How To Do Keyword Research: 4 Steps Guide (2020).

In our last post we talked about SEO basics, in which we listed the 7 essential areas that requires your concerted effort in on-page optimization that will eventually enable your post/site feature among the SERP top 10.

In this particular article, I explained quite a bit on how you should handle those key SEO areas, and I also briefly hinted about keyword research where I touched just a little bit of types of keywords e.g. short-tail and long-tail keywords.

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So that aside, today in this guide, we will look a bit into different strategies of keyword-research process step by step.

Step 1: Understanding your users.

First, before we dive deeper into the keyword research process, it’s very important to understand your users, which - by the way - is part of the whole process.

Users will always browse the internet/website in search of certain things or 
with specific intentions in mind. An intention which seeks to fulfill a need - and that's the reason as to why they are doing that search.

They do a search that is of course, driven by user-intent, and intent that eventually unearths more information, more ideas and more terms that will guide them to relevant sites.

So if your keyword research process is quite hectic you can also be guided by more detailed strategies and information like the ones from this article, which has clear directions towards getting a list of relevant and targeted keywords. 

I think with it you are better off in meeting your visitors demands.

So, to me, keyword research I would say is; a-two-way-traffic.

Two Way Keyword Approach.

Keyword research always assumes a two pronged approach. In other words it’s a two way research method.

It meets two needs at the same time.

When I say that, what I mean is that this process involves getting to understand the user-intent, while at the same time you learn which keywords are mostly used by web visitors, that leads them either directly into your site or your competitors sites too.

In this step, try to be broad and cast your keyword-research-net wider in your exercise by doing or understanding that process through this user-intent analysis and also the keyword research for beginners all at once.

This will help you group different intents e.g. informational, navigational, transactional/commercial etc, in their specific categories, and also keywords into various multiple classes, based on what your site addresses in terms of products and services.

So it's better to get to know or identify their (user) intent in your keyword research process, based on a number of topics of your choice.

Step 2: Identify Keyword Research Topics.

Your keyword research needs to be topic-based, for you to get more relevant and targeted keywords to use that are more directed at a particular group of people i.e. your audience.

When its topic oriented then your endeavor will be smoothly flowing and halfway solved.

These audiences can come from a range of segments that are aligned with your niche market or topic of discussion. But it should be based on your user-persona analysis, which we discussed in our previous post.

Topics can be generated from several different areas like;

• College students – if maybe you are targeting students who may be looking for off campus accommodation. Target the keywords that will help you rank for that particular niche, when you seek to meet their needs.
• Home delivery - you may be looking for keywords that targets to serve groceries or home delivery/errand services niche for the stay at home moms, nannies, senior citizens home-care etc.
• Veterinarian - Here is it a puppy day-care (as a niche) you will be targeting or the general vet services and/or treatment for pet goose? So be specific in your niche topics or go the generic keyword research way – that doesn’t depend on any topic at all.

I would say this approach is an intent-inclined search on one hand and keyword research on the other hand.

Those are some of the example areas where you are likely to get a good list of topics for your keyword research, depending on the service that you offer.

After that crucial stage is when you now embark on the following more important step.

Step 3: Ascertaining Keyword Difficulty.

When doing your keyword research, it’s better to identify keywords that are potentially effective and can boost your post/site in ranking, and should be the ones that would NOT be an uphill task for your site in terms of ranking.

Would you like to rank for head keywords, medium tail or long tail keywords? 

So the choice is yours, because each keyword, whichever you choose, will have both its advantages and disadvantages.

You may ask yourself this.

If I use this keyword – “machine” for instance - which is a more less a head keyword; can I even rank in the SERPs top 20?

Like you can see from the following graphical diagram showing keyword difficulty. Such illustrations can help you decide on which keywords to pick, whether; short, medium or long-tail keywords.

In other words, try to gauge those keywords first, and see where or how difficult they would rank - as we can see the term "machine" shows below, in the KWFinder, it has 69/100 i.e. 69% difficulty in ranking. That means that the chances of your article ranking specifically with the word "machine" as your keyword would be very slim.

So, before you select them as your seed keywords.

This screenshot shows the word - "machine" ranking difficulty level. Courtesy KWFinder

So the best strategy here is that, it’s important to also consider implementing a blend/mix of at least both the difficult keywords with ones that are easy to rank for. Reason being, the head keywords attracts a lot of traffic, but are very difficult to rank for, because of high competition for those single word key phrases.

On the other hand the long-tail keywords are easy to rank for due to low competition because they have low monthly volume in terms of organic search traffic.

Keyword Research Process.

Now here, we are going to look at keyword research process, a bit in-depth, in terms of what steps you can follow in this exercise. What benefits or disadvantages of some keywords or key phrases as opposed to others in this entire process.

Like I said earlier, keyword research starts and ends with your target market or niche market to be specific. 

But it is important to note that:-

Note: There are no standard/absolute steps to follow in the keyword research process oe journey; but there is no point of you generating many keywords that will end up not adding any relevance to your content or most importantly no value to your audience.

Even though there is no ultimate resource for keyword research, but I would say there are some universal trends and steps you can adopt.

So keywords can come from a number of sources i.e. from;

a) Google search.

Here you simply just type a word that you target for ranking - maybe your seed keyword is a term like digital marketing, just type and see what follows.

Google Search Home Screen - with keyword "digital marketing"

You will see quite a huge list of keyword suggestions with lots of different phrases from Google search bar - as you can see below - that people are keying-in during their web searches.

