How to Do Keyword Research for Your Blog Post or Article in 2022: A Beginner’s Guide

If you’re an online marketer, you must have heard a lot about “Keywords”. Almost every successful SEO strategy revolves around performing Keyword Research to find the most popular google keywords. The reason why keyword research is so essential is that it helps you connect to your audience. You are creating content and there are people who want to access your content. Keywords bridge the gap between these two simple but necessary things. When your audience searches for products or services that you produce, they will be tempted to visit your website if you are solving the query or problems that they were looking for.

What are keywords?

In uncomplicated terms, keywords are simple terms or phrases that users like you and me type into search engines to get the desired result. For instance, if you want to find out about the weather in New Delhi, you type “weather New Delhi” in your Google Search.

The search engines process millions of data and find the most relevant data for you which is displayed in the first page of the search results. These words are called focus keywords. They help the search engines sort through huge chunks of data on the internet.

Keywords are the backbone of search engine optimization. People need to be curious about your content if you want to get traffic on your website.

What is keyword research?

If you just go on creating a bunch of content without doing keyword research, you might as well be throwing darts in a dark room. While there is a chance that you will get lucky and hit one of the targets, most of your throws will be amiss.

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that the audience is consistently searching for. You can analyze this data to plan your content strategically. Suppose, you find that during the Covid wave, people were searching for home workouts more. If you are a fitness blog that usually posts about gym plans, you will realise that you need to switch up your content to include homework out plans, homework equipment, etc.

This way your content creation efforts will reap maximum benefit.

Keyword research is essentially the process of finding out the demands of the industry and then accordingly, working on the supply.

How to do keyword research?

This is the most important question you need to be asking yourself. Because it is not a question of whether you should do it or not. You don’t have another option if you want your marketing campaign to be successful.

Keyword research is not a complicated process. We will give you a basic guide that will hopefully help you get started with keyword research.

When to do keyword research?

Keyword Research is the first step of the search engine strategy. You need to perform keyword research using keyword research tools to get google keywords and SEO keywords that you can base your content on.

You need to do keyword research before diving into a new niche while looking for ideas for a new post/blog and even while optimizing your existing content.

Stages of keyword research

To give you a clear understanding of keyword research, we have broken it down into 3 separate chunks:

A. Finding the keywords

First and foremost, make sure you have a comprehensive understating of your niche. Why do you need to research your niche? When you’re searching about something, there are certain universal keywords that have very high competition. They are called fat head keywords. But if somebody is interested in your niche, there might be alternate recurring terms those people might be using. These terms are generally longer and more unique, called Long tail keywords.

A typical long-tail keyword has 3 or more words, has a lower search volume. It is less competitive and has better conversion rates.

Ex. best android app for streaming

The traffic through these long-tail keywords constitutes the majority of the organic traffic a website achieves. There can be multiple long-tail keywords relevant to a single topic.

B. Analyzing the keywords

When you start your keyword research, you will come across many many keywords. However, you can’t stuff all of them in your content so you need to carefully analyze them. You must choose a focus keyword that will depict the general idea of your page. The 3 main aspects to consider for a keyword are popularity, difficulty and relevance.

You can use SEO metrics for the analysis. The 5 SEO metrics that you will need are:

1. Search Volume: Search volume is a measure of the frequency at which a particular keyword has been searched in a month.
2. Clicks: A lot of people will see your website on the search results but not all of them will click on it. This is why it is important to maintain a count of the number of clicks registered regularly. Recently Google gives you answer to most queries on the search page itself, making it useless to open a link. This is why you need to filter out keywords with a poor click rate.
3. Traffic Potential: You can use tools like Keywords Explorer to find out the true potential of a keyword. As a word can have many synonyms and paraphrases, you should not make the mistake of just searching for traffic potential through a single SEO keyword. Traffic potential gives an idea about the size of the audience searching for a particular query.
4. Keyword Difficulty: With enough practice, you will be able to estimate the difficulty of a keyword manually. There are many factors that come into play while deciding how difficult it will be to rank a keyword.
5. Cost Per Click: Cost per click is used by advertisers to determine the pricing of keywords. You can make use of it by evaluating what is the price/value of any keyword and how much are advertisers willing to pay for it.

C. Using the keywords

Once you’ve found your keywords, you need to strategically place them within your content. You can use your keywords as topics or subtopics. Use the focus keyword whenever suitable on your page. You can use the keywords obtained from Keyword Research for Your Blog Post in the title tag, Heading of the page, The body of the page (ideally, first paragraph), Anchor texts of internal links.

It is suggested to use only one keyword for one page. Make sure the articles you write are well-written and comprehensive.

Some things that you should avoid:

• Stuffing keywords randomly
• Blindly following recommendations of SEO research tools
• Fixate on the number of times you’ve used a keyword
• Place keywords where they don’t add value to the page

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research provides a lot of data that can be used to improve your SEO strategy. It is perhaps the only proven way to figure out what your audience is thinking. You need to know this information so you don’t end up creating content nobody wants to consume. A lot of websites unfortunately still make this mistake costing them traffic to their website.

The first step is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about what they might need from your website. This is where keyword research tools are helpful.

A. Brainstorm ‘Seed’ keywords

Before you start researching for keywords to use, you will need a start point. The seed keywords are these starting points that will help you build your keywords list.

These seed keywords are used by keyword research tools to find related keywords.

