SEO Keyword Research – The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

By using the right keywords, you will get more search engine traffic…

Optimize your website for keywords and you will achieve your business goals…

As a business owner or an SEO enthusiast, how many times have you received this advice in your career?

Probably a lot.

That’s because, when you want to use SEO to grow your online business, you should first learn about keywords and keyword research.

I was in the same situation as you a long time ago, and I know how beneficial keyword research can be for people like you and me.

therefore,

This guide is written for beginners like you to understand the most basic concept of SEO – keyword research.

Even if you’ve never understood what the purpose of keyword research is and how to actually do it, this guide will help you understand every aspect of keyword research.

My goal today is to help you understand:

1. What is Keyword Research?
2. What is the Importance of Keyword Research?
3. How can keyword research benefit you?
4. How to do keyword research?

Let’s start with the basics…

What is Keyword Research ?

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that will drive targeted traffic to your business . This is usually done by determining how your target users find websites like yours.

Let me simplify it,

When we look for solution to any problem, we use search engines like “Google”, “Bing” etc. to find the answer.

We want search engines to give us a solution on the first page of the search, also known as the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Keyword research helps us identify those “phrases”, “words”, “queries” that masses of people ask using search engines.

As a business or even a blog, when we know what kind of queries users (the general public) ask through search engines, we can optimize or create new pages that help users find answers and use that traffic to grow our business.

Alternatively, using the same keywords (queries), you can also run PPC ads on platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads to increase traffic to your or your clients’ websites.

In technical terms;

The purpose of keyword research is to find those "topics" and "ideas" and give them commercial value that are commonly used by your target audience. Another way to look at keyword research is that it helps you discover the questions and problems that your target customers ask on the web and enables you to express them in a language that your customers can understand.

Let's understand this with an example:

As a simple example, let’s say a new father wants to buy a stroller for his child. He uses the query “best strollers” in Google Search to find the best brands. It goes something like this…

Because Google Search is so smart, it will automatically populate a lot of common queries to help dads ask the right questions.

Now, depending on the father’s position and his understanding, he will stick to his query or go for the query suggested by Google.

Search engines now record the number of times these queries are asked by millions of users around the world.

The keyword research process shows the most popular queries, geographical locations, and the number of times these queries were asked within a specific time period (e.g. 30 days).

Now, as a business owner, these statistics will help you understand what queries you should answer on your website, which in turn will help users discover your website and solutions.

This solution ultimately helps business owners attract more targeted traffic from search engines, which can be converted into direct sales, advertising sales, and even affiliate sales.

Well, this is how SEO keyword research helps.

With just a little preparation, you can maximize your hard work by driving a ton of traffic to your blog or business.

The process of optimizing keywords for search engines is called On-Page SEO .

This is a topic for advanced users, but today we’re going to dive deeper into keyword research.

Conducting keyword research can help you gain experience with your business in record time. Since you are using data to express your emotions, it can help you maximize your productivity.

Let’s understand this with an example…

Earlier I talked about a father who wanted to buy a "stroller" for his son. Now, let's pretend you are a business that sells strollers. (You can be anyone, substitute your product for strollers).

By using keyword research tools , we can find data such as which keyword “also known as query, question, search term” parents use on search engines to find solutions.

The following results are from a tool called “ Semrush ” and it shows a similar query with a lot of data, like this:

Let's try to understand what's going on in this picture. (Don't worry if you don't understand 100% because this is normal for beginners.)

1. Keyword: This is the query that users ask when searching for the best stroller. When doing SEO, this is the phrase we are “targeting,” so we often call it our “target keyword” or “focus keyword.”
2. Volume: This tells you roughly how many people were searching for that particular keyword in a particular month. This is a very important metric because even if you assume a certain search term will be popular, the search data will tell you that this is not the case. In the example above, you can see two similar keywords with quite a big difference in their monthly search volume:
   • Top rated strollers: 140 searches per month
   • Top rated baby strollers in 2019: 30 searches per month
3. Trends: This helps you understand if the keyword is trending up (more people searching) or down (fewer people searching). For example, iPhone 11 Pro might be a popular term in 2019-2020, but as they release the new iPhone, the term will lose value. You’ll learn more about this as we move forward in our keyword research guide.
4. Keyword Difficulty: This is an important metric that helps you understand how easy it is to rank on the first page of Google for your target keyword. These tools compare all existing ranking pages to understand things like On-Page SEO, Backlink Profile, Domain Authority, etc. to rank for such queries. The lower the keyword difficulty, the easier it is to rank.

