How to do Keyword Research for SEO: Beginner’s Guide [2023]

What is Keyword and Keyword Research?

The study by Ahrefs on search traffic revealed that 90.63% of content gets NO traffic from Google because of not choosing the right keywords. 

Only 9.73% of website owners consider keyword research the most important aspect in SEO, and they get wonderful results by generating huge traffic, leads, and sales. 

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So what is keyword and keyword research?

Keywords are those words or phrases that people type on search engines like Google and Bing to sort out their queries or problems. 

And the process of reaching out to the audience with the relevant content is keyword research. It leads visitors to the organic search results, where they reach out to your websites to find out their requirements. 

Role of keywords in SEO Marketing:

Be it blog, YouTube, video marketing, visual content, or in any form of content marketing, the role of keywords is unarguably vital. Keywords to help your website;

1. With the better ranking on search engines
2. To reach with the well-targeted right prospects.
3. With enormous traffic and leads
4. With great ROI by bringing sales
5. To establish a brand of your business.
6. To establish effectiveness, authority, and trust.

Types of Keywords: 

a) Short Tail Keyword: 

Short tail keywords consist of one word or phrase. These keywords are highly competitive and most searched by the people across the search engines. 

Few examples of short-tail keywords are “Business”, “Marketing”, ‘Shoes’, “Footwear”, “Coffee”, “Tea”, “Hotel”, “Restaurant” and “Resorts”. 

Short Tail Keyword Advantage: 

• Robust market presence and brand visibility
• Drives crazy traffic on your website
• Extremely difficult for your competitors to surpass you once you start ranking for short-tail keywords.
• You can generate colossal leads sales to grow your business at an exponential rate.
• You need to invest very little or zero dollar in paid expenses marketing to generate traffic, leads conversions, or brand visibility.

Short Tail Keywords Disadvantages: 

• Extremely competitive and difficult to rank.
• If you are a new or medium-size business, then ranking for short-tail keywords needs huge investment, resources, and an in-house team for several months or years. 
• Low quality and less targeted traffic and leads.
• Bad conversion rate.

b) Long Tail Keyword: 

Long-tail keywords consist of 2 or more than 2 words or phrases. These keywords are less competitive and easy to rank. 

Few examples of long-tail keywords are “online business”, “marketing trend”, “hiking shoes for men”, “best restaurants near me”, “hotels in New York”,  and “luxury resorts in Thailand”. 

Long Tail Keyword Advantage: 

• Less competitive and easy to rank
• Best for startups or new website owners to get ranking on search engines to drive good traffic.
• Highly targeted audience and qualified traffic
• Better leads and high conversions

Long Tail Keyword Disadvantage: 

• Less brand visibility
• Less search volume and traffic
• Needs A/B testing and competitors analysis to find out which one will perform better.

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How long-tail keywords can be the Gold-mine for SEO? 

• People type long-tail keywords to get the specific answer to their query. More than 70% of the queries on the search engines are in the form of long-tail keywords. 
• The most important fact is that the average conversion rate of long-tail keywords is 36%, which is huge for any business. [Wordstream]
• The organic search results and ranking can be achieved in less than three months with fewer resources, efforts, and expenses. You can hook your SEO ranking for most commercial and traffic-driven keywords with the help of long-tail keywords. 
• In one survey of HubSpot, for more than 65% of the companies, getting traffic and leads is the topmost challenge. But, you can make a solid sales funnel with the long-tail keywords. 
• According to Google, 27% of the online global population prefers voice search. You can answer voice assistant searches by focusing on long-tail keywords. In that way, you can get tons of quality traffic and leads from Amazon Alexa and Google voice searches. 
• A long-tail keyword is the soul of content marketing and the backbone of your digital marketing strategy. It defines the goal and mission of your business very well. 

5 Significant pillars of Keyword Research for SEO 

Before doing keyword research, you must be aware of those significant crucial aspects that directly impact traffic, ranking, lead generation, conversion, and marketing budgets. 