On their own, seed keywords don’t lead to any significant traffic since they are very broad and highly competitive but they are still important to find other keywords.

For businesses, seed keywords are simply the services or products that they offer. For example, a pizza joint will have seed keywords like “pizza”, “Italian pizza”, “cheese pizza”, etc. For others, a little brainstorming will give you the keywords you’re looking for. Once you’ve found seed keywords, move to the next step.

B. See what keywords your competitors rank for

If it’s working for them, it can work for you, right? Start by listing out the keywords that lead to maximum traffic to your competitor’s websites. You can do this by using seed keywords from the previous step. Just search for the words and see which one of your competitors are ranking high for it on search engines. Other than seed keywords, auto-suggestions can also come in handy for this. For example, people interested in your content may be searching for Italian pizza cafes or Italian pizza toppings.

Remember, your competition is not big brands like Flipkart or Grofers. It’s websites with a similar audience and products to you.

C. Use keyword Research Tools

Some main benefits of using keyword research tools are as follows:

• It is time-efficient. You don’t waste time with trial and guess, you can handpick high ranking keywords that are related to your niche and drive traffic to your website.
• You get in-depth data like keyword difficulty, SERP, search volume to make informed decisions. These metrics tell you what part of your strategy is working and what’s not.
• It gives you an advantage over your competitors who don’t do use keyword research tools.

Let us look at how we can do SEO keyword research:

Keyword research tools will help you target keywords that even your competitors missed. Keyword research tools work by fetching data that is related to your seed keyword to find other keywords. Google Keyword Planner Keyword research tools are perhaps the best for this purpose. Google Keywords show you suitable keywords even if they don’t have the seed words you entered.

D. Study your Niche

With the help of previous steps, you’ll be to generate a non-exhausting list of keywords. However, being a master of your niche can give you the competitive edge to outshine your competitors. Go through industry forums, watch videos, read reviews, participate in Q&A sessions, etc to find out things that real customers find missing in your website.

A very brief history of keyword research

Like most of the trends in SEO, keyword research has developed with time.

In the early 2000s, people mostly stuck to using Google Keyword Planner to find the highest-ranking keywords and put them all into website text.

However, this deteriorated the quality of content. Google came up with several updates over the course of the last 2 decades to improve user experience and ease. Some of these updates forever changed the way we do keyword research. For instance,

• Google Panda punished flimsy, low-quality content and duplicate text.
• Google Penguin penalized unnatural usage of keyword
• Google Hummingbird enhanced semantic search and increased focus on the search intent of the user
• Google RankBrain used Artificial Intelligence to understand how users interact with the search results and find the internet behind any search query.

How to target keywords

You need an appropriate page that contains relevant content relating to each keyword. You can learn how to do this in 2 small steps:

A. Identify the Parent Topic

Once you have a long list of keywords, the first question that will pop in your mind will be whether you should create individual pages for each of them or if they fall in the same sub-topic. Instead of scratching your head over it, you can get your answer by doing simple Google searches. If Google shows the same results for them, they fall in the same sub-category and therefore, don’t need individual pages.

However, this can be a tedious and time-consuming process. So, it is advisable to use keyword research tools like Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs.

B. Identify search intent

Suppose you get different keywords like, “pizzeria”, “how to make pizza at home”, etc. However, you need to understand the search intent of the user to find out what to post as blog posts and what as products posts. While some search intents are clear, some are ambiguous.

The main type of search intent can be categorized into 4 types:

1. Navigational – distinctive page or website.
2. Informational – detailed information like definitions or recipes.
3. Transactional – Searcher has decided to make a purchase.
4. Commercial Investigation – comparison of products and reviews.

A good strategy is to create similar content that is already ranking high on google since Google understands search intent better than anyone else in the game. However, don’t shy away from taking risks when you are confident that people will read your posts just because they don’t align with the mainstream search intent.

Keyword Research Tools

A. Google Keyword Planner (Free)

Google Keyword Planner is popular for its extensive and unique collection of keyword suggestions and updated CPC values.

B. Google Trends (Free):

Google trends keyword research tool is known for its practical trend comparisons and exploring the trends patterns.

C. Google Search Console (Free):

Google Seach Console can be used to find out your top performing 100 keywords and how much traffic these keywords generate for you.

D. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (Free):

Ahrefs Webmaster tools are multifunctional. They can be used to check for all the keywords you presently rank for and find their estimated search volumes, Keyword Difficulty scores, traffic potential, and other valuable SEO metrics.

E. Keyword Generator (Free):

Keyword Generator is used for producing free keywords from seed keywords.

F. Keyword Difficulty Checker (Free):

Keyword Difficulty Checker is used for reviewing the ranking difficulty of a keyword, using Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty (KD) score.

G. Keyword Rank Checker (Free):

Keyword Rank Checker is used to check how well you rank for any keyword in different countries.

H. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (Paid):

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is a paid tool but it is worth every penny. It provides thousands of keyword ideas within seconds and you can even filter these keywords depending on what you’re looking for. You can assess the keyword difficulty and traffic potential of any keyword easily.

Conclusion

To conclude, you can not undermine the importance of SEO keywords in your SEO campaign if you want to increase relevant organic traffic to your website! Keywords are either single words or elaborate phrases that are used by search engines to gauge the contents of the website. Your audience uses SEO keywords to search for queries about your products or services.

Keyword research, when done effectively, is the most effective way to help you connect to your target audience.