Suggestions of the words the people search for as can be seen above - "digital marketing"

So Google browser search is also a good place to start that process, but based on the following considerations.

i) Topic.

Which topic within your niche market will you be targeting; that you feel will bring more traffic into your site.

ii) Search trend.

Ask yourself, what are the current search trends? For instance, if I am in the SEO industry and I want to rank for that specific "SEO Industry" keyword; then what are the search trends for that word?

Tip:     Use tools like Google Trends to search, identify and choose your keywords based on their popularity and search trends.

The search trend of the word - SEO worldwide. Courtesy Google Trends.

iii) Current ideas.
Your current ideas may be from daily news bits, general public discussion forums or just a pep-talk with your pals at a neighborhood joint or restaurant, office tea break/lunch time.

Here you can generate quite a number of unique broad/medium/long-tail keywords.

iv) Brand name.

If you are already an authority in either of these industries or niches (i.e. SEO/Content Marketing/Digital Marketing etc) it means you already have a brand name. That “brand name” is a keyword of its own. 

So you already have a boost.

You can use it to generate more suggestions and ideas, but especially if you do have a product/service with an advantage of your brand name, then that's a plus for your site, because you are already a selling brand of its own.

Then we go to the next step, which is still part of our keyword research process.

Step 4: Competitor Analysis.

This is another area where you will find what keywords you can explore in your keyword research exercise.

Start by analyzing your competitors’ keyword use, if by all indications you want to rank. Because getting to know who are your competitors in your niche or industry it gives you an edge in planning and strategy for your sites.

So try to investigate and unearth the keywords that your competitors used to boost them in ranking themselves above you. If you do your research and identify those keywords from them, then your task will be an easy keyword pick to optimize your articles or contents.

The above step can be effective through use of the following few tools, but in our next topic we will cover them more into details. 

But for now, let’s proceed.

Competitor Analysis and Keyword Tools.

Competitor analysis and keyword research can never be a success – fully, not, unless you get to understand the competition around you. In that case you need to come up with a plan for that purpose.

And that is for you to track what they (competitors) are doing, or what they did and with what strategies exactly, in order for them to rank on top.  

So for you to identify which different terms/phrases/keywords that were used by your competitors; there are a range of tools for your consideration to help you in that. Where you just simply key in your competitors URL/name into the search bar – of the following tools that I have mentioned below; and you will get suggestion of ideas that you were looking for. 

You will be spoiled for choice of perfect keywords to decide on.

You can use tools like Ahref, keyword.io, or SEMRush; which are both traditional and competitor targeted keyword research tools.

Another good tool that can help you in that exercise is Browseo, which has a brilliant site Explorer tool, where you simply key in the URL of your competitor or any site; as I have stated above, and you will view all details e.g. links, header tags, description, author etc.  

So the above tools will help you identify types of keywords for your use.

Different types of keywords.

So first of all, let's look at the different types of keywords. And here let me categorize with brief description of what they mean.

We have the short-tail/head keywords, medium-tail keywords and long-tail keywords whereby;-

a) Short-tail keywords.

The short-tail/head keywords are those single word phrases e.g. "community", “plant", "machine" etc.

The above examples are called short-tail or head keywords, and they can mean a lot – depending on industry/niche and the context at which they are used.
 

Those are the types of head keywords that are high in demand; in-terms of monthly search volume and traffic flow, but are very difficult to rank for because of the undisputed high competition levels regardless of the niche market.

In these 1-2 worded type keywords, customers are just random in their search. These types of keywords can also be more or less categorized as broad keywords.

A one word like "industry" is such a broad (seed) keyword that can mean a lot depending on your niche or the context] at which you are writing about it.

It can mean "Content Marketing Industry" or "Manufacturing industry” or even "SEO industry" which is a broad terms any way. So the word industry means a lot if you pick it as seed-keyword.

Refer to the example screenshot above to understand what results the search reveals.

Like when I typed digital marketing, as we can see above, it gave me a number of generic meanings - which are not specific to what I was looking for.

So the bottom line is that short-tail keywords are broad in meaning, shorter in length, and high in demand/competition in terms of search.

b). Medium-tail keywords.

These are 2-3 word phrases, which I would say are not very competitive, but also guarantees quite an impressive number of monthly searches and high organic traffic. They are words like "community hospital", "plant engineer" etc.

They are more direct in terms of meaning, because immediately you see such a phrase it makes some sense to you, based on its sentence structure, regardless of the context at which it applies to. In other words, I would say the medium-tail keywords has reasonable emphasis to search-intent.


Then we have the long tail keywords.

c). Long-tail keywords.

This keyword types are mostly used by the site visitors when they have already made up their mind in terms of making a purchase. They are 4 words and above e.g. "community hospital for the deaf" or "plant engineers' salary scale".

The long-tail keywords I are more specific, less competitive, with low monthly traffic; but are easy to rank for in your niche market.

Conclusion.

There is no any single site that doesn't want to rank among the best in search engines. Everyone else is gearing up just for that.

But if you specifically target that (top rank) then try to identify keywords that would comfortably beat competition - or at least try to achieve that, by using several of the keyword research tools that (these SEO experts recommend.

It doesn't matter if its head, medium or long-tail keywords you are targeting in the entire keyword research process.

But what is important is the choice of keywords in your selection stage, from any of the categories (of head/medium/long-tail keywords) that you feel will yield you the best results in terms of ranking for your site/post.

So wisely consider your keyword choice.

I am done - I think the choice is now yours - develop great content for the ultimate user-experience (UX) out there and the reward will be the best position in SERP, right for your site.

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I hope this post helped you.