The 5 major things that you should not ignore while doing keyword research are;

1. Trend
2. Search Volume
3. SEO Difficulty
4. Paid Difficulty
5. Cost Per Click (CPC)

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How to do keyword research for SEO?

Step-1: Seed Keywords Listing

List down the seed keywords that define your business or brand. Following things you need to analyze before choosing seed keywords:

1. Seed keywords must be related to your niche or brand.
2. What type of product or service do you want to sell?
3. What keyword ads would you buy?
4. What keyword do you want to rank for on search engines?
5. What will people type in a search for my business on search engines?

For example, seed keywords for my marketing and advertising company, The Blue Oceans Group are SEO, social media marketing, PPC, affiliate marketing, and Google AdSense. 

Step-2: Research the taste and preference of your audience: 

You can consider both primary and secondary research. For primary research, you can conduct an online survey, polling to know their opinion. 

For secondary research, you can look at and analyze the audience’s comments on your competitor’s websites. 

Step-3: Analyze the trend of the market and take suggestions:

You can analyze Google Analytics and Google Webmaster to analyze the trend of your audience. You can also take suggestions from Google with the autocomplete method. Google only tells you about the top trending keywords based on people’s search in Google autocomplete method. Soovle can also help you with the top trending keyword with autocomplete methods. 

Step-4: Expand your keyword list by using SEO tools:

Now it’s time to expand your list based on your business needs and goals. You can use the best SEO tools like SEMrush, to find the best keywords, including long-tail keywords. You can bifurcate the list of keywords based on search difficulty, search volume, CPC to generate traffic, leads, and conversion. 

Step-5: Keyword Grouping: 

Keyword grouping is the process of organizing your keywords to avoid a mess. Keyword grouping helps search engines and users to exactly understand your product and service. It can be done based on an informational, navigational, and transactional basis.

Suppose you are selling refrigerators and air coolers, you can put a refrigerator and commercial refrigerator simultaneously, but air coolers should be addressed separately. 

Step-6: Competition Analysis:

SEO tools like Semrush can help you with the competitor analysis within a few minutes. It would help if you did not waste hours to do the overall competitor analysis and content gap analysis. You can find the content and keyword ideas from these tools for your business.

You can also enter the domain name to see which topics a particular website currently ranks in Google top 100 SERP. It helps you to analyze the keywords of your competitors.

How to find the perfect keywords for your content?

There are various effective and efficient ways to find the perfect keywords for your website. You can find the most suited keywords from keyword research tools, take suggestions from Google, Soovle, explore the tremendous opportunity from tools like AnswerThePublic, LSIGraph, or pick the trending and potential keywords from Quora, Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, Facebook Groups. 

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Let’s dive in one by one in detail: 

I) Keyword Research Tools for SEO: 

Finding the most possible and perfect keywords from the SEO tools is the marketers’ first preference. Semrush, Ahrefs, UberSuggest, and SERPstat are one of the most widely used SEO tools for both short-tail and long-tail keywords. 

These tools are all in one SEO tools and perfect for your website where you can find;

1. Short Tail Keywords
2. Long-Tail Keywords
3. Trend
4. Search Volume
5. SEO Difficulty
6. CPC
7. Paid Difficulty
8. Keyword Ideas
9. Content Ideas
10. Competitor Analysis
11. Track on Keywords Ranking

Remark: If you choose Semrush, then you need not look into any other SEO tools. It is an amazing and complete tool for all marketing needs of any business. 

II) AutoComplete Suggestions:

Autocomplete suggestions from Google are time-saving and free methods of finding the most trending and potential keywords for your business. Website owners or marketers rely on this keyword research tips as the suggestions directly come from Google. Hence there is no issue with trust. 

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Soovle is another tool where you can directly find the top trending keyword with autocomplete methods. 

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III) LSIGraph, AnswerThePublic:

LSI stands for latent semantic indexing keywords. LSIGraph is a tool that generates the most relevant LSI keywords.

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On the other hand, AswerThePublic tool is an excellent keyword tool that generates all the possible questions and queries that people can think of for any seed keywords or a specific set of keywords.  Since the nature of the keyword generated by the AnswerThePublic tool is in question form, you will only get the long-tail keywords.  

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You can open the wings for your keywords by exploring the keyword ideas from these 2 tools. You can also sort the generated keywords into alphabetical orders and download the data as a CSV. 

IV) Make the best use of sites like Quora, Wikipedia, and Amazon: 

It is still an untapped hidden gem for most website owners to find the best keyword research for your business. 

People share industries, expertise, experience, knowledge, tips, trends, and methods on these platforms. You will get the exact idea of what people are demanding and how I can establish my brand by helping them.

What are Keyword Ideas?

When SEO tools like Semrush and UberSuggest automatically generate the most relevant keywords for your brand to skyrocket, your content marketing strategy is called keyword ideas. These tools automatically generate the perfect keywords with the complete analysis such as trend, search volume, organic rank difficulty, paid difficulty, and CPC. 

What is the content gap analysis?

Content gap analysis is an effective process of finding gaps and missing topics from your website’s existing content to draw more traffic and user trust in minimal effort. 

You can use the Semrush SEO tool and do the content gap analysis for your site in just a few clicks. 

How filling these gaps with great content can turnaround your business and multiplying traffic on your site?

Suppose you have written a post on “how to make money,” and this web page is ranking on search engines. Because of this keyword, you are driving decent traffic and leads. 

To make the process more effective, you start doing content gap analysis for this keyword. You find few lucrative keywords like “how to make money online”, “how to make money from the internet”, “how to make money from Instagram”, or “how to make money from home” that have better search volume, trend, CPC and SEO ranking and paid difficulty. 

Since you are already ranking for the keyword “how to make money”, you will start ranking for these related keywords in very little time and effort. 

Why and How to analyze your competitors while doing keyword research?

A competitive analysis is a process of getting a complete understanding of your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). It helps you gauge how to curb competitors and refine your strategy.

Generally, I’m not too fond of wrong practices like copying or plagiarism. But when you copy someone’s strategy or the process to improve your existing performance, then it is a great thing. Here you learn from the mistakes of your competitors and start implementing the best industry practices. It saves a lot of time, resources, and reduces risk and mistakes. 

Pro Tips on Keyword Research

• Keyword Cannibalization:

When you target one keyword in multiple pages, then the issue of keyword cannibalization exists. Several pages on your site start competing for the same keyword that confuses search engine crawlers. 

As a result, you lose ranking for that particular keyword, and all your web pages lose SERPs ranking badly. 

Hence, do not create more than one page for one keyword. In simple terms, you should not be the competitor of your own. 

• Construct Awesome Landing Pages:

It would be best if you tried to create great landing pages for your seed keywords. It can boost the confidence of your audience and help you in higher conversion rates. You can aim to highlight your product, premium services, and offers such as free ebooks, reports, or free trial. 

With the help of simple, sweet, and uncluttered landing for your seed keywords, you can drive traffic, generate data, and educate your customers directly about your business goals.

Do not use more than 1 or 2 call-to-action (CTA) on your landing pages. It will distract your audience from the focus point and reduce the conversion rate.

Closing Keynote: 

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I hope you now have an excellent understanding of keywords in SEO and content marketing. You must not select random keywords. Else, it will be a full waste of time and effort. Once you will lose your track and start selecting random keywords, your whole business will suffer from traffic, leads, and sales.st

Few people who do not know the importance of keyword research hesitate to invest money in keyword research tools like SEMrush. They think I can perform the keyword research process without tools that are not even possible. 

It would help if you also explored the other dimensions, such as Amazon, Wikipedia, and eBay, while making your keyword list. Moreover, Google autocompletes suggestions, and Soovle will save your time and efforts. 

Now, it’s your turn to share your constructive feedback and review this comprehensive blog post? 

After reading this post, let me know by leaving in the comment box which keyword research tips are you going to follow for your SEO strategy?