Doing good keyword research goes a long way in creating content that people are looking for in an area and making a website successful.
While there are many ways to do keyword research, there is one method that successful webmasters use to strike gold in terms of keywords for their website’s content.
Through this article, I will be showing you this method and how to make the most out of it.
Let’s jump right in.
Table of Contents
An Overview of Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important steps in SEO because it helps you know how you can optimize your website in such a way that you get more traffic.
What makes the difference between a site that gets many visitors and one that doesn’t is primarily because of the keywords used.
You use the wrong keywords, you end up failing to rank well on the various search engines and lose out on cool traffic or even fail to get traffic at all because the keyword you chose is not something people are searching a lot on search engines.
However, if your keywords are well-chosen you have a high chance of having more people visiting your site and hence traffic which translates to good conversion.
Therefore, you must carry out thorough keyword research so that you identify important aspects of the keyword you are going to use such as, traffic, search engine result pages (SERPs), conversion, search volume as well as rank difficulty.
Doing this will not only help you find a good keyword but also help you get to find untapped areas in a certain niche meaning that you will not have a lot of competition and so you will rank well.
Now, to further help you carry out your keyword research in the best way possible, you will need to use a keyword tool.
Keyword tools are systems that help you analyze keywords and make it easy for you to determine if the keywords you want to use are actually the right ones.
To better understand keyword tools and the most important things to know about them, I encourage you to read this beginner’s guide on keyword research tools.
Some of the most popular high performing keyword tools include Ahrefs, SEMrush, Jaaxy, Google Keyword Planner, and Majestic, just to name a few.
These are some of the best and most effective keyword tools and you can choose to work with any of them based on your needs and goals.
How to do Keyword Research For SEO
Before you get started, you need to have chosen a good keyword tool for yourself as well as decided on the topic you would like to research keywords on.
I will be using Jaaxy to walk you through how to carry out keyword research since that is my favorite keyword tool as it offers the kind of features that work well for me.
The reason I prefer it is that it’s great for carrying out keyword research in that it shows you untapped niches and that can bring in high traffic, as well as help you find keywords that have low competition very easily and hence saves you a lot of time and makes your research productive.
You can read my in-depth Jaaxy review to know the other features I love about it so that we get straight into the keyword research here.
Here are the steps I take as well as the ones you should take to carry out your keyword research;
Step 1: Come up with keyword ideas for the chosen topic.
You should already have a topic in mind that you want to get good keywords for. And from that topic, you should then brainstorm a few ideas that can make good keywords for your content.
You can also get keyword ideas by getting in the head of your audience and thinking about what they want to know more about on that topic and how they would search for a specific topic.
This is where you ask yourself how they would phrase the different questions they have in Google regarding that topic if they are not knowledgeable on a certain topic.
You can also ask yourself, depending on the kind of information they might have about that topic, how they would structure the words on their searches.
The idea here is to aim to get keywords that are almost the same as the ones the people you are targeting with the article you will be writing so that they are directed to your content by search engines.
Another way through which you can come up with keyword ideas is through visiting forums and social platforms to get a feel of what people want because this is where they air out their issues on certain topics if they don’t get help elsewhere.
The good thing about this is that you get ideas on keywords that haven’t been used before.
You could also make use of the comments section on your website and get feedback from your audience on a certain topic which will lead you to discover new keywords that you never even thought of.
Through these ways that I have provided, you can come up with at least five phrases that you will use as the basis for your keyword research on your keyword tool.
Step 2: Search for each of those phrases in your preferred keyword tool
This is where I now get to use Jaaxy.
I will log into my account and click on “Keywords” in the top menu so that I am taken to the keyword tool page.
I will then copy-paste the keywords that you came up with, one by one so that I get to analyze each of them well and see if I can get something substantial.
After copy-pasting my first keyword, I hit “Search” to get results on it.
After searching, I will be given the analyses of that keyword as well as other related keywords that could be a good replacement for the one I entered.
Now I have to go through each keyword, from the one I chose to the other related ones, and get to determine which one fits me the best.
To be in a position to vet your keywords, there are certain terms that you will see on each column of the keyword results that you need to understand first.
