How to Research Keywords for SEO?

Table of Content

What is keyword research?
What makes keyword research important?
Market Research Trends
Traffic Growth
Customer Acquisition
Topics vs Keywords
The Basics of Keyword Research
How to Conduct Keyword Research for Your SEO Plan
Top SEO Keywords


While Google constantly rolls out algorithm updates, one aspect of inbound marketing that aims to optimise websites for search has been fairly constant: keyword research.
We'll explain keyword research in this piece along with its benefits, how to do it for your SEO strategy, and how to pick the best keywords for your website in Digital Marketing.

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What is keyword research?

Finding and analysing search phrases that people type into search engines is the practice of conducting keyword research. This is done with the intention of utilising the information for a specific purpose, frequently for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. The popularity of the target queries, how tough they are to rank for, and other information can be found through keyword research.

 

What makes keyword research important?

The ideal keywords to target can be found with the use of keyword research, which also offers useful information about the Google searches that your target market is actually making. You may use the knowledge you gain about these actual search phrases to inform both your smaller-scale marketing plan and your content strategy.

When conducting internet research, people utilise keywords to discover answers. Therefore, you stand to get more traffic if your content is successful in appearing in front of your audience while they conduct searches. As a result, you ought to concentrate on such searches.

Additionally, according to the inbound technique, we should design content around what people want to learn rather than what we want to tell them. Or to put it another way, our audience comes to us.

All of this begins with keyword research.

Check out our case study and exclusive interview here for a closer look at how Arel="noopener" target=" blank" hrefs can help you with your SEO keyword research.

The most well-known benefits of conducting keyword research are:

Market Research Trends

Effective keyword research may give you information about current marketing trends and assist you in focusing your content on the pertinent subjects and search terms that your audience is using.

Traffic Growth

The more relevant keywords you choose for the material you post, the higher you'll rank in search engine results and the more visitors your website will receive.
 

Customer Acquisition

If your company offers the information that other business professionals need, you may satisfy their wants and direct them to a call to action that will take them through the buyer's journey from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.

You may answer the questions that the majority of people in your audience want to know the answers to by studying keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent.
 

Topics vs Keywords

We hear more and more about how SEO has changed in the last 10 years and how little of an impact keywords have on our ability to rank high for daily searches.

This is accurate to some extent, but from the perspective of an SEO expert, it's a different strategy. Instead, it's the purpose behind the keyword and whether or not a piece of content fulfils that purpose (we'll cover the purpose in more detail in a moment).

However, that doesn't imply that keyword research is an antiquated practice. I'll explain:

If you utilise the correct SEO tool, keyword research will also reveal the degree to which those topics are truly popular with your target audience. The essential word here is subjects; you may identify and group your content into topics you wish to write about by looking into keywords that receive a lot of monthly searches. Then, you may utilise these themes to determine the search terms and keyword phrases you want to target.
 

The Basics of Keyword Research

When doing keyword research, there are three crucial components to consider.

1. Relevance

Relevance affects how Google ranks material. The idea of search intent enters the picture at this point. If your material satisfies the needs of the searchers, it will rank for that term. Additionally, the query's best resource must be your content. Why, after all, would Google give your article a higher ranking if it offers less value than other online content.


2. Authority

Sources that Google considers authoritative will be given more weight. This means that you must use every effort to establish yourself as an authoritative source by enhancing your website with educational, helpful material and promoting it to gain social signals and backlinks. Unless your material is extraordinary, you have a decreased chance of ranking if you're not regarded as an authority in the field or if a keyword's SERPs are stacked with authoritative sites you can't compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic).


3. Volume

Even if you wind up on the first page of search results for a certain keyword, no one will ever visit your website as a result. similar to opening a business in a deserted location.

MSV (monthly search volume), which represents the total number of times the keyword is searched each month across all audiences, is used to measure volume.
 

How to Conduct Keyword Research for Your SEO Plan

I'll outline a keyword research procedure you may use to generate a list of terms you should be aiming for. By doing this, you'll be able to create and implement a solid keyword strategy that promotes your website for the search phrases that matter to you the most.


Step 1: Based on your knowledge of your company, create a list of significant, pertinent issues.

Consider the topics you want to rank for in terms of general buckets to get this process started. You'll create five to ten topic buckets that you believe are crucial to your business, and you'll use those topic buckets later on in the process to help you choose some precise keywords.

