Ultimate Keyword Research Guide 2022 : How I Find The Best Keywords For My Website

In this post, you’ll get to uncover the power of knowing your audience and learning what they are searching for online. The content is essential because without learning how to find what your audience wants you cannot effectively market to them. This is not only true in the SEO world, but any marketing world. I believe that content creation is a customized process and therefore in order to create the best content for your audience you have to know who they are and what they want out of you and/or your website.

Before keyword research, ask questions

You have the business. You know what they do and they understand why they need to grow their online presence. They have a list of keywords they want to rank for and a few competitors to beat. The work is should be done, right? Wrong. These are all great first steps, but you can’t start doing keyword research yet. Before you can pinpoint which keywords to go after and how to optimize your site for them, you need to understand WHO you’re actually targeting – the customers!

Here’s the thing about keywords: you can’t really separate them from the content around them. That is because your keyword research needs to be based on who you’re writing for, not just what your piece is about. The answer is that what you want to rank for and what your audience actually wants are often two wildly different things.

Focusing on your audience and then using keyword data to hone those insights will make for much more successful campaigns than focusing on arbitrary keywords.

What terms are people searching for?

What terms are people searching for? This is the critical question you need to answer before doing any keyword research. By figuring out what terms people are searching for, your business has a better chance at being where it should be: in front of the right people searching for your product.

Discovering Keywords

One of the first things that you’ll likely notice when taking a look at your website’s keyword rankings is that you probably have a few keywords in mind that you would like to rank for. These will be things like your products, services, or other topics your website addresses, and they are great seed keywords for your research, so start there! You can enter those keywords into a keyword research tool to discover average monthly search volume and similar keywords.

We’ll get into search volume in greater depth in the next section, but during the discovery phase, it can help you determine which variations of your keywords are most popular amongst searchers.

After you enter in your primary keyword(s) into a keyword research tool, such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner or Long Tail Pro, you will start to discover other keywords and concepts that are relevant for you to use for both content and advertising purposes.

Typing “Tshirt” and “Polo” into a keyword research tool, you may discover highly relevant, hight searched for related terms such as:

polo shirt
tshirt for men
polo ralph lauren

So let’s see what you should look for in a keyword. In the process of discovering relevant keywords for your content, you will likely notice that the search volume of those keywords varies greatly. While you definitely want to target terms that your audience is searching for, in some cases, it may be more advantageous to target terms with lower search volume because they’re far less competitive.

How often are those terms searched?

Uncovering search volume

There’s an important metric that SEOs and content marketers should look closely at while running their SEO campaigns: average monthly search volume, aka “search volume.” We do this because the higher the search volume for a given keyword or keyword phrase, the more work is typically required to achieve higher rankings.

This is often referred to as keyword difficulty and occasionally incorporates SERP features; for example, if many SERP features (like featured snippets, knowledge graph, carousels, etc) are clogging up a keyword’s result page, difficulty will increase. Big brands often take up the top 10 results for high-volume keywords, so if you’re just starting out on the web and going after the same keywords, the uphill battle for ranking can take years of effort.

In today’s search marketing world, we are told that it’s all about “search volume.” The higher the search volume, the greater the competition and effort required to achieve organic ranking success. Go too low, though, and you risk not drawing any searchers to your site. In many cases, it may be most advantageous to target highly specific, lower competition search terms. In SEO, we call those long-tail keywords.

Understanding the long tail

How many times have you heard of a keyword with 50,000 searches per month? Or even 5,000 searches a month? Those numbers might seem as though they would be pretty good when it comes to ranking for terms. But in reality, these popular search terms only make up a fraction of all searches performed on the web.

In fact, keywords with very high search volumes may even indicate ambiguous intent, which if you target these terms can put you at risk for drawing visitors to your site whose goals do not match the content your page provides.

Many companies are focusing all their efforts on optimizing for the most popular keywords. While it’s good to target high volume keywords, you cannot afford to neglect the long tail keywords. The long tail keyword might have a low search volume but they often convert the best. Why? Because your audience is more specific and therefore makes a better decision.

They want to buy word an affiliate product related to “best price red women’s size 7 running shoe” because they know exactly what they want. So it’s crucial that you don’t ignore these relevant searches

Getting strategic with search volume

As we’ve already mentioned, you can use the same search volume tool to look at the search volume of your competitors. By looking at a competitor’s website, you can get a better understanding of what words they might be targeting. You should still focus on your own users and customers needs, but getting an understanding of what your competitors are doing is helpful.

