If you want to increase your search engine traffic, use the right keyword.
If you want to optimize your website keywords, you will achieve your business goals.
Have you ever heard this advice in your time as a small business owner or aspiring SEO pro?
If so, you’re not alone.
Keyword research is one of the most important things you should know about SEO.
As someone who has been in your shoes for a long time, I know how valuable keyword research can be for you and me. That’s why I’ve written this guide for you, a beginner, to help you understand the most basic concept of SEO: Keyword Research.
Even if you don’t know what keyword research is or how to do it right, this guide will teach you everything you need to know.
Today I’m going to talk to you about:
1️⃣ What is Keyword research?
2️⃣ What is the importance of Keyword research?
3️⃣ How Keyword research could benefit you?
4️⃣ How to perform Keyword research?
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is all about finding keywords that will bring specific traffic to your company. Most of the time, keyword research is done by figuring out how your target audience is searching for a website such as yours.
To put it another way, when we are looking for solutions to any of our issues, we turn to a search engine such as “Google“ “Duckduckgo” to help us find the answer to that problem.
We hope that the search engine will give us a solution in the first page of the search results page (also known as SERP).
The goal of keyword research is to find those ‘phrases’, ‘words’, and ‘queries’ that the mass is searching for using a search engine.
As a business (or even a blog), when we know what queries (mass) of users (search engines) are asking, we can create or optimize new pages to help users find the answer and drive traffic to our business. Alternatively, we can use the same keyword (queries) to run PPC (pay-per-click) ads on platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads to drive traffic to our or our clients’ websites.
The goal of keyword research is to identify the ‘topics’ and ‘ideas’ that your target audience is searching for, and assign a specific business value to them. Another way to think about keyword research is that it helps you discover the questions and queries your target customers are searching for on the web and gives you the benefit of speaking the language your target audience understands.
Let’s look at a simple example:
"Best baby diaper"
"Best brand"
"Best diaper"
Google search is smart enough to auto-populate a large number of frequently asked questions to help your father ask the correct question. Now, depending on where your father is located and what he understands, he will stay with his question or maybe pick one that Google suggests.
Google keeps a record of how many of these questions are asked every day by millions of people all over the world.
Our keyword research process will show you the most popular question, along with your geo-location and how many of those questions you have asked within a certain period of time (e.g. 30 days).
These statistics would help you as a business owner understand which of these questions to answer on your site, which in turn will help users to find your site and the solution. The solution will help you to drive more specific traffic from search engines that will convert directly into sales, ad sales or even affiliate sales
Well, that’s how SEO keyword research works. With a bit of planning, you could drive massive traffic to your blog/business and make the most out of your efforts.
On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing your keywords for search engines. That’s something for advanced users but today we’re diving deep into keyword research.
By doing keyword research, you can experience your business in a fraction of the time. Because you’re using data with emotion, it will help you get the most out of your work. Let’s take an example:
I mentioned earlier that a father was looking for a ‘Stroller’ for his little boy. Now imagine that you’re a business that sells baby strollers (you could be anyone) and you want to replace the stroller with a new product.
With keyword research tools like this, we can find data such as which keyword ‘Also known as a query, question, or search term’ a parent is searching for a solution to.
The following is the output of a tool called Semrush, which displays similar queries with large amounts of data, as shown below:
Let’s see what’s going on in this picture. (Don’t worry if you can’t see everything 100% – that’s normal for beginners.)
👉 Keywords: This is the most common question users have when searching for the top baby diaper brands. This is the keyword that we focus on in SEO, which is why we often refer to it as a target keyword or “focus keyword”.
👉 Volume: This gives you an idea of how many people are looking for that keyword in a month. This is an important metric because even if you think a search term is going to be popular, the search data will show you otherwise. For example, in the example below, you can see that two similar keywords have a significant difference in monthly searches.
- Best baby diaper: 4.4k searches/month
- Best baby diaper 2024: 1.0k searches/month
👉 Trend : This one tells you whether the keyword trend increases (more searchers) or decreases (fewer searchers). For instance, the term iPhone 11 Pro will increase in popularity in 2019-20 but as soon as Apple launches a new iPhone this term will decrease in price. You will learn more about this as we progress in our Keyword Research Guide.
