Keyword Researcher Tool Guide - 2024

You should be strategic and use multiple methods to ensure that you rank for the keywords you are targeting. These tips include utilizing relevant, high-quality content as well as making sure your site is optimized correctly.

This is a very straightforward and honest article which gets to the point. I personally read articles in the SEO industry that don't even give you a quick tip, but rather ramble on about something irrelevant for half an hour. So this one does what it says and gives you solid tips of how to rank your content in Google's SERPS.

You should be tactical and use various methods to ensure that you rank for the keywords you are targeting. These tips include utilizing relatable, high-quality content as well as making sure your site is optimized correctly.

What Is Keyword Research ?

Keyword research is the process of finding long-tail keywords with a low competition level that are relevant to your niche. Long-term keyword research is very important when you want to find new ways to generate traffic and grow your business.

Knowing which industries have the highest search volume can help you choose an industry that will work best for your website. Keyword research can be used as a basis for generating ideas, content, article titles, product names and more in order to bring potential customers to a specific website.

For example, if you're trying to promote ecommerce solutions for small businesses, then using these key terms in your titles/content/article links will drive traffic toward your site resulting in conversions (clicking through) on your embedded links.

Why Keyword Research Is Important ?

Keywords are the foundation of your website. If you do not choose the right keyword, you will either waste a lot of money or result in getting very few visitors to your website. Here is why it's important to conduct keyword research before building your website:

" Finding keywords that have low competition can make a big difference in ranking higher on search engines and bringing traffic to your site."

These keywords are easier to rank for since they have less competition as compared to high volume, highly competitive keywords. For example, let's say that there is a huge number of people searching for "paintless dent repair cost" (the term I used) every month even though there are a number of companies that offer this service.

On the other hand, if you were to use "small business ecommerce solutions", then it would be much easier for your website to rank higher since there is less competition as compared to searching for "paintless dent repair cost".

Asking the Correct Questions to Yourself for keyword research

These are the first things to ask yourself when performing keyword research?

What kind of sites do I want to compete with for these keywords and how aggressive would I like my competition to be? From there we can build a list of ideas that fit our chosen strategy, and get started on the process.

Competition is an important question that you should always keep in mind before starting any new SEO campaign; knowing who your competitors will be at any time is very useful information and helps set expectations correctly. If you're planning on going head-to-head with the big boys (like Amazon or Google), then… well…. good luck! You're going to need it.

If you're planning on going after some smaller niches (which are always a good idea), then you can get started! Here are the types of questions that I like to ask myself when planning out my campaigns:

In what niche/ keyword (KW) am I interested in getting rankings? What kind of sites do I want to compete with for these keywords and how aggressive would I like my competition to be? Are there any partners I could cross-promote with, or related websites that may benefit from additional traffic?

How far will your budgets go, and how much time are you willing to put into this campaign?

The first question is fairly obvious; if we wanted keyword research ideas for "SEO articles", we would start doing keyword research for "SEO" and then look at results. However, you'll notice that I added a second question as well; what kinds of sites do I want to compete with? While this is usually a really hard thing to imagine out, you can still try to play the game yourself – just sit down and write out how you would plan your site if it was competing for those keywords. What kind of content creation schedule would you follow? Would your site be larger (in terms of page count) than others in the niche or smaller?

By playing around in our heads with these questions, we should get some good information going into our own personal strategy plans. Once you've identified who you do and do not want to compete with, you should have some good keywords that could fall within your chosen sub-niche to target.

This can be a very time-consuming process; however it's highly important if you're going after a profitable niche at all! There is no point in writing an article about "SEO tips" (for example) on a site that only gets 500 visits per month because so many sites are already covering this topic.

If you write an article like this, most likely nobody will read it! It doesn't matter how great of an article it is, if the people who need the information aren't looking for what we're selling – then we'll never make any sales. So try to get creative with this process and make sure you target your competition properly.

Any additional partners that could benefit from additional links and traffic are also a great way to find keywords, too. For example: if you're in the "startup" niche, then maybe you can't compete with TechCrunch for terms like "startups", but what about other areas of corporate blogging?

You may have an interest in writing on behalf of startup companies; not only will this work towards building your own brand recognition (which is always a good thing) – it'll bring some extra traffic to these sites which wouldn't otherwise exist. This strategy works really well when working alongside a cross promoting partner who has their own list of topics they'd like to cover for their readers!

