We have all heard how important it is to use the right keywords in order for your audience to find you. We also know how one keyword can make a huge difference. All this is true, but how can you do keyword research?

In this topic, we will discuss how to get inside the mind of your audience and understand what they want to find.

 

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research should be the basis of any online marketing campaign.

The simple goal of keyword research is to figure out what your target audience is searching for and what it will take to actually rank for those keywords.

Without knowing what keywords you should be targeting, you have basically no chance of understanding what your audience wants to find. But don’t worry we’ll go through with that in order to help you succeed.

 

How to start keyword research?

The first phase of keyword research involves researching your competitor’s keywords. To learn more about competitor’s research check out our blog – Competitors Keywords Analysis. 

Sometimes this is the most difficult part of the process as many people unfamiliar with keyword competition will select very broad words to target such as keyword example, hotel, or online coach. 

Others will pick obscure phrases that no one will likely search such as SEO/Link Building/Social Media. Which you understand is not going to bring good results. 

So the first thing you will need to do is find suitable, related phrases for your business.

When you have a list of the keywords that you have from your competitor’s keyword research, you can start with additional analysis. 

 

How to find profitable SEO keywords with Ubersuggest 

Ubersuggest allows you to get insight into the keyword research strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge

It is a free keyword research suggestion tool (with an optional subscription) for helping you discover new keywords.

The first thing you want to do is go to Ubersuggest and under Keyword Analyzer/Keyword Overview paste your keyword. There you can check your keyword data for: 

• Search volume – number of searches the keyword has during a month
• SEO difficulty – estimated competition in organic search
• Paid difficulty – estimated competition in paid search
• Cost per click – average cost per click for a Google Ad

Let’s say we’re doing keyword research for an online business coach. Input the phrase and click Search. 

You’re also provided an overview of what it takes, on average, in terms of backlinks and domain authority, to reach the first page of Google for the keyword. This is located above a chart displaying the keyword search volume, both for desktop and mobile.

You’ll also be able to scroll down and see different variations of your keyword phrase.

This gives you a wider view of what you can strive to rank for. 

If your budget is low,  you may want to optimize a low competition, low cost per click option that still gets good results. For example, “how to start a life coach business online” could be what you are looking for.

Or, you can pick multiple and A/B test them for the best results.

However, once you start using it, you’ll see that it is a great tool.

 

Ubersuggest for Google searches 

Ubersuggest has an extension that makes keyword research really easy and effective.

Sure when you use Ubersuggest, you’ll see suggested keywords on the right side, but that is a different thing from what I want you to do. 

First, download your extension by visiting Chrome Web Store and Add – Ubersuggest – SEO and Keyword Discovery to your browser. 

Instead, I want you to perform a Google search and scroll down to the first organic result. It should look like this:

I want you to click on the down arrow next to “Est. Visits” which just stands for estimated visits.

You’ll now see all of the keywords that the ranking web page ranks for. In other words, you see all of the other keywords that a specific URL ranks for.

And if you want you can also easily export that data with a click of a button.

 

How To Create A Keyword database? 

As you are going through this keyword research you want to keep a spreadsheet of all of the keywords with relevant data. 

Now that you have a base spreadsheet to use for keyword data entry, let’s have a  look at what’s next.

I want to show you some ways how to interpret the data about each keyword and further narrow down your results.

One thing I suggest using is highlighting the cells a certain color based on the numerical value in the cell. 

A three-color formatting style is best to visually see what level of value the certain keyword has. 

• Lowest Value = Red
• Medium Value = Orange
• High Value = Green

Certain fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is good whereas a lower number is bad.

So for instance if your search volume is high and SEO difficulty low you want to mark it as High Value = Green. 

Where if your search volume is low and SEO difficulty is high you want to mark it as Low = Red. 

Once you’re finished, you can highlight the top row and add a filter by applying the Sort & Filter > Filter option.

You can begin with selecting the filter for the Difficulty column and sorting it from smallest to largest.

As you can imagine, having the highlighting and sorting options would be very valuable when looking at a spreadsheet with a lot of keywords.

You could quickly see which keywords have the most searches and least competition or the least competition but most searches.

 

Digging deeper & Selecting the best keywords

Now the next step is to actually select the best keywords that you want your site to rank for. 

For instance, if your website is commercial (like offering products or services), you should go with keywords that seem to have the most commercial intent based on the current ranking websites. 

If your website is informational (like blogs for example), you can go with keywords that have the most informational intent.
 

Some things to keep in mind are: 

• Look for a “sweet spot” of high search volume in conjunction with low difficulty/competition.
• Look at keywords with high search volume with top competitors that have lower domain authority and backlinks.
• If your website is already ranking on the first page, but not in the top 5 spots and the keyword has good search volume, your focus should be on getting those keywords and phrases to rank higher.
• It’s not always the actual decision that is the most difficult – it is actually compiling the data which takes a lot of your time.
• Do not forget to take the keywords that are more informational and use them for content topic ideas.

Next, you want to select the top 5 primary keywords that you would like to rank for and start preparing to write content around it. 

 

How to rank with primary keywords?

Let’s begin by analyzing what Primary Keywords are. 

Primary keywords are those terms you want to rank up for. These are terms with high search volume that can bring a big enough amount of traffic to your site but with low SEO Difficulty. 

As a rule of thumb, your primary keywords should be targeted to a broader audience and should be spread out across the text on your site. As a rule of thumb, your site should have only one primary keyword. If you want to write additional content around that topic you should find some keyword synonyms that you can start using as your primary keyword in the next article. 

 

What are primary keyword Synonyms? 

Now that we explained what are primary keywords, let’s talk a bit about Synonyms.

Synonyms of a word are words or phrases that have the same meaning. Using synonyms in your copy can help people understand it better, especially if you’re discussing a difficult topic. 

To find search engine proven synonyms follow these steps:

• Go to Google.com and search on: ~keyword

• Place the ~ (tilde symbol) before your main keyword. For example ~marketing for
              coaches
• Words in bold in the search engine results are synonyms. For example coaching,
              coaches, marketing, market.
• Look for single words, not phrases or plurals. 
• Ignore any words that are too broad or not relevant to your market.

Keep a list of these keywords, as you will need to use them in your article. 

 

What Are Primary Keyword Related Keywords?

Primary related keywords are words and phrases that are connected to your primary keyphrase. Google uses these related words to better understand what your text is about and to connect it to your other content on your site.

Related key phrases on a page about [marketing for coaches] could be marketing coach, digital marketing coach, marketing plans for coaches. Those words don’t carry the same meaning, but it’s very likely you’ll discuss these points in your text.

A great tool you can use to find these keywords is LSI Graph. 

 

What Are Primary Keyword Long-tail Keywords?

A long-tail keyword is more specific than a primary keyword, and most of the time – but not necessarily – it consists of more words.

Google Suggestions are an awesome source of long-tail keyword variations. Just start typing your primary keyword into the Google search box and see what variations Google suggests. 

Keep in mind that there are many various ways to perform keyword research, and you have to try out different analysis methods to see which ones speak to you the best when deciding on keywords!

Now as you are done with the keyword research, you want to keep track of all of these keywords, so when you are ready to actually start writing the content, you can use all these keyword types in your text. This will tell Google that your article is relevant for your topic so you can start ranking higher. 

However, there are certain rules that you need to follow. You can read all about SEO copywriting rules at our blog – Seo copywriting – How to engineer “No-brainer” content that your audience needs and wants. 

So that’s it. We talked about some tips to use in your Keyword research and now all that is left is for you to try them out! I would love to hear your thoughts on that. 

Was there anything that you already knew and did some of the things surprise you at how simple they might be?