These are presumably the subjects you blog about most frequently if you are a regular blogger. Or possibly the most frequently discussed subjects in sales interactions. What themes would your target audience look for that you want your company to be found for? Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas. If your business sold marketing software, as HubSpot does (which also happens to have some amazing SEO capabilities, but I digress), you might have generic topic buckets like these:

• 'Inbound marketing' (21K)
• "blogging" (19K) (19K)
• email advertising (30K)
• call generation (17K)
• "SEO" (214K) (214K)
• marketing through social media (71K)
• analytics in marketing (6.2K)
• advertising automation (8.5K)

See the numbers directly after each keyword, enclosed in parentheses. Their monthly search volume is that. With the use of this information, you can determine how important these subjects are to your audience and how many different subtopics you might need to cover in order to rank well for a certain keyword. We now move on to step 2 to learn more about these subtopics.


Step 2: Insert keywords into those topic buckets.

It's time to determine some keywords that fit within the topic buckets you've chosen to concentrate on. These are keyword phrases that you believe are crucial to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) since your target audience is likely searching for them.

For instance, if I chose the final topic bucket for an inbound marketing software provider, "marketing automation," I would come up with a list of possible keyword phrases that I believe users might enter in relation to that topic. These could consist of:

• tools for marketing automation
• using marketing automation software: techniques
• What is automated marketing?
• determining whether I require marketing automation software
• driving nurture
• automating email marketing
• exemplary automation tools

And the list goes on. Not coming up with your final list of keyword phrases is the goal of this step. You simply want to come up with a list of words and phrases that you imagine clients could use to look for material under that certain topic bucket. So that you don't have something too cumbersome, we will subsequently refine the listings.

Finding out the terms your website is already being found for is a good technique to generate keyword ideas, even though Google is encrypting more and more keywords every day. Website analytics tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot's Sources report, accessible in the Traffic Analytics tool, are required for this. In order to determine the keywords, people are using to find your website, dig deeper into the traffic sources for your website and sort through the organic search traffic bucket.

For as many topic buckets as you have, repeat this technique. And never forget that if you're struggling to come up with pertinent search phrases, you can always go over to your customer-facing colleagues in sales or service and ask them what kinds of terms their prospects and customers use or common questions they have. These are frequently excellent places to begin your keyword research.

At HubSpot, we carry out this step using the Search Insights Report. With the aid of this template, you can do the same thing: organise your keywords into topical clusters, examine MSV, and use the results to guide your editorial strategy and timetable.


Step 3: Recognize How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Conduct Appropriate Analysis.

User intent, as I mentioned in the previous part, is currently one of the most important aspects of how well you may rank on search engines like Google. Today, it's more crucial for your website to answer the issue a searcher was trying to solve than it is to merely contain the keyword they chose. How does this impact your keyword research, then?

It's simple to take keywords at face value, but beyond the surface, they might mean a lot of different things. You need to be very cautious about how you interpret the keywords you target because the searcher's intent is so crucial to your chance of ranking.

Consider a scenario in which you are looking for information on how to start a blog for an article you plan to write. What a searcher is looking for when they use the keyword "blog"—which might refer to either a blog post or the blog website—will affect how your article is written. Are you looking for information on how to start a blog post individually? Or do they want to know how to start a domain for a website specifically to blog on? You should confirm the keyword's intent before using it if your content strategy solely targets those who are interested in the latter.

It's a good idea to type the keyword directly into a search engine to check what kinds of results appear to confirm the user's intent. Assure Google that the content you want to produce for the term is closely related to it.


Step 4: Find relevant search terms.

When conducting keyword research, you might have already come up with this innovative idea. Otherwise, it's a terrific method to add to those lists.

Look at the associated search terms that show up when you enter a keyword into Google if you're having trouble coming up with additional keywords people may be looking for about a particular issue. You'll get some search suggestions linked to your initial query when you key in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results. These keywords may give you ideas for further terms you might want to research.


Step 5: Make use of tools for keyword research.

You can produce more keyword ideas using phrase match and exact match keywords using keyword research and SEO tools depending on the concepts you've already generated. Among the most well-liked ones are:

Ahrefs
SEMrush
Ubersuggest
Google Keyword Planner
SECockpit
Keywords Everywhere
Moz
KeywordTool.io
KWFinder
 

Top SEO Keywords

Recognize that there are no "great" keywords—only the ones that your audience uses frequently to search. With this in mind, it's up to you to develop a plan that will assist you in ranking sites and generating traffic.

Relevance, authority, and traffic will all be factors in choosing the optimal keywords for your SEO campaign. On the basis of:

the degree of opposition you face.
Your capacity to create content of a higher calibre than what is currently ranked.







  You can find keywords for your search campaigns with the use of a keyword planner. Using this free tool, you may find new keywords associated with your company, get an idea of the number of searches they receive, and find out how much it will cost to target them.