Brainstorm Ideas for keyword research

Brainstorming and keyword research works best when you do it with a number of people. This is, because it won't just be you generating keyword ideas but also other individuals in your company or in a group that are involved in the same niche as you.

Brainstorming also makes use of more than one person's mind to generate ideas for the next big project which would not have been possible if only one person was doing brainstorming. It uses many minds working together instead of one busy brain working on its own.

It is important to note that brainstorming should always take place using two steps; this will help everyone come up with great idea. The first stage involves having all members within a group submit their ideas for consideration before they come together for the second stage.

For instance, what if your group brainstormed and generated fifty ideas which were not good enough? In many cases, this will be the norm and could mean that you did great in generating such a number of ideas. However, it is important to note that there may also be an individual or two within the group who came up with some best idea in their own right; missed out on generation because they weren't present for all the previous sessions.

This means that these ideas have been left behind after everyone had submitted theirs into consideration. You can easily overcome this problem by introducing a step in between brainstorming session where freewriting takes place before finalizing on some keyword ideas to shortlist and use for your next project.

Freewriting is simply writing whatever comes into your mind without editing or proofreading the written content until you are done with everything you want to write on paper.

This will help ensure that all ideas generated during brainstorming sessions between different individuals in a group, form the basis of an individual or two who have been left out because they were not present for all brainstorming sessions. Freewriting ensures that every idea is recorded by someone and therefore is not lost at any point during keyword generation activity within a group.

Create a List of Topics Based on Your Business for keyword research

Use the following steps to create a list of topics related to your business, products or services.

Browse Google for competition research (e.g., [keyword + brand] in quotes) and write down all topics you see listed here. Search for the names of well-known companies that are somehow related to your industry (e.g., Tesla, Samsung). Browse forums and blog comments related to your type of business.

Write down every topic found here as well. Repeat step 2 with other growing industries, especially if they're closely related to yours (e.g., construction tools → electronics → hardware → software development). Use competitors' landing pages and browse their keywords' rankings on SEMrush or Keywordtool .com to find out what pages are ranking for which keyword.

If the keywords don't make sense anywhere, create a new topic here. Once you have a decent list of topics to work with (10-20), it's time to start looking into keywords related to your business and industry.

Find keywords that make sense with all the topics created in step 1 through 3. Also try to look for long-tail SEO keywords (e.g., [keyword research tool 2015] instead of "keyword research" or "[online market research tool] free") since they tend to perform better in many cases.

TIP! Don't forget about other common search phrases besides actual "keywords". Longer forms like "[best online market research tools] free" tend to perform well too.

Once you think you have a complete list of related keywords, it's time to find their search volume.

How to Find Out Search Volume for Your Keywords

While creating your list in the previous section, I'm sure you noticed many things that ranked high in Google and were completely unknown to you before (as opposed to generic keywords like "market research" or "web analytics"). That's because long-tail keywords usually don't bring tons of traffic by themselves but they're well worth investing into if you can rank well for them. Here are a few places where you can easily get keyword search volumes:

Google Keyword Planner

Go there after signing up with your Google account and create a new project. Go there after signing up with your Google account and create a new project.

SEMrush

Sign up with your email, go to the keyword research section, click "Organic Research" in the left pane and then select one of the SERP features on the right (e.g., Amazon , YouTube etc.). A new tab will open with search volumes for that specific service/domain combination and you can quickly cross out any keywords whose volume is too low or irrelevant to your business.

If you have an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Moz already, sign up for their free plans to get more accurate results (e.g., organic traffic only).

Don’t Rely on The Keyword Difficulty (KD) Metric for keyword research

I have seen a lot of keyword research by using KD metric in SEMrush and Ahrefs. They both provide this feature that shows you how hard your competition is to rank for the particular keyword.

It doesn’t mean they are good at Keyword Research, don’t rely on it until you see an actual result from a website with lower or similar KD as yours. Don’t forget about Domain Authority (DA) of Your Target Website also matter when looking at their Search Traffic and Keywords Ranking Position in SERP.

Just because they have lower KD, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank higher than them, You may need to check DA before making decision whether run after certain keyword or not if you have same KD as others.

I know it’s easy to look at those metrics and believe them but you must also realize that not all the sites are ranking for competitive keywords. Some of those websites get traffic from guest blogging, PR or other sources like that which we don’t see in Google Analytics.

Some of those sites may be getting traffic from infographic sharing on Pinterest and other social media platforms which Google doesn’t track in Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools).

