Step-by-step guide to keyword research (with: comparison of the best keyword research tools)

Imagine that more than 250000 visitors visit your site every month. We did this thanks to keyword research:

Monthly SEO traffic

The screenshot is from a website called The Wandering RV. The webmaster and his wife have grown the site from a brand new site to 250000 visits a month in just three years, with less than 30 articles.

Yes, you must also create good content and establish a link to that content, but these actions occur after you know the best keyword to locate. Every successful SEO activity starts with keyword research; skip this step at your own risk.

How to do keyword research (quick steps):

Good keywords can achieve or prevent a successful SEO marketing campaign. Here are the key steps to start keyword research:

Step 1: find keyword hints based on keywords, related search, long tail keywords and LSI. Step 2: check the difficulty and search volume of the TRUE keyword. Step 3: determine the user’s intention.

In today’s guide, I share a step-by-step guide to keyword research, covering not only how to find hundreds of excellent keywords, but also how to determine which keywords can have an impact on your business and which are not worth your time!

1. Keyword research basis
2. Search volume and long tail keywords
3. Search intention
4. The function and synonym of LSI
5. How do you do keyword research?
6. What is the best keyword research tool?

Keyword research basis

Before I talk about the exact steps to find keywords for your SEO activity, let’s briefly introduce what keyword research is and why you should be concerned.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the act of finding and reviewing keywords to locate in SEO activities.

This is done by using free and / or paid tools that show you what people search on Google and other search engines.

Recommended in-depth guidelines: Google search console and Bing webmaster tools.

The role of keyword Research in Digital Marketing

As you will learn in the next section, the quality of keywords is the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a waste of time. The keywords you choose will determine your SEO marketing strategy from beginning to end.

Let’s see how.

How important is keyword research?

SEO can be complex, but it boils down to three basic elements:

1. Keyword research
2. Content
3. Link building

Among the three, keyword research is the most important.

Why? Because you can create the best content and build incredible links to win the first place in the Google rankings, and if you locate the wrong keywords, you still get zero revenue in terms of business growth or revenue.

For example, suppose you want to write something on a blog on your site so that you can appear on the home page of Google. You have an idea for blog posts and think you have a good keyword to locate. You create amazing content, set up links to it through visitor posts and email outreach (here’s how to find anyone’s email address), and end up on the home page of Google. You get hundreds of visits every month.

But your income from that article is still $0.

That’s because you didn’t study your keywords properly in advance. You may have found a keyword, but finding a keyword and doing keyword research are completely different things.

Studying keywords correctly means knowing its revenue potential, competitiveness, and even the exact type of content you need to create to rank it. At the end of this guide, you will see what I mean.

In short: the right keyword research can be a very successful SEO activity that makes the difference between a lot of money in your business and a complete waste of time and money.

Search volume and long tail keywords

The first concept to understand keywords is the number of searches.

This is what most people focus on when they first start studying keywords, and it’s one of the worst indicators.

The high number of searches is very deceptive for two reasons:

1. The original number of people searching for something has little to do with how much revenue you can actually get from that traffic. For example, if you rank keywords that get 10000 searches per month, but if people are just looking for information and are not ready to buy (hint: you need to define search intentions. See below for more information. ), that won’t help your bottom line.
2. Just because 10000 people search for keywords doesn’t mean all 10000 people actually click on the results. For example, look at the keyword “how old is Trump”-it has 30000 searches a month, but only 13% of people actually click on anything. That’s because people get the right answer on Google and don’t need to click to find it.

Keyword search volume and click rate

Example of incorrect keywords

On the other hand, a low number of searches does not mean that the keywords are bad, or that the number you see is the number of visitors you will get. Almost all the pages that rank one keyword on Google rank dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of other keywords.

These other keywords are usually synonyms and long-tailed variants. There are also latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords, which I’ll cover in the following sections.

For example, look at this article written by Kayla for The Wandering RV. According to Ahrefs, her goal is the keyword “best camping equipment”, which is searched about 2700 times a month. But as you can see in the screenshot below, it also ranks among 1912 other keywords and even ranks 32000 searches per month on the first page of Camping equipment!

Ahrefs keyword

What’s the point of the story? While search volume is an important indicator, you should not determine target keywords only based on the number of people you search each month (unless you only focus on brand awareness and / or advertising revenue per presentation).

Search intention

The search intention is exactly what it sounds like-the intention of the person who searches for a given keyword. It is similar to the marketing concept “buyer’s intention”.

In other words: what are users looking for?