👉 Keyword Difficulty: This metric is important because it gives you an idea of how easy or hard it will be to rank your target keyword on Google’s first page. These tools compare all the current ranking pages for On-page SEO, Backlink profile, Domain Authority and a few more to rank these queries. The higher the difficulty of the keyword, the easier it is to rank for.
Here are some of the matrices you’ll get when you begin your Keyword research:
In short, keyword research helps you make data-informed decisions. If you haven’t figured it out by now, data is king.
However, before we dive in, make sure you’ve read my previous guide on the Difference Between SEO Keywords and Queries, which will help you get a better understanding of what keyword research is all about.
Let’s dive in and see what keyword research can do for you.
What is the Importance of Keyword research?
Not all keywords are created equal, so let’s break this down. Keyword research can benefit your business (whether it’s a blog, an ecommerce site, a service, or anything else).
✅ Keyword research allows you to get a better understanding of the language your target audience is using on search engines. We usually base our research on Google search as it is the largest search engine in the world.
✅ Keyword research can help you find untapped queries that can directly help you acquire paid customers through organic search engines such as google search, baidu, etc.
✅ Engaged Audience: The audience you’ll be targeting is already engaged and ready to buy, and you’ll get high levels of engagement through comments, sharing or even sales.
✅ Market and Customer Trend: On a regular basis, keyword research can help you get a better idea of the market and customer trend.
✅ Keyword advantage: Putting keywords and SEO in front of your competitors gives you a huge competitive edge. If done correctly, in a niche that isn’t too crowded, you could earn a ton of backlinks, giving you a huge advantage as a first mover.
✅ Decrease PPC cost: Keyword SEO will drive traffic for free that a business typically pays for through PPC. This organic ranking could drastically reduce your business's digital marketing costs.
✅ Increase Ad Revenue: Marketers/ Bloggers who rely on Google AdSense/Setupad could use keyword research to discover high CPC keywords, thus increasing their ad revenue exponentially with the same amount of effort.
There are many other benefits of keyword research, but these are the most important ones.
Here’s another little-known keyword research fact:
Many people misinterpret keyword research as just looking for high-volume keywords. This is not the case.
As an SEO expert, your job is to weed out those keywords that don’t add value to your business. After finding high-value keywords, you’ll also learn how to prioritize them for maximum value in a shorter amount of time.
The beauty of keyword research skills is that once you practice it, it only gets better. Now, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of keyword research.
Types of Keywords based on the users intent
Continuing with our Baby diaper example above, a parent might ask this question in a different way. For instance:
✔️ A parent would like to know how to choose a baby diaper.
✔️ A parent wants to know what is the most popular baby diaper in the current market.
✔️ A parent is prepared to buy the best diaper immediately.
✔️ A doctor would be using this question for research purposes.
See how the same query means different things when used for different purposes? This is what we call search intent.
To sum up, Keywords can be broken down into different types based on the user intent. Here are the top 4 types of keywords:
1️⃣ Commercial Keywords
2️⃣ TransactionalKeywords
3️⃣ InformationalKeys
4️⃣ NavigationalKeywords
These 4 types decide which keyword directly impacts your revenue. It also has a lot to do with the content funnel (toilet-to-fuelled-fuelled, or MOFU, or BOFU, which is a topic for another time).
What are you need to conduct keyword research?
At BigBloggerTips I use a very specific approach to keyword research. To conduct keyword research, you will need the following:
✏️ A free or paid keyword research tool.
✏️ A list of seed words or list of SEO competition domains/companies (more on this below).
✏️ Using seed words to generate a list of search engine keywords (SEO keywords)
using competitive websites to search for profitable keywords.
✏️ A document ( Excel or similar) that captures and cleanses the keyword.
✏️ A system that delegates the final keywords to production (writing blog articles, creating eBooks, creating video content, creating product page, etc.)
✏️ Measuring the ranking with a keyword rank monitoring tool.
Once keyword research is integrated into your overall business marketing strategy, it allows you to grow organically. These are the exact steps I use to drive over half million page views per year and generate close to $5000 in revenue annually.
Here is a great example of an example of a Keyword research process:
This is the result of a keyword research process I implemented 10 years ago.
My keyword research process includes research, cleanup, execution/delegation, monitoring, and optimization.
These 5 steps will take care of everything you need to know about keyword research.
Now that we have a clear understanding of what keyword research is and how to do it, let's get started.