Like this, when you start keyword research, you will get many matrices.

In short, keyword research helps you make data-driven decisions. If you didn’t know already, data is the new oil.

Before we continue,

Please read my previous guide on the difference between SEO keywords and queries , it will help you create a better mental model for keyword research.

Next, let’s look at the benefits of keyword research.

What is the Importance of Keyword Research?

Not all keywords are created equal, let’s try to quantify this. The keyword research process can help your business (blog, e-commerce, services, or any other business) in the following ways:

1. Keyword research helps you understand the language your target audience uses on search engines . We usually use Google search as a base because it is the largest search engine.
2. It helps you discover untapped queries, which can directly help you acquire paying customers from organic searches like Google, Baidu, etc.
3. Engaged audience: The audience you’ll host is already enthusiastic (ready to buy), and you’ll get high engagement in the form of comments, shares, and even sales.
4. Market and Customer Trends: Performing keyword research regularly will help you understand where your market and customers are heading.
5. Competitive Advantage: Integrating keywords and SEO before your competitors will give you a solid advantage. If done well, in a niche where competition is not that fierce, it can help you get a lot of backlinks, thereby gaining a first-mover advantage.
6. Reduced PPC costs: Keyword SEO will help you get that traffic for free, which businesses usually pay for in the form of PPC. This organic ranking can significantly reduce your business’s digital marketing costs.
7. More Ad Revenue: Marketers and bloggers who rely on Google AdSense or Setupad revenue can use keyword research to find high CPC keywords to significantly increase their ad revenue with the same effort.

There are many other advantages of keyword research, and the above points are the main ones.

Here’s a little-known fact about keyword research:

Many people mistakenly believe that keyword research is simply the process of finding high-volume keywords, but this is not the case.

As an SEO professional, your task is to remove those keywords that do not bring any benefit to your business. Also, after finding the profitable keywords, you will also learn how to prioritize them in order to get the maximum benefit in a shorter time.

Now, I won't go into detail on how you should position this, but if you're curious, you should read these two guides:

• How to Write SEO Friendly Content
• On-Page SEO Guide – The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need

The great thing about keyword research skills is that once you put them into practice, they get better and better.

Now, it’s time to dive into the technical details of KW’s research.

Determine keyword types based on user intent

Continuing with our previous example of "strollers," parents can ask this question with different intentions. For example:

• Parents can ask how to choose a stroller.
• Parents just want to know which one is the most popular stroller today.
• Parents are ready to buy the best stroller right away.
• A doctor can use this query for his research.

Have you noticed that the same query can mean different things when used in different contexts? This is called search intent.

This brings us to the idea that keywords can be broken down into different types based on user intent.

Here are the 4 most common types:

1. Business Keywords
2. Transaction Keywords
3. Information Keywords
4. Navigation keywords

These 4 types determine which keywords will directly affect your revenue. This is also closely related to the content funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU), which you will learn later.

Keywords can also be categorized in several other ways, such as…

Some words:

• Short-tail keywords are also called core keywords: (e.g. baby stroller)
• Long tail keywords. (Example: best strollers in Australia)

See also: Long Tail Keyword Finder Tool

What does keyword research entail?

At ShoutDreams, I follow a unique style of keyword research.

Conducting keyword research requires the following:

1. Tools for keyword research ( free or paid )
2. Seed word lists or SEO competitive domain/business lists. (More on this below)
3. Use seed words to create a list of SEO keywords or use competitive websites to find profitable keywords
4. A document (Excel or similar) in which keywords are to be captured and cleaned.
5. Commission a system for final keyword production (creating blog posts, e-books, video content, product pages)
6. Use a keyword rank tracking tool to measure your rankings.

Once you incorporate keyword research into your business marketing process, it will help you grow organically.

This is the exact steps I took to drive over 8 million page views and earn nearly $500,000 per year. This website “ShoutMeLoud” is a great example of the fruition of the keyword research process.

After 10 years of doing it, I define the steps of keyword research as:

1. Research
2. Cleaning
3. Execution/Delegation
4. Monitor
5. optimization

These 5 steps will cover all aspects of keyword research.