Are they looking for what they are going to buy now? Did they do any research before making the purchase decision? Or are they just looking for information that has nothing to do with buying anything, but a problem they may need to solve?

Let’s look at an example.

High purchase intention: the high purchase intention keyword may be the product name, such as “RV rent las vegas”. If you type it into Google and view the results, you’ll see a bunch of RV rental ads and a map showing Las Vegas RV rental companies. People who search for this content may be ready to buy, or very close.

High willingness to buy

Research intention: these are keywords that people are still working on solutions, but may buy them soon. The “best” and “review” keywords usually fall into this category, such as “best RV rental company”.

Medium purchase intention

Message intent: these keywords apply to people who are strictly looking for information and are not ready or even considering buying anything. The example of “how old is Trump” falls into this category. Another example suitable for RV rental might be “how to take a pet to travel around the country”.

However, don’t think that you should go only after buying the intention keyword. Information keywords can help you build your email list and allow people to enter your marketing channel and eventually buy from you.

Search intent is also important because it affects the ranking of content on Google. If you try to create a login page to rank information keywords when Google ranks long blog content, then even with the perfect page SEO and a large number of backlinks, you may not rank because this is not what the user is searching for at all.

For example, suppose you want to rank “small campers”. As a result, you created a guide to having small campers. But when we look at Google, we can see that people are not looking for a guide, but a list of small campers to buy.

Example of search intent

This is why even after you find good keyword tips, you should always manually enter them into Google and look at the current ranking to see what you need to create. Don’t write a lot of guidelines when people just want a quick answer, and don’t try to rank blog posts when they want to buy a product.

The function and synonym of LSI

Earlier, I mentioned the LSI keyword. This represents latent semantic indexing, which is a strange way for Google to say “synonyms and related keywords”. They are words that are usually found together in a single topic and are semantically related to each other.

They tell search engines what your content is important because the same keywords can have multiple meanings.

For example, suppose you are writing an article about cars. You can talk about five different potential “cars”:

1. Car, vehicle
2. Cars, Disney animated movies
3. CARS, Canadian rally Sports Association
4. CARs, Canadian Aviation regulations
5. (The) Cars, an American band in the 1970s

How does Google know which version of “car” you’re talking about? Through the LSI keyword! Take a look:

1. Use the words “vehicle”, “used”, “new”, “buy”, “sell” and so on.
2. Use the words “movie”, “movie”, “Disney” and so on.
3. Use the words “association”, “assembly”, “sports” and so on.
4. Use the words “aviation”, “supervision”, “administration” and so on.

While LSI keywords are not necessarily important during your keyword research, they are important when developing your actual content. Instead of populating them, you should naturally include various LSI keywords in your content, including in title and image alternative text.

You can use tools such as LSI Graph to find LSI keywords (and learn more about them).

How do you do keyword research?

Well, now that you have an in-depth understanding of the important indicators behind keyword research, it’s time to really find your own keywords! When I do keyword research for a new website, I follow three steps, and an optional, more advanced step 4:

1. Find keyword hint
2. Check the difficulty of TRUE keywords and the number of searches
3. Determine their search intentions.
4. (optional) find and take advantage of keyword islands

Step 1: find keyword hints

Finding keyword prompts is the easy part. There are plenty of tools that can generate hundreds of ideas at the click of a button. It takes effort to censor them, but we will do it.

Now, check out the “Best keyword Research tools” section below and select your poison. I’ll use Ahrefs in the example because it’s my favorite tool and has all the fancy stuff, but other tools work as well.

My favorite way to find keyword opportunities is to spy on my competitors. You can do this by inserting their website into any keyword tool and viewing their keywords. Ahrefs has a beautiful tool called content gap analysis.

Here’s how it works:

1. Insert your website into Ahrefs, and then click the Content Gap link in the left menu.

Ahrefs content gap

two。 Insert 1-10 competitors who rank on Google for the keywords you want to rank. You can find them by Google searching for these keywords and getting URL from Google or using Ahrefs’s competitive domain tool at the top of the content gap link. Run the tool.

Research on Ahrefs keywords

3. If desired, you can export the list to an Excel spreadsheet from here. I like to comb through lists in Ahrefs. If I see a keyword that I might want to locate, I open it in a new tab and use the + add button in the upper right corner to add it to the keyword list.

Keyword list

If you don’t have access to Ahrefs or other keyword tools that allow you to view competitive keywords, you can also use tools such as Keyword Shitter to provide you with a large number of ideas, and then use other free tools such as Uber Suggest to review them.

