A step-by-step guide to keyword research (bonus: comparison of the best keyword research tools) (2023)

Imagine making over a quarter of a millionvisitorto your website every month. This is what we managed to do thanks to keyword research:

This screenshot comes from one of my accessed pagesthe hiking trailer. My wife and I have grown this site from a brand new site to a quarter of a million monthly visits in just three years with less than 30 articles.

yes you have to toocreate great contentand link to that content, but those actions are done AFTER you know the best keywords to target. every successSEO-Campaignbegins withkeyword search; Skip this step at your own risk.

Ready to start?

In today's guide, I'm sharing a step-by-step keyword research guide that not only describes how to find hundreds of great keywords, but also how to know which ones can move the needle for your business and which ones will make yours are not worth .time. . Let's dive!

Basics of keyword research

Before we talk about the exact steps to finding keywords for your SEO campaign, let's briefly explain what keyword research is and why you should care about it.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the act of finding and evaluating keywords to target in an SEO campaign.

This is done using various free and/or paid tools that show what people are searching for on Google and Googleother search engines.

Recommended detailed guides:Google Search ConsoleeBing tools for webmasters.

The role of keyword research in digital marketing

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

Let's see how.

How important is keyword research? (Don't skip!)

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

1. keyword search
2. Satisfied
3. link building

Of these three, keyword research is the most important.

Why? Because you can create the best content and create amazing links that rank you #1 on Google and still get no benefit in terms of business growth or revenue by targeting the wrong keywords.

For example, say you wantWrite some content on your website blogso that you can appear on the first page of Google. You have an idea for a blog post and think you have a good keyword to target. They create great content, link to it through guest posts and email contacts (here'sHow to find someone's email address) and end up infirst page of google. You get hundreds of hits every month...

But your income from this article remains a big fat $0.

That's because you didn't properly research your keyword beforehand. You may have found a keyword, but finding a keyword and doing keyword research are very different things.

Properly researching a keyword means understanding its sales potential, how competitive it is, and even the exact type of content you need to create in order to rank for it. At the end of this guide you will see what I mean.

In short, proper keyword research can make the difference between asuccessful SEO campaignThis makes your business a lot of money and a complete waste of time and money.

Search volume and long-tail keywords

The first concept you need to understand about keywords issearch volume.

This is what most people look for when they start searching for keywords, and it's also one of the worst metrics to look at.

A high search volume is very misleading for two reasons:

1. The sheer number of people searching for something has very little to do with how much you can actually make from that traffic. For example, if you rank for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per month, but people are just looking for information and aren't willing to buy (tip: you need to set search intent. More below.), it won't do anything...nothing for your bottom line.
2. Just because 10,000 people search for a keyword doesn't mean that all 10,000 people actually click on a result. For example, look at the keyword “how old is Trump” – it gets 30,000 searches a month, but only 13% of those people actually click on anything. That's because people get the right answer on Google and don't have to click through to find it.

On the other hand, low search volume doesn't mean a keyword is bad or that the number you're seeing matches the number of visitors you'll get. Virtually every page that ranks for one keyword on Google also ranks for dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of other keywords.

These other keywords are often synonyms and long-tail variants. There are also Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, which I cover in a section below.

Take a look, for examplethis postwritten by my wife Kayla for The Wandering RV. She targeted the keyword “best camping gear,” which Ahrefs says gets about 2,700 searches per month. But as you can see in the screenshot below, it also ranks for 1,912 other keywords and even ranks on page one for "camping gear" with 32,000 searches per month!

The point of the story? While search volume is an important metric, don't base your targeting keywords solely on how many people search each month (unless you're just focusing on brand awareness and/or ad revenue per impression).

search intent

Search intent is exactly what it sounds like - the intent of the person searching for a specific keyword. It is similar to the “buyer intent” marketing concept.

In other words: What is the user looking for?

Are you looking for an item that you want to buy immediately? Do they do research before making a purchase decision? Or are they just looking for information unrelated to the purchase but to a problem they may need a solution to?

Let's look at an example of each.

High purchase intent: A high intent keyword could be a product name, such as B. "Las Vegas Trailer Rental." If you type that into Google and look at the results, you'll see a number of RV rental ads and a map of RV rentals in Las Vegas. Anyone researching this is probably ready to buy, or very close.

search intent: are keywords that people are still looking for solutions to but will probably buy soon. The keywords "best" and "reviewed" often fall into this category, as do "best RV rental companies."