Now, I believe you and I agree that it’s time to learn how to do keyword research.

3 Different Ways to Conduct Keyword Research:

There are a variety of methods that can be used to research SEO keywords. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular methods that even a beginner can use.

1. Find competitors or popular website keywords:

This is perhaps the easiest way to find keywords that are already used by existing websites. In this process, we identify 2-3 websites that rank top in our target market. Example: "best baby stroller"

A quick Google search shows results for these 3 top sites. You can repeat this process for your target keywords, and once you’ve identified the top 3-4 winning sites, head over to Semrush , a keyword research tool.

Create a free Semrush account

On the Semrush dashboard, enter the domain name you identified from your Google search and use it to find the keywords that domain ranks for.

Semrush will show you all the important details such as:

• Which keywords bring the most traffic to a specific website?
• Quantity, traffic percentage, KD, keyword ranking
• Which page on the website gets traffic for which keyword?

Semrush also gives you the option to filter keywords based on various factors. If you need a more detailed guide, let me know in the comments section below.

This way, within minutes, you have found a Pandora’s box of profitable keywords for your business.

2. Use keyword gaps to find easy wins

This is an underutilized keyword research technique that helps you find keywords that your competitors rank high for but you don’t rank for. This is of no use for existing sites and is only about finding low-hanging fruit.

To learn about this method, read my previous guide on “ Keyword Gap Analysis – Methods and Tools ”.

3. Use Seed Words to Research Keywords

This is useless for any new and existing website. This is more time consuming than the above two methods, but it will help you discover unique keywords that no one is targeting.

You can use this method by using a keyword research tool or even a long-tail keyword tool.

We will use Semrush again to better understand this approach.

• Go to Semrush
• Click Keyword Magic Tool

Enter your seed keyword and select the primary country you are targeting.

Now, click on Search and within seconds, Semrush will generate tons of keywords from your seed keyword.

You can filter keywords based on various parameters, such as:

• Exact matches will include an exact match for the phrase "stroller" with the same word order. So you'll get "buy stroller," "where to buy stroller," "buy stroller in San Francisco," etc.
• Broad match will include all forms of the word "buy" and "new" and will suggest variations in the word order. So you'll get all the keywords for exact match plus "buy latest baby strollers," "buy new baby strollers," "buy super new baby strollers in New York," etc.
• Phrase Match
• Related keywords

You can do the same thing using the free Google Keyword Planner tool (GKP). The only downside is that Google’s Keyword Planner tool was created for PPC and is not very friendly to SEO keyword research. However, for someone on a budget, Google’s Keyword Planner tool is useless.

Note: In this guide, I used Semrush because it’s my go-to keyword research tool. However, you can always use a similar tool like KWFinder to achieve the same purpose.

The above steps will help you capture the primary keywords. Now, once you have the important data, you need to do a few things like:

1. Create clusters of similar keywords
2. Create an SEO plan to create new content or product pages, website structure
3. Measure it and optimize it.

I’ll discuss keyword clustering and creating an SEO plan in an upcoming guide.

SEO Keyword Research FAQs

How to do a keyword analysis? Keyword analysis is a process that involves using Semrush , Ahrefs , Mangools , or a similar keyword tool to identify keywords related to your content. You can start by brainstorming to come up with seed words or doing a competitor analysis, then use these tools to find keywords based on search volume, competition, and relevance to your niche. Once you have a list of keywords, use a clustering tool like Keyword Insights to create keyword clusters and create content to gain topical authority.

What are keywords in SEO, for example? Keywords in SEO are words or phrases that users type into a search engine to find information. For example, “best backlink checker” is a keyword someone might use when searching for top backlink checker tools. Optimizing content around relevant keywords helps a website rank higher in search engine results for those specific keywords.

What are the best keyword research techniques for SEO? The best keyword research techniques depend on your goals. The most effective methods include:

1. Use tools like Semrush to analyze competitor keywords to determine what works for top-ranking sites.

   . Use a keyword gap analysis to find keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t. 3

   . Generate keywords from seed words using tools like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool or Google Keyword Planner, which help discover unique keywords related to your niche.

Now, I hope that this guide has helped you understand what keyword research is, and how to actually do it.

I know this is a broad topic and you probably have some questions. Please use the comments section to ask your keyword research related questions.

Also, if you’re an experienced SEO, share how you conduct keyword research by commenting below.

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