These are:
* AVG (Average Searches) – This shows you the average number of searches a keyword has.
* Traffic – This column indicates the number of people who will visit your site if your content makes it to the top position of Google when the keyword you are analyzing is searched for by readers.
* QSR (Quoted Search Results) – This one indicates your competition that is, the sites that are targeting the same keyword as you. The reason it is called quoted search results is that the data is straight from Google and reflects the number of websites that have been ranked for that keyword.
* KQI (Keyword Quality Indicator) – This shows the quality of a keyword and how favorable it is for you to use.
* SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – This part informs you how difficult it’s going to be for you to rank based on competition and traffic.
These are the most important terms as you use the keyword tool.
Step 3: Now it is time to vet each and every keyword in the results and choose the most suitable one for you.
To do this, in Jaaxy you will see a column called KQI (Keyword Quality Index) where you feed in your search. Click on the “Get QSR” button for each keyword to reveal the data for that column. Under KQI, you will see different results. Some keywords may have “Okay/normal status (shown in yellow), other many have “Great” (shown in green) and others may be “Poor” (shown in red).
These results give you an idea of how good a keyword is to use for your website. If it is Okay or Great, then you can use it. If it is poor, you should not use it because it will give you a really hard time.
Step 4: Use the most rewarding keyword analysis technique to get keywords.
To be even more thorough with your keyword analysis, you need to have a formula for vetting the keywords.
And there is a proven formula that can guide you into identifying the best keyword.
The formula is simply this, to aim for keywords with low competition and high monthly traffic. Why? It ensures that you rank well on search engines because you are covering an area that not many of your competitors are and many people are looking for information on it.
So you will get to have your website rank well and get a good deal of traffic every month.
With Jaaxy, you not only discover how much traffic a certain keyword is getting but also get to know how much traffic you can anticipate if you rank on the first page for it, with the help of the “Traffic” column.
It’s very obvious, that a keyword won’t get a whole 100% of the traffic even if it was placed in the first position of the first page readers have different needs and preferences.
And Jaaxy gives you a very close estimate of how much traffic your preferred keyword can bring in.
If the keywords are for a new website in a highly competitive niche, you should aim for the least competitive keyword possible while aiming for some good traffic and then aim for higher traffic and slightly higher competition as you grow.
Mostly, long-tail keywords fall under this criterion and are good to use for your website.
Always seek to use long-tail keywords (long phrases that people key in on search engines when they want information on something specific on a given topic) because, with these, you have lower competition than with short tail words and you will rank much better.
Examples of long-tail keywords include “how to carry out keyword research” or “tips to be successful at keyword research”.
Looking at short tail keywords, they mostly have less than three words, for example, “zero-grazing” and “researching”.
To continue with your keyword analysis using Jaaxy, aim to work to find a keyword that has traffic above 100 in the AVG column and competition below 50 or 100 in the QSR column.
As you grow and as your website gains authority, you can then aim for keywords with competition below 200 and traffic above 200.
This technique is quite rewarding in the long term.
In case you don’t find a keyword that fits that criteria, you can use the “Related” section on the right side of the keyword tool and see other phrases that are related to the keyword you searched for to see if the tool can come with up other related keywords that will fit your criteria.
Step 5; When you find a good keyword, you should then copy it and go write content based on it.
If you still don’t get a keyword in that topic that fits the criteria, you should then consider the other phrases on your list because the keywords that are there will give you a much harder time to rank on search engines because of high competition, or even worse, fail to give you a substantial amount of traffic since people may not be using them to look for information on the topic.
The topic could also be so thin that people are generally not interested or don’t consider it helpful.
NOTE: If you are using a different keyword tool, you should use the same formula to find suitable keywords although metrics such as competition and traffic will not be exactly structured the same way as Jaaxy.
Just use what is provided in your preferred tool and remember that the lower the competition you can get with good traffic on a keyword, the easier your chances of ranking well on search engines especially in google where most searches are.
And that, my friends, is how good keyword research is done.
I now encourage you to follow the steps that I have provided to discover great keywords for your niche.
In case you need a hand with anything related to keyword research, just shoot your question in the comments and I will shoot an answer right back.
Cheers to fantastic keyword research! 🙂
