Every successful SEO strategy starts with detailed keyword research.
What Is Keyword Research for SEO?
If you want your SEO strategy to be successful, you need to understand which keywords are used by your target audience, and which ones aren’t. This is the most important goal of keyword research for SEO. You analyse which words your target audience uses in queries, revealing which ones you should use in your content.
Before You Start, You Should Know This
Types of Keywords
Short-tail keywords are short, generic terms that usually consist of one or two words. For broad, high-volume terms like these, there is plenty of competition. Some examples of shot-tail keywords are ‘shoes’, ‘travel’, and ‘SEO’.
Long-tail keywords on the other hand, consist of three or more words and are less generic than short-tail. These lower-volume terms have a specific search intent and considerably less competition. They are still very valuable however, because they target distinct groups of people. A few examples of long-tail keywords are ‘black leather men’s shoes’, or ‘How do I set up local SEO?’
Search Intent
Search intent refers to the reason behind someone’s query. Understanding the search intent of your keywords is crucial to the success of your SEO strategy. Knowing what your audience is looking for, enables you to better tailor your website and content to their expectations.
We can split intent into 4 main categories:
- Informational: users are looking for information about a subject. Their either want to learn something new, better understand something, or do research. For example: ‘How do you make guacamole?’
- Navigational: users are looking for a specific website or web page. They might not know the site name, or simply want to go directly to the correct page, which is why they go through the search results. For example, ‘Facebook log in’, or ‘Amazon customer service’.
- Transactional: users have a specific goal, usually completing a transaction. This can include buying a product, using a service, or downloading an app. For example, ‘buy iPhone 13’, or ‘book a hotel in Amsterdam’.
- Commercial: somewhere in between informational and transactional, lies commercial search intent. Users have a vague idea of what they want, but they need more information before buying anything. For example, ‘best Italian restaurant Antwerp’, or ‘How do SEO agencies work?’
Take a look at the top 10 results on the SERP to get a feel for what Google expects of your page.
Doing Keyword Research
Know Your Target Audience
The first step in any marketing strategy is knowing your target audience, and this is no different when doing keyword research. Before you start looking for relevant terms, make sure you know the answer to these questions:
What are their wants and needs?
How do they search for things?
What problems do they have and how do they solve them?
Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Look at your competitors’ websites and use SEO-tools like Ahrefs to get an idea of the keywords they are using. Save and organise all relevant terms to add to your keyword list later on.
Generate Relevant Keywords
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Semrush, and Ahrefs to generate relevant keywords. These tools provide long lists of terms including information about the monthly search volume, competition, and related words.
This information will not only tell you how relevant certain words are to your target audience, but also gives you an estimate of how difficult it will be to achieve high rankings.
Add all of these words to the list you made earlier.
Cluster Your Keywords
You now have a long list of keywords, time to add some structure and organisation. When reading through the words, you will see that many of them are related to each other, add those to their own categories. After that, you can split those words up in multiple subcategories, make it as generic or detailed as you’d like.
Assign priorities
After you’ve created some order from chaos, you can now start assigning priorities to your keywords. One mistake we see many people make is simply sorting the words by search volume and prioritising the high-volume words. While search volume certainly is an important factor, this is not the only one! Competition, relevance to your target audience and relevance to your business should all be taken into consideration when assigning priorities.
The Next Step
You’ve now completed your keyword list, time to start writing! As tempting as it is to use AI-tools like ChatGPT to help you along the way, good SEO content should be unique and written with the appropriate tone of voice. Are you not confident in your own writing or SEO skills? Do you want to leave your content to an SEO expert? Get in touch today!
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