Informational Intent: These keywords are intended for people who are solely looking for information and are not ready or thinking of buying anything. The example “how old is Trump” falls into this category. Another example that fits RV rentals might be something like “How to travel cross country with a pet”.

However, don't think that you should only search for purchase intent keywords. Informative keywords can help you with thatBuild your email listand bring people down your marketing funnel to eventually buy from you.

Search intent is also important to know as it influences the ranking of your content on Google. if you tryCreate landing pagerank for an informative keyword, if google ranks long blog content, you probably won't even rank perfectSEO on the pageand lots of backlinks because it's just not what the user is looking for.

Suppose you want to sort by "small campers". How to create a guide to small RV ownership. However, if we look at Google, we can see that people are not looking for a guide, they are looking for a list of small charms to buy.

For this reasoneven after finding good keyword ideas,You should always manually type them into Google and see what's currently rankingto get an idea of ​​what you need to create. Don't write a giant guide when people just want a quick answer, and don't try to rate a blog post when people want to buy a product.

The role of LSI and synonyms

Earlier I mentioned LSI keywords. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and is Google's fancy way of saying "synonyms and related keywords". They are words that frequently appear together in a single subject and are semantically related to each other.

They are important for search engines to know what your content is about, as the same keywords can have multiple meanings.

Suppose you are writing an article about cars. There are five different potential "cars" you could be talking about:

1. cars, vehicles
2. Cars, the Disney animated film
3. CARS, the Canadian Rally Sport Association
4. CARs, Canadian Aviation Regulations
5. (The) Cars, American band from the 1970s

How does Google know which version of "cars" you're talking about? By LSI keywords! Just look:

1. Use the words "vehicle", "used", "new", "buy", "sell", etc.
2. The use of the words "movie", "movie", "Disney", etc.
3. The use of the words "club", "rally", "sport" etc.
4. The use of the words "aviation", "regulation", "administration" etc.

While LSI keywords aren't necessarily important during your keyword research, they are important when developing your actual content. You should of course include several LSI keywords in your content without stuffing them, including in titles and image alt text.

You can find (and learn more about) LSI keywords with a tool like .LSI diagram.

How do you conduct keyword research? (step by step instructions)

Alright, now that you have a solid understanding of the important metrics behind keyword research, it's time to find your own keywords! There are three steps I follow when conducting keyword research for a new website, with an optional, more advanced fourth step:

1. Search for keyword ideas
2. Check TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume
3. Determine your search intent
4. (Optional) Find and use keyword silos

Let's dive!

Step 1: Find keyword ideas

Finding keyword ideas is the easy part. There are many tools that generate hundreds of ideas at the click of a button. It's exhausting to examine them, but we'll get to that.

Now take a look aroundthe "Best Keyword Research Tool" section.below and choose your poison. I'll use Ahrefs in the examples because it's my favorite tool and it gives all the details, but the other tools may work as well.

My favorite way to find great keyword opportunities is to spy on my competition. You can do this by connecting the website to any keyword tool and looking at the keywords. Ahrefs has a nifty tool called Content Gap Analysis.

See how it works:

1. Connect your site to Ahrefs and click thecontent gapLink in left menu.

2. Connect 1-10 competitors that rank on Google for keywords you want to rank for. You can find them by searching Google for these keywords and getting the URLs from Google, or by using the Ahrefs Competing Domains tool just above the Content Range link. Run the tool.

3. From here you can export the list to an Excel spreadsheet if required. I like browsing the list directly in Ahrefs. When I see a keyword I want to target, I open it in a new tab and add it to a keyword list using the + Add to button in the top-right corner.

If you don't have access to Ahrefs or another keyword tool that lets you see your competitor's keywords, you can also use a tool like Keyword Shitter to give you a bunch of ideas, and then combine them with other free tools how to go through Uber Suggest .

Step 2: Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume

Once you have a list of keyword ideas that you're comfortable working with (I aim for 50-100 at a time, but you can do a lot more), it's time to see which ideas are worth pursuing , based on keyword difficulty (KD) and in search volume.

There's just one caveat... the search volume and KD you see in most keyword research tools are usually far apart. The KD on Ahrefs is based solely on the number of domains linking to the top results, which is not a 100% accurate representation of a keyword's true ranking difficulty.