Some Marketing Agency and Consultant will tell you, “Hey Dude! We got a list of 3,000 keywords for your website with about 80% keyword difficulty score range around 7-11! you should buy our service in order to rank on those 3,000 keywords!”

You will see a lot of people using KD score in SEMrush and Ahrefs and think that they have done all the keyword research for you. Just because their keyword difficulty rating is low or between 1-5 doesn’t mean you should go after those keywords.

You still need to make your own independent choices when doing Keyword Research and don’t rely on other people opinion about what a good Keyword is to target. Do Your Own Independent Evaluation While Doing Keyword Research So You Don't Get Fooled By fancy metric like KD Scores.

Check your Niche Competitors for keyword research

Fortunately or unfortunately, there's a big world out there and you'll always be competing with someone for some kind of search traffic. But if you're targeting keywords that are actually worth going after then the competition is no reason to shy away from an opportunity.

If the keyword generates over 1000 searches per month and has over 50 competitors, I'll take it into consideration while selecting my first 3-5 niche specific longtail post topics. The biggest mistake I see people make is choosing keywords that don't have much sustainable traffic.

This is a pretty big deal because Google allows thousands of other websites to compete for your niche; many of which are more capable of ranking than you, so your chances of getting on the first page for long tail keywords is often slim to none.

While I'm not a fan of 'black hat' SEO techniques, one trick I do recommend trying is using the Google keyword planner tool to find out what your competitors are targeting in terms of high traffic / low competition phrases. You won't be able to see what specific keyword each competitor chose, but you'll get a good idea as to how many words and competition there is per phrase.

Knowing Your Website Strength for keyword research

This is very critical. Many of the top ranking web pages on Google & other search engine results are not using their main keyword in their page title, meta description or page content.

When I started a course in SEO and was stunned to learn that even if you're looking for a solution to something, people don't just type it into Google. They type it into Bing, Yahoo! And sometimes Youtube or Amazon before finding what they were looking for on Google.

So having multiple URLs pointing at your website (domain names) can be an advantage because it allows your audience to find you through different mediums and under different contexts/models). It also increases your traffic flow as these "new" searchers see your brand and start navigating deeper.

We see this with big brands like Nike, Apple, and YouTube. These large well-known websites have millions of pages indexed that aren't using their main keywords in the majority of their content.

So how do they stay at the top of Google rankings? They know that just having a strong domain name is not enough to have a successful website. They know their target market (searchers) don't always search for solution directly to the solution or product they're looking for .

Now we all want to have the best possible keyword density on our page but if you use your main keyword over and over again it can be detrimental to your SEO efforts because people can easily tell you're trying too hard. 

Find Keywords on Reddit for keyword research

Reddit is a social media platform that has been gaining a lot of popularity in the past few years, and for good reason.

I use Reddit for keyword research often because it provides tons of insight into what topics I need to cover as an SEO writer/blogger.

How do I find keywords?

I use Reddit in two different ways to find keywords.

First, I go to the subreddit that is most relevant to the niche my article covers. For example, if I was writing a blog for dogecoin and its place in crypto on a crypto site, I would go to /r/dogecoin:

From there I would read through all of the content on that subreddit. While reading it, you will notice things like "swag," "wow," "dogememe," etc. Write these down because they could be used as good search terms for your article:

The next thing I do is check out what related subreddits people are having discussions about on this one:

As you can see, someone wanted to know about the price of dogecoin. I also see there are people commenting on a giveaway contest for dogecoin as well. Both of these could be excellent topics to write about and should produce good search terms as well:

The other way I use Reddit is by going directly into meme-related subreddits such as /r/memeeconomy:

In this subreddit, you will see memes posted all day long. You can easily scroll through them all until you find a topic that catches your eye – like one of the links above to "What if Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook today?":

This gives you an idea on how to find keywords in Reddit using specific subreddits and looking through content that is posted there. Use these strategies to find great keywords, boost your website's SEO rank and get more traffic.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a crucial aspect of SEO. In this article, we’ve discussed the importance of using keyword research to create content and build links that will help you rank higher in Google search results pages (SERPS). If your website or blog has been struggling with rankings, it may be time for you to rethink what keywords are driving traffic into your site.

For instance, if an eCommerce company isn't ranking high on SERPS because they have lots of competition selling similar products but not enough demand from customers looking for those specific items; they should conduct some keyword research to find out which key phrases their target audience uses when searching online.

Once these new terms and phrases are identified, the company can use them as part of their digital marketing strategy to drive more people to their site.