Step 2: check the difficulty of TRUE keywords and the number of searches

Once you have a list of keyword ideas that you can easily use (my goal is 50-100 at a time, but you can do more), it’s time to see which volumes are worth pursuing based on keyword difficulty (KD) and search.

There’s only one warning. The number of searches you see in most keyword research tools is usually a far cry from KD. KD in Ahrefs is based only on the number of fields linked to top-level results, which is not really difficult to accurately describe keyword rankings.

This is because SEO is a complex beast, and things such as domain name ratings (which I will introduce soon) and internal links can have a huge impact on rankings. Backlinks are only part of the picture.

And the number of searches? This does not include LSI and long tail keywords!

Remember the camping equipment example I showed you at the beginning of this article, which ranked more than 1900 keywords? There are only 2700 searches for major keywords per month, but the article is visited more than 5000 times a month. That’s because it ranks keywords other than the main keywords.

So if you see a keyword that has 200 searches per month, it’s actually more like 500 or 1000 if you include the relevant keywords you want to rank.

To determine the true number of searches, get the number one result of the keyword on Google and insert it into Ahrefs or Uber Suggest to see the actual traffic generated by the page. This should give you a more accurate understanding of the number of searches for a given keyword.

The following is the traffic on the top page of “Little camper”, which gets about 3400 searches a month:

Real search volume

See how the page gets more than 10k of traffic, even though the main keywords get 1/3? This is the real potential for search volume.

Another indicator, keyword difficulty, is not 100% accurate. But finding out the real difficulty is usually as simple as looking at the front page domain permissions (DA) or domain ratings (DR) (if you use Ahrefs). Let me explain.

If the difficulty score for keywords is 8, but the top pages are all DR 80s, it may be difficult to rank your site for these keywords, even though the difficulty score is low, if your DR is low.

My advice is that if your DR is less than 40, target 30KD or lower keywords, and then branch as you make more links and gain higher permissions. As your DR climbs, your internal links become more valuable (or pass more “page permissions”, depending on where you listen).

But this is not an article about technical SEO, so I won’t talk about it for the time being!

Step 3: determine the search intention

At this point, you should have a pretty good list of keywords that you can easily solve and the search potential you are happy to capture. Now is the time to figure out what people really want when searching for these terms and whether they meet your marketing and revenue goals.

This section is as simple as Google searching for each keyword in the list and looking at the first 3-5 results. View their meta title and description, click them to view the page, and see their angle on the page.

• Are they mainly list posts? How? The ultimate guide? Landing page? What else?
• How do they seem to profit from this page? Are they using display ads? Sell products as a solution to the problem? Affiliate marketing? just capture email without actually selling anything?
• Read the comments. Are people asking questions that are not answered in the article? Do they look happy, angry or neutral?

All of these questions will help you understand the type of post / page you need to create, how to profit from it (or use it to capture email / push notification subscribers / social followers), and what you can do to improve it.

As you browse each keyword, save your answers to these questions in a spreadsheet or Word document to track the questions you are interested in. Your final list is a list that you can start pursuing!

To give you a better understanding of how to determine search intent, here are some examples provided by Moz posts:

Information intent:

• [product name]
• What is [product name]
• [product name] how does it work
• How do I use [Product name]

Business intention (AKA research intention):

• Best [product name]
• [product name] comment
• Compare [product name]
• What is the top [product name]
• [color / style / size] [product name]

Transaction intention (AKA purchase intention):

• [product name] how much
• [product name] in [location]
• Order online [product name]
• [product name] is near me.
• Affordable [brand name] [product name]

This chart from Ahrefs may also be helpful:

Ahrefs search intention Chart

Now take out your list and start making some content! Alternatively, you can perform the last step.

Step 4: (advanced) find and use keyword islands

If you really want to do well, you can choose to go further and look for keyword silos to create corresponding content silos on your website.

Keyword silos are highly relevant lists of keywords around which you can create content to link to each other on your site (also known as the “central radiation” method). This is the visual effect I created to help you understand:

The central radiation mode of content marketing

In essence, you create a central page for the main core words you want to rank, and then create a “spokes” page based on related and long-tailed keywords.

For example, while doing keyword research on Kayla’s vegetarian blog, I found a series of related keywords and asked “Is _ _ vegan”. People want to know whether common foods, such as bagels, doughnuts or Oreos, are vegetarians.

To rank these keywords, we created this central page, which links to all her “Is _ _ vegan” articles. These articles are linked to each other and returned to the main central page.