That's because SEO is a complex endeavor and things like domain ranking (which I'll get to in a moment) andinternal linkscan have a big impact on ranking. Backlinks are only part of the picture.

What about search volume? This does not include LSI and long-tail keywords!

Remember that camping gear example I showed you at the beginning of this article that ranked for over 1,900 keywords? The main keyword only had 2,700 searches per month, but the article gets over 5,000 hits per month. This is because it ranks for keywords other than the main keyword.

So if you see a keyword getting 200 searches per month, it's probably closer to 500 or 1,000 when you include the related keywords it's ranking for.

To determine true search volume, take the #1 result on Google for your keyword and paste it into Ahrefs or Uber Suggest to see how much traffic that page is actually getting. This should give you a more accurate picture of the search volume for a given keyword.

Here's the traffic on the #1 ranking page for "small campers," a keyword that gets about 3,400 searches per month:

See how the page gets over 10,000 hits even though the main keyword gets a third of that? This is the true potential of search volume.

The other metric, Keyword Difficulty, is also not 100% accurate. But to figure out the real difficulty, it's usually as easy as looking at the Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Ranking (DR) of the top sites when using Ahrefs. let me explain.

If a keyword has a difficulty of 8, but the top ranking pages are all DR 80+, your site can be difficult to rank for those keywords if you have a low DR despite your low difficulty.

My advice is to target keywords of 30KD or less if you are under 40DR, and then expand as you build more links and gain greater authority. As your DR increases, your internal links are worth more "link juice" (or convey more "page authority," depending on the source you're listening to).

But this isn't an article about technical SEO, so I'll leave it at that for now!

Step 3: Determine search intent

At this point, you should have a pretty decent list of difficulty keywords to deal with and search volume potential you'd like to capture. Now it's time to find out what people really want when they search for those terms and whether or not it aligns with your marketing and sales goals.

This part is as simple as Googling each keyword on your list and looking at the top 3-5 results. Check your meta title and description, click on them to preview the page and see the angle they took on the page.

• Is it mostly list posts? How to make...?final instructions? A landing page? Anything else?
• as they seemmonetization page? are theyUse of Display Ads? Sell ​​products as a solution to a problem?Affiliate-Marketing? Just intercept emails and not sell anything?
• Check out the comments. Are people asking questions that aren't answered in the article? Do they appear happy, angry, or neutral?

All of these questions will help you define the type of post/page you need to create, how to monetize it (or use it to collect email/push notification subscribers/followers), and what you'll do can to improve them.

Keep track of your answers to these questions in a spreadsheet or Word document as you go through each keyword to keep track of which ones you want to follow. Your definitive list is the list to chase!

To give you a better idea of ​​how to determine search intent, here are some examples courtesy ofthis post moz:

Informational Intent:

• [product name]
• what is [product name]
• How does [product name] work?
• How do I use [product name]

Commercial Intent (aka Research Intent):

• best [product name]
• [product name] reviews
• compare [product name]
• What is the tip [product name]
• [color/style/size] [product name]

Transaction Intent (AKA Purchase Intent):

• How much is [product name]
• [product name] at [location]
• Order [product name] online
• [product name] near me
• affordable [brand name] [product name]

This graphicby Ahrefscan also help:

Now take your list and start producing content! Or you take one last step.

Step 4: (Advanced) Find and use keyword silos

If you really want to do well, you can optionally go one step further and look for keyword silos to create appropriate content silos on your site.

A keyword silo is a list of highly related keywords that you can create to link together on your site (also known as the "hub and spoke" method). Here is an image I created to help you understand:

Essentially, you create a hub page that targets the top keyword you want to rank for, and then create "spoke" pages based on related and long-tail keywords.

For example, when I was doing keyword research for my wife Kayla's vegan food blog, I found a bunch of related keywords with the question "is it ___ vegan." People wanted to know if common foods like bagels, donuts, or Oreos are vegan.

To rank these keywords, we createdthis central pagewhich contains links to all of his "Is ___ vegan" articles. All of these articles link both to each other and back to the main hub page.

This connection is called a content silo and it works very well for two reasons:

1. Since all pages link to each other, if you link to one of the pages, it improves the authority of the page on all other pages.
2. Google uses relevancein its algorithm, and since these topics are highly relevant to each other, it can further improve your ranking.

How do you find keyword silos? There is no magic bullet - you have to be good at spotting patterns and recognizing relevancy. However, there is one trick you can try to find them: books.