Keyword by competitor

There might be a lot of high-volume keywords with low competition out there that you can rank for, but it’s tough to know which ones are worth your time, and if any are too competitive to attempt going after.

By taking a quick look at the list of keywords your competitor is currently ranking for, you can determine which keywords are feasible to target in the short term. This could be important when you want to take advantage of your competitors’ missed opportunities or set yourself up to compete for keywords your competitors already rank for.

Keyword by season

Knowing trends in seasonal or timely specific keyword queries can affect the way you strategize and set a content promotion plan. Using tools such as Google Trends, Keywordtool.io, Wolfram Alpha, Getameninger.com, TermExplorer.com and keywordtool.io one can easily analyze and get insights about frequently searched terms related to a given topic all over the world for any given time period

Keyword by Region

You can more strategically target a specific location by narrowing down your keyword research to specific towns, counties, or states in the Google Keyword Planner , or evaluate “interest by subregion” in Google Trends.

Geo-specific research can help make your content more relevant to your target audience, and give you ideas for unique local events you could cover, report on, conduct interviews at, or mention as a way to get other businesses in the area talking about you.

Which format best suits the searcher’s intent?

The way Google displays search results depends on searchers’ intent. And every single query has one. Google describes this intent in their Quality Rater Guidelines as either “know” (find information), “do” (accomplish a goal), “website” (find a specific website), or “visit-in-person” (visit a local business). It is important for you, the searcher, to know how Google thinks and how it then ranks its results according to these different intents.

When you think about user intent, you probably think about what the user is searching for. But did you know users actually have a lot more on their minds and aren’t as straightforward as you might think? There are five types of user intents that need to be considered when optimizing a search experience.

1. Informational queries:

How tall is the Empire State Building? How cold will it be in Anchorage next month? What is this band called, anyway?

2. Navigational queries:

The searcher needs a post or page, such as Taylor Swift lyrics or the current weather in San Francisco.

3. Transactional queries:

The searcher wants to buy something or provide payment information. These queries often include a specific brand name and other details that help the searcher narrow down their options.

4. Conversational queries:

The searcher is hoping to chat with a personal assistant via a chatbot or carry on a conversation with another person through a forum or web board.

5. Brand searches:

Brands are popular search topics, not only for informational reasons but also for transactional reasons such as searches for online shopping, reviews and more.

Tools for determining the value of a keyword

How much value would a keyword add to your website? These tools can help you answer that question

1. Google Keyword Planner

Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner has historically been the most common starting point for SEO keyword research. However, Keyword Planner does restrict search volume data by lumping keywords together into large search volume range buckets. Go to Site Google Keyword Planner.

Keyword Tool

Unlike Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool relies on the autocomplete suggestions of Google, Bing, Amazon, and YouTube to generate hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords for any topic. Using Keyword Tool is free up to 750 requests per 24 hours, at which point a paid plan becomes necessary. Go to Site Keyword Tool.

SEMRush

SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research. If you do SEO work for local clients (especially if you’re working with local businesses), SEMrush is an essential tool.Go to Site Keyword Tool.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a fantastic tool that uses data from Google Suggest to uncover long-tail terms related to a seed keyword that you input. It’s one of the most extensive suggestions tools on the market and offers great suggestions without requiring a paid account, though you’ll only get a limited amount of results per day without one.Go to Site Ubersuggest.

Google Trends

Google’s keyword trend tool is great for finding seasonal keyword fluctuations. For example, “funny halloween costume ideas” will peak in the weeks before Halloween. Go to Site Google Trends.

AnswerThePublic

This free tool populates commonly searched for questions around a specific keyword. Bonus! You can use this tool in tandem with another free tool, Keywords Everywhere, to prioritize ATP’s suggestions by search volume. This is a great way to cross-check your topic ideas against what people are actually searching for to see if they’re worth writing about! Go to Site Google Trends.

Final Thought

Keyword research is the foundation of your content- and SEO-building process. Don’t rush it, but do take the time to get it right. You want to draw in customers with content that resonates with them, which is only possible if you know who these people are, what they want, and how they communicate about their needs. Take your time and make sure you’re happy with your end product, because that’s the foundation on which all your future efforts will stand. If you have any question feel free to Contact Neu Entity.