The most important factor for having your content rank well is keyword research. It’s an important step because it tells you what people are searching for on the internet and even more important, how many people are searching.
Proper keyword research is going to help your business out with a lot more than just SEO ranking. You’ll have an overall better understanding of your target market and how they are searching for content.
SEO isn’t necessarily complex by nature but it’s understandable how things can be considered as such. A lot of acronyms and a lot of different viewpoints. In this article, we are going to cover the basics of keyword research and show you how to do it through free resources. There will be varying levels to the detail of the research but at the end of it all, you should be able to get a good idea of what keywords are good and what aren’t.
Think Like Your Customers
Research on keywords should always start with questions. What are your customers searching for? There is also a degree of thinking outside the box. Try to think about when you do a google search for something. Unless you have a very specific idea of what you want, chances are you either asked a question or searched a few individual words that best describe your question.
The whole reason we use the internet is to be provided with options that fit our search queries. Why did I say such an obvious statement just now? Often in digital marketing, you will find that there aren’t any “tricks” or “hacks” so-to-speak and a lot of if it is optimizing the fundamental base practices. I mention the very obvious statement because it may be enticing to think of keywords that are close to what you want to be ranked for but will hurt you in the end. Imagine if you wanted to buy some basketball shoes but Google kept referring you to pages that sell basketball shorts. You would probably leave the website in a few seconds if not immediately. This ultimately impacts the score of your website and tells Google that you are not a reputable source for that search and puts other pages ahead of yours in priority.
5 W’s…and 1 H
We all remember the 5 W’s right? The basic questions for information gathering! Good job class. These are all the basic questions you need for conducting keyword research. Easy right?! Let’s continue with our basketball show example, follow along but with your own examples. Unless you are a basketball shoe store then lucky you, here’s a free template. But for the rest of you, these are some questions you might want to ask.
Who is searching for basketball shoes?
What type of basketball shoes are people searching for
When are people searching for basketball shoes?
- You’ll notice that different searches have different peak times, maybe basketball shoes are more popular in summer.
Where are your potential customers located?
- Local, national, or globally?
Why are people searching for basketball shoes?
How are people searching for basketball shoes?
- This can become insanely granular
- Mobile
- Desktop
- Search Engine
- What words are they using?
- Voice
Okay… So What Are People Actually Searching For?
How you describe your own business is often different from what people are really searching for. Knowing what people are actually searching for is a pivotal first step.
Finding Keywords
You probably already have a decent idea of what keywords you want to be known for. It’s probably exactly whatever your business is. In the case of Hashi Media, we wanted to rank for “Digital Marketing Japan”. It explains our business perfectly in 3 words which is easy for Google to score and not too hard for people to search.
*WARNING* I’m going to condense some larger topics here for the sake of convenience and to hopefully keep things easy to understand.
Now that you have an idea about the keywords you want to rank for your first step is to discover the search volume of the keyword. You can do this through a couple of tools and I highly recommend using Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. It’s a very easy tool to use and it’s free! The overall goal is to find keywords that have a balance of high search volume but low competition. Keywords with crazy high search volume might seem awesome at first but that usually means there is low intent or has ambiguous intent.
These tools will also give you related search terms that will be just as good and probably better than the keyword you thought of initially! These related words will usually result in a good balance of search volume and difficulty as well as being more targeted. Which as you go, you’ll find go hand in hand.
Show Me How To Do It Already
Okay, Okay! Here’s an example of a very basic workflow I use for quickly determining if keywords are useful:
Let’s start with our most basic version of the keyword to get an idea of the overall data. As you can see it is very competitive. When a number is highlighted red it’s a good idea to not use that keyword!
Now, I will look around and see if I can make this keyword more specific. There’s something called longtail keywords which for the purpose of this article we will just explain these as longer versions of the words, usually 3-5 words, that are an incredibly specific phrase. Here is a good article to check out on the importance of longtail keywords. The article actually explains that longtail keywords make up 70% of all searches.
You’ll find a lot of info that says longtail keywords need to be the title and that’s enough, but actually, I disagree. The important factor for ranking is intent (we will get into this soon). Anyways, back to the workflow. You’ll see that these are all 3-5 words long and much more specific than “basketball shoes”.
Notice how the search volume is a lot lower but the competitive score is half or more than half as competitive as the base search term. Maybe another easy to understand this is that the base search terms will pretty much equal half of your longtail keyword.
It should be noted that search volume is simply the expected amount of searches for that keyword, don’t actually expect 1,000+ people to find your content just because you used that word.
Another easy way to find related search words is to simply let Google do the work for you.
Those phrases that pop up are not random at all. They are the most searched related phrases to the keyword you typed in. Let’s select “basketball shoes online”
Right away when you can tell how many results pop up. 130M people are talking about basketball shoes online. Take a look at the top page results, as they are the only results that really matter. Can you improve these results? Think about how to stand out from the searches.
It’s all about intent
Learning how to do keyword research will be a skill sharpened with time and experience. You will eventually figure out what works for your niche and what doesn’t. How you implement this is really up to you. A word of warning though, overusing keywords is a big misconception and will harm your ranking. The general rule of thumb is about 5 keywords per piece of content. This is a sliding scale of course. If you write huge pieces of content, then you will need to use more. Basically, just be natural and don’t spam the search engine.
It really is all about the intent and we can’t outsmart Google at every turn. We may find some short-term hacks, but these services are designed to interact with human intent and are designed to evolve in that way. The algorithms will always prioritize helpful and non-ambiguous content. So, keep that in mind!