Content island

This interlink is called a content island, and it is so effective for two reasons:

1. Because all pages are linked to each other, if you establish a link to any page, it increases page permissions for all other pages.
2. Google uses relevance in its algorithms, and because these topics are highly related to each other, it can further improve your ranking.

So how to find the keyword island? There is no panacea solution-you have to be good at mastering patterns and paying attention to relevance. However, you can use a technique to try to find them: books.

Find books on your subject on Amazon and browse the catalog. Usually, books are full of islands of keywords: that’s what makes them books! Treat the binding as the central page and the chapter as the spoke page.

The idea of keyword library

Of course, as you can see in the example above, these keywords are not what people search for on Google. People type not “the vegetarian of the world”, but “how to eat a vegetarian in a restaurant” or “how to eat a vegetarian at a family gathering”. Therefore, you may need to do some research to find out the keywords that correspond to the chapter titles in the book you find.

Once you have found a potential island, be sure to run the keyword through steps 2 and 3 before you submit! Just because you’ve found a library doesn’t mean you should pursue it. Think logically about how all this content will fit your business and how you can expand it in the future.

What is the best keyword research tool?

There are dozens or even hundreds of keyword research tools on the market today. Some are very unique, but most are only slightly different from the same ideas. So what’s the best? Let’s break it down through free and paid tools.

Free keyword research tool

I use and recommend two free keyword research tools:

1. Ubersuggest
2. Keyword Shitter

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest

Let’s put aside all conversions related to Neil Patel for the time being. This tool can do its job, and if you have a budget, it can help you start using SEO.

Ubersuggest is basically a free scaled-down version of Ahrefs or Moz. It allows you to monitor competitors’ backlinks, see which keywords they rank for, and do some good keyword research. If you SEO within your budget, it can get the job done.

Keyword Shitter

Keyword Shitter

Keyword Shitter is almost exactly what it sounds like. You enter a keyword and get hundreds of keyword suggestions. It would be great if you only need a large number of ideas, but it mainly spits out keywords related to the keywords you enter, rather than unique, individual ideas.

Paid keyword research tool

If you are serious about SEO and have a budget, then these tools are the ones you want to use.

1. Ahrefs
2. SEMrush
3. Keyword Insights
4. Keywords Everywhere

Ahrefs

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is my favorite SEO tool; it is not only used for keyword research, but also for link building, ranking tracking, content ideas, and so on. It has all the gaudiness and can easily become the best omni-directional SEO tool on the market. However, its price is very high, with only basic tools of $99 a month.

SEMrush

SEMrush

SEMrush is another great keyword research tool. It’s more affordable than Ahrefs, but it doesn’t have that many features. It is more suitable for search engine marketing and PPC (and therefore SEM in SEMrush). However, if you want a great paid tool but don’t want to pay extra for Ahrefs, this is an effective option. It even allows you to try the product for free!

Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights claims to be “the smartest way to group keywords and search for intentions on a large scale”. And for good reason. The tool uses location-specific real-time search engine results page data to aggregate keywords into similar groups while calculating the search intentions behind them.

Users only need to upload a list of keywords (any number), and the tool will output a pre-formatted Google table document containing the aggregated keywords and the intention to pass. Its latest update also classifies grouped keywords as “top-level topics” so you can see what their content center should be and what their content might look like. These insights will also tell you which keywords you can use to locate a single page, or which keywords need to be broken down into multiple pages.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a great tool. It used to be free, but now it’s based on credit. Every time you enter something, the tool shows you the number of searches, competition, and average cost per click on Google. It will also show you the relevant keywords and statistics for the “people also search” ​​ keyword. No matter which other tool you use, I strongly recommend that you use this.

Want more SEO tools? Check out the list of WordPress essential SEO plug-ins, more keyword research tools and webmaster essential SEO tools.

Suggestion

So what keyword research tools should you get? I suggest Ahrefs and Keywords Everywhere. Ahrefs is a complete SEO software that helps you rank websites instead of just finding keywords. Keywords Everywhere allows you to view the number of searches and keyword prompts whenever you search for content on Google. Plus it’s free, so what don’t you like?

Summary

The following is a quick review of everything we have covered:

1. Keyword research is very important for any SEO activity and should not be ignored or taken lightly.
2. Search volume and keyword difficulty can be deceptive. Do more in-depth research by entering keywords in Google and viewing the results before making a decision.
3. Don’t be fooled by low search volume. Check the real search volume by using Ubersuggest or Ahrefs to view the home search traffic.
4. Search intention is king. Make sure that what you create matches what people want to see (and what Google already shows).
5. Looking for the keyword isolated island. They can be a shortcut to ranking pages faster.