. Write down all the questions from the subreddit that your current keyword research has not identified.
YouTube: YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, but it is one that we don’t see come up very often when talking about SEO. Type your keywords into the search bar and see what comes up. Add any new ideas to the keyword & topic list.
Podcasts: another one that doesn’t come up very often. Find podcasts in your industry and then see what they are talking about. If you ran a platform that helped writers, you might look at the podcast ‘Writing Excuses’ and check the topics that each of their episodes cover.
Wikipedia: Wikipedia is a great place for keyword research. Find the Wikipedia page and then look at the contents section and the headers and sub-headers. These are your keywords.
Check industry forums.
Check industry publications.
Search the keywords.
Alright, now that you have a pretty extensive list of keywords, it’s time to Google every single one of those keywords.
There are a few things to keep an eye out for when you search the keywords:
Take a look at the articles that rank highly.
Check how many results there are – it’s more difficult to rank for a keyword with 100,000,000 results than one with 40,000 results.
We use a browser extension to check SEO difficulty, and off-page and on-page difficulty – these tell you how difficult it will be to rank for each keyword. The plug-in is called ‘Keywords everywhere.’
Check the SERPS features that are available for each search.
Take note of each of these next to the keyword.
Analyse the Keywords.
Alright, we have a list of keywords. It should be pretty extensive by now. But what should you focus on first? That’s when analysing them comes in.
There are two main metrics to check out to figure out which keywords to target first, and then three more to keep in mind.
Search volume.
Search volume will tell you the number of times a keyword gets searched per month.
It’s the number of searchers, so if one person searches ‘red mittens’ one thousand times and no one else searches for it, then the search volume will be 1000.
Even if you rank number one for this keyword, you will not get 100% of this traffic. At a guess, it would be about 30% of this traffic if you rank in number 1.
It’s an annual average. For example, if there is a Christmas keyword that gets 60,000 searches in December and none the rest of the year, the monthly traffic would be 5,000.
It is also country specific.
Keyword difficulty.
We use SEMrush, and Keyword Difficulty is a metric that shows how difficult it is to rank for this keyword. It’s a number between 0 and 100, with the higher the number meaning its more difficult to rank.
Backlinks.
This is a metric which tells you how many backlinks there are (links to your site from another site) on a page ranking highly for your keyword. It provides information on how many you may need to compete.
Intent.
Check out search intent – this should tell you what people are looking for when they search the keyword. If it’s navigational, then usually forget it. Commercial and informational are good, depending on what you are after.
CPC.
CPC (cost-per-click) indicates how much advertisers are willing to pay, per click, for your keyword. This is mostly important for PPC but, for SEO, a high CPC can indicate a keyword that has high commercial intent.
Which keyword do you target first?
You’ve now analysed the keywords, but which ones should you target first?
First up, compare search volume and keyword difficulty. The golden ratio is a keyword with decent traffic and a low keyword difficulty — however, finding that keyword is as likely as finding a unicorn. Instead, focus on low keyword difficulty and low traffic. These keywords are ideal, as they are usually longer and will help you match more keywords.
Next up, check the top-ranking posts for the keywords you have at the top of your list and start by focusing on the keywords which have posts with weak backlink profiles.
Get rid of any navigational keywords – unless you have a good reason to keep them.
Choose to focus on commercial or informational keywords – this is based on what your business goals are. Eventually, you will have articles that target a good selection of both commercial and informational keywords.
Now you should have a pretty decent list of keywords – time to come up with articles that match each of the keywords and then start to write the articles.
That’s a comprehensive review of Keyword Research. As always, if you have questions, contact the team at Edison.