Search Amazon for books on your subject and browse the table of contents. Books are often full of keyword silos: that's what makes them a book! Think of the cover as the main page and the chapters as the speaking pages.

Of course, as you can see from the example above, these keywords are not exactly what people are looking for on Google. People aren't typing "worldwide vegan," but "how to eat vegan at restaurants," or "how to eat vegan at family gatherings." Therefore, you may need to do some research to find the keyword that corresponds to the chapter title in the books you come across.

Once you've found a potential silo, make sure you go through the keywords in steps 2 and 3 before committing to it! Just because you found a silo doesn't mean you should go after it. Think logically about how all this content fits into your business and how you might expand it in the future.

There are dozens if not hundreds of keyword research tools on the market today. Some are extremely unique, but most are just a little different from the same idea. So which one is the best? Let's break it down into free and paid tools.

Free keyword research tools

There are two free keyword research tools that I have used and recommend:

1. Ubersuggest
2. keyword shit

Ubersuggest

Let's put all the conversions about Neil Patel on hold for a second. This tool does the job, and if you're on a budget it can help you get started with SEO.

UbersuggestIt's basically a free, stripped-down version of either Ahrefs or Moz. It allows you to take a look at competitor backlinks, see what keywords they rank for, and do some decent keyword research. If you're doing SEO on a budget, it can get the job done.

keyword shit

keyword shitit is exactly what it sounds like. You enter a keyword and get hundreds of keyword suggestions. It's great if you just need tons of ideas, but most of the time it just spits out keywords related to what you typed, not separate, unique ideas.

Paid keyword research tools

Now we come to the big boy (or girl) tools! If you are serious about SEO and on a budget, these are the tools you want to use.

1. Ahrefs
2. SEMrush
3. keyword information
4. keywords everywhere

Ahrefs

Ahrefsit is without a doubt my favorite SEO tool; not only for keyword research, but also for link building, ranking tracking, creating content ideas and more. It has all the bells and whistles and is by far the best general SEO tool out there. However, the price is high as only the basic tool costs $99 per month.

SEMrush

SEMrushis another great keyword research tool. It's cheaper than Ahrefs but doesn't have as many features. It's more geared towards thatsearch mechanismMarketing and PPC (hence SEM in SEMrush). However, if you want a great paid tool but don't want to pay the Ahrefs premium, this is a worthwhile option. You can even test the product for free!

keyword information

keyword informationClaims to be "the smartest way to group keywords and rank search intent at scale"... and with good reason. The tool uses real-time and geo-specific data from search engine results pages to group keywords into similar groups while also discovering the search intent behind them.

A user simply uploads a list of keywords (as many as you like) and the tool generates a pre-formatted Google Sheets document with the keywords grouped and intent extracted. The latest update also categorizes keywords grouped into "top-level topics" so you can see what content hubs should look like and what spoken content can look like. The information also tells you which keywords you can target a single page with, or which ones need to be split across multiple pages.

keywords everywhere

keywords everywhereIt's an amazing tool that used to be free and is now credit based. The tool shows you search volume, competition and average CPC right on Google as you type. It also shows statistics on related keywords and the “people also search” keywords. Regardless of what other tools you use, I highly recommend using this one.

Want more SEO tools? Check out Kinsta's listmust-have SEO plugins for WordPress.

Suggested Stack

So which keyword research tools should you get? My suggested stack is Ahrefs and keywords everywhere. Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO software that helps you rank your website, not just find keywords. And with Keywords Everywhere, you'll see search volume and keyword ideas whenever you search for something on Google. Plus it's free, so what's not to like?

Summary

Here's a quick recap of everything we've covered:

1. Keyword research is extremely important to any SEO campaign and should not be ignored or taken lightly.
2. Search volume and keyword difficulty can be deceiving. Do more thorough research by typing your keyword into Google and checking the results before making a decision.
3. Don't let the low search volume fool you. Check true search volume by checking search traffic on the top pages with Ubersuggest or Ahrefs.
4. Search intent is king. Make sure the content you create is consistent with the content that users want to see (and is already served by Google).
5. Look for keyword silos. They can be a shortcut to rank your pages faster.

And that's it! If you have any questions, you can leave a comment below or email me. For more help with SEO,Click here to read my step-by-step guideand this amazingly detailed guidehow to drive more traffic to your website

Much luck!