Your Guide to Keyword Research for SEO

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

If you’re optimizing your site to rank higher in search engines like Google and Bing, you’re doing so to ultimately drive more visitors to your website. The very foundation of any digital marketing campaign, organic or pay-per-click (PPC), is the keyword. No matter how many algorithm updates search engines throw at you, the need to find the right keywords for sight has remained constant. And in order to find the right keywords, you need to do your keyword research.

What’s keyword research? It’s the process in which marketers find the keywords people are actually using to search the web, to create a list of keywords to target in order to rank in search results. It’s got three basic parts:

• Discovery
• Refine
• Competitor Research

In this piece we’ll go over the three parts of keyword research, explaining what each of them entails. We’ll also be providing some tips and keyword research tools to help you along the way.

Keyword discovery

List of seed keywords

The very first step in the keyword research process is to come up with a very broad, general list of keywords for your site. These aren’t necessarily the actual keywords you’ll end up targeting on your site — think of them more as answers to the question "what is my site about?"

If you’re a blogger, or doing keyword research for your company’s blog, these are likely to be the subjects that you post about the most. If you’re doing SEO for your business’ page, think about your buyer profiles. What sort of topics would your target want to know more about? Check your analytics and Google Search Console account to see how people are currently finding your site, and which keywords are driving the most conversion.

If your business is, say, an SEO tool that targets digital marketers and small/medium businesses, for example, your topics could be "digital marketing tools," “lead generation,” “SEO audit tool,” “SEO guide” and “keyword tracking.” If you have several categories on your website, think of each of these as a keyword topic.

Expanding your list

Once you’ve come up with your list of topics, usually between five and ten, it’s time to come up with a list of keywords for each. These are keywords you think that someone would actually type into a search engine to find your site. The point of this step isn’t to come up with every possibility under the sun, you just need to come up with starting points for further research. So for our SEO company, some keywords for the "SEO audit" topic could be:

• SEO website checker
• SEO website audit tool
• Best SEO website review tools
• Free website SEO Checker
• SEO Report
• Website review
• Technical audit
• SEO checklist

There are a lot of tools you can use to expand your list of keywords at this point. Both Bing and Google have keyword research tools. Google has the AdWords Keyword Planner, while Bing has a keyword research tool in its Webmaster Tools. Both are technically designed for PPC keyword research, but they are both really useful for SEO. Use Keyword Planner’s adgroup ideas to get a list of related keywords.

Keyword Planner requires you to sign up for a free AdWords account. Bing’s Keyword Research is accessible in Webmaster Tools, which you should have already signed up for.

Google Suggest is another great source of potential target keywords. Fortunately, there are tools out there you can use that will get Google’s suggested keywords without you having to manually find every possibility. Ubersuggest will provide you with a list of related keywords using Google Suggest, based on your input keyword. You can expand your list by finding related keywords to Ubersuggest’s results. You can download your results as a .csv, which will come in handy later.

Mergewords is another useful free tool. It doesn’t use Google data like Ubersuggest, but can be very useful in building your keyword list quickly. It works by creating every possible combination of keywords. So if you’ve got three keywords: "SEO website audit," “best SEO audit tool” and “free website review,” Mergewords will put together 36 possible different ways to combine those terms. Select the results to copy and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet.

Just be sure to go over your list from Mergewords to take out any that don’t make sense, like "SEO seo audit" and “SEO seo audit tool” in the example above.

Narrow Your List

So now that you’ve put some time and effort into coming up with a long list of keywords you want to target, it’s time to cut it down to size. To do this, you’ll need to determine how much traffic a keyword can bring in, how easy (or hard) it will be to rank for it, and what users expect to find when they use a keyword in a search query.

Continue reading %Your Guide to Keyword Research for SEO%

by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint