How to Proper Keyword Research for SEO in 2023

Process of Keyword Research

Learn from scratch, how to do keyword research for SEO in 2022 to make your website, blog, and online store findable by customers who are looking for similar services or products that you are providing.
After reading this detailed blog, you’ll come to know the exact process of doing keyword research in 2022. In this detailed guide to keyword searching, I am going to cover: –

  1. How to find keywords
  2. How to choose the exact keywords for profitable business
  3. How You can use keyword research tools to make your process fast and easy.
  4. Some advanced tactics of keyword research

Read this complete blog to achieve a higher ranking in Google or other search engines like – Yahoo, Bing, and so on.
So, let’s dive into it.

keyword research in SEO

Fundamentals of Keyword Research

In this section, I’ll discuss about what is keyword research and why it’s important for you if you are doing SEO for any website or blog.

Perfect keyword research can help you to improve the search ranking of your blog post or a web page in the search engines and it will also reduce your paid marketing cost like pay-per-click (PPC).

On the other hand, if you poorly perform the keyword research task, you can’t drive more organic traffic from the search engines due to the low ranking of a web page. No website traffic means no leads, no conversion, and no sales.

Introduction to Keywords

Keywords are those words or phrases that describe the intent of your content For example –

If you have a blog or website in which you have written an article about “what is digital marketing” so this term (what is digital marketing) basically is known as keywords. No matter whether the word or phrase is about one word or two words, all are keywords.

Keyword in SEO

When we do an SEO of any website then keywords are those words or phrases for us on which we want to rank in SERP. I have already given you an example of a keyword above which means you want to show your webpage when a person searches “what is digital marketing” and other words which are similar to this phrase on Google.

This means if you are working on a webpage as an SEO executive or manager so the word or phrase on which you want to rank is a keyword.

What is Keyword Research

In simple language, Keyword research is the process of finding a word or phrase that people are searching for in search engines like – Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Why the Process of Searching Keywords is an Important Task in SEO

To start with keyword research is always a good idea while doing SEO of any website or blog. An SEO expert knows the importance of keyword research as it helps him/her in whole SEO campaign parts like – content topic planning, On-page SEO, and other promotional activities.

SEO include multiple process

Just not that, even keywords also help you to understand your target audience and it gives you an Insight that what they are searching for. By getting this insight, you can plan your content accordingly to give them the relevant and complete information that they are looking for.

In another way, you can say that keyword research can also help us to identify the market and trends.

How You Can Find Your Keyword Ideas

Finding a keyword idea is to make a list of raw keywords which are not your final keywords. In this section, I am going to give a proven strategy and SEO techniques to generate lots of profitable keywords for your website or blog.

Brainstorm the Topics

To start with it, you have to think about some random questions from yourself which are directly related to your business or the services that you are offering.

Suppose, you are a real estate broker or an agency.

Just ask yourself, what people will search about your business or service you are offering for?

According to me, some terms can search –

  • 2BHK flats in [city]
  • 3BHK flats in [city]
  • flats on Rent
  • Real estate agency
  • Real estate service

Don’t forget, these are not the keywords yet.

Below I am going to share with you some other ways to find unique terms that people can search for –

Find Suggestions Using Wikipedia

There will be few people who know that Wikipedia is not only an authoritative website but also can use as a keyword research tool.

Yes, you heard it right! When you open the Wikipedia site, you will find a search bar on the head section like this –

wikipedia for keyword research
source: Wikipedia

You can put a generic term for such a topic on which you are doing keyword research.

Once you do that, you will see the webpage related to that generic term. Now look at the content part of that particular webpage, you can find the number of subtopics out there.

Make a list of that unique terms or topics which you can’t generally think of but are available on that Wikipedia page. Wiki covered broad information about any topic that’s the reason you can utilize it in your keyword research process.

Keywords from Related searches

There is another way to choose the right keywords you can use and that is Google’s Related searches.

Let me take you through the example –

Just take a moment and search a topic called “digital marketing “on Google.

google SERP

Once you do that, scroll the page to the downside. You’ll find 7-8 keywords of phrases that are closely related to your search query (digital marketing).

Google Related Search Keywords

Just like Google suggests, these are some relevant keywords that best match your search term. The core benefits of “Related searches” are that you don’t need to guesswork while brainstorming for the keyword research process.

Keyword Research Tools

There are so many keyword research tools out there in the market which you can use to find the best keywords for making content.

And, we’ll talk about it one by one –

The Google Keyword Planner

I took the Google keyword planner into the first position because this is a reliable source of keyword research or keyword information according to marketers and SEO professionals.

Google Keyword Tool for Keyword Research
source: google keyword planner

And it’s true because Google has a large database of users, even 5.6 billion searches every day happen on Google. If I’ll talk about its use so basically this tool is designed to help advertisers in their Google ads campaigns. But still, SEO professionals use it for keyword research and the best part is that GKP is totally free not paid.

Keyword Surfer

I personally like this tool called keyword surfer because it’s really easy to use.

Keyword surfer tool for keyword research

You just need to install an extension of the keyword surfer tool and it will show you the keywords ideas and the volume of keywords from inside the Google SERP (search engine result page).

Ubersuggest

Ubbersuggest is really popular keyword research and analysis tool among SEO specialists.

Ubber suggest tool for keyword research
source: ubbersuggest

It also generates keyword ideas from Google suggest along with some useful keyword matrices (like search volume, CPC, keyword difficulty, and so on).

Ubber suggest keyword ideas feature

SEMrush

If you are ok with investing some amount in paid tools, the SEMrush tool is one of them which I’ll highly recommend you invest in. This tool will give you the actual analysis of those keywords on which your competitors are already ranking.

SEMRUSH Tool for keyword research
source: SEMRUSH

Yes, It’s true!

You can actually steal all of their keywords and prepare good content against your competitors. SEMrush is the no.1 choice of those people who are really serious about website SEO.

SEMRUSH tool backlink analysis feature

Ahrefs

Many people use Ahrefs as a link-building tool only but it is a really good keyword research tool as well. In the Ahrefs tool, there is a feature called “Keyword Explorer” which you can use to generate tons of keyword ideas.

But this tool is hugely expensive I term of budget. Therefore, many SEO professionals do not use it.

Keyword Difficulty

What will you do, if your target keyword is too competitive to rank for?

Well, it’s a general problem when you want to rank on a keyword that has a huge volume.

Yes!

If you choose a keyword that has high completion it means big brands are already ranking on that keyword so you might be in trouble competing with them.

On the other hand, if you choose a keyword that has low competition, you have a good chance to get the top position on Google SERP.

So, the question is how you can check the keyword difficulty of a particular keyword to decide whether you should choose it or not.

Here, I have prepared some key points which you can prefer in the process of keyword research –

Always Start with Long Tail Keywords

If you have launched a new website and want to target 100% low competitive keywords, you should always start with long tail keywords.

SEO professionals mainly divided keywords into three categories such as –

  • Short tale or Seeds keyword – This type of keyword contains only a single word that has a huge volume of traffic. For example, “SEO”, “Digital Marketing”, etc. Most big brands can only play on these kinds of keywords as they become an authority in their niche. The short-tale keyword doesn’t have any user intent.
  • Mid-tale keyword – Mid-tale keyword has 2-3 words with decent volume and these keywords are more specific than short-tale keywords. For example, “order mobile online”.
  • Long-tale keyword – Long-tale keywords include 4-5 words or a complete phrase that are very specific with complete user intent. This kind of search term doesn’t have volume but is good for beginner websites.

Certainly, there is no best keyword category in all of the above, all three have their own pros and cons.

But If I talk about less competitive keywords so I always recommend you to choose the long-tale keywords.

Keyword Difficulty Inside of Keyword Tools

If you still feel issues finding keyword difficulty so there are several tools that you can use to see the KD (keyword difficulty) of every keyword. Some of the tools and their KD matrices are below here –

  1. SEMrush
  2. Ahrefs
  3. KWFinder
  4. Moz Pro

If your favorite tool is not on the list You can include and no matter what tool you use, you can choose any tool to check the keyword difficulty level.

How to Choose a Keyword

Now you have finally made a list of keywords but how would you know which keyword you should choose?

Unfortunately, there are no tools available in the market that will tell you: “this keyword is the best on your list”. Infect, you have to choose the best-suited keyword yourself measuring different factors.

If you don’t know, how you can check?

Don’t worry! This is exactly what I am going to show you in this blog, so keep reading.

Search Volume

This is the simple way to find your focus keyword which means the more people are searching for the keyword the more traffic you’ll get.

Now, the question is:

What is the decent “traffic or volume” you should choose?

Well, there is no simple and straightforward answer to this question because the volume of keywords always varies as per the industry or business.

For example –

If you are into the fitness niche and targeting a long tale keyword (best belly fat exercise) which gets 1K – 10K per month.

monthly searches of "best belly fat exercise"

On the other hand, if you’ll the long tale keyword in B2B business (best free SEO tools) gets only 100 – 1K per month.

Just like that, you can choose your focus keyword that has high and low volume in your business niche.

Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Nowadays, the number of google searchers that click on organic results is going to decrease which has two main reasons that are –

  • Featured Snippets – now you don’t need to click anything to get an answer from search engines because google feature snippets can answer your query directly.
  • Google paid to list – You can see some paid lists on Google SERP (4 results on top & 4 on bottom) due to it many searchers use to click on that paid listing before going to organic results.

After checking the search volume of any keywords, you can analyze only the traffic or volume of that keyword. To know how many clicks, you’ll get after ranking in the no.1 position, you need to estimate organic CTR.

Now the question is how you can check the organic CTR of any keywords.

So, the answer is: to use some tools.

In my opinion, there are two tools that you can utilize to measure the CTR of a keyword and Ahrefs and Moz are the two tools that you can use.

We have talked about organic CTR must be good that doesn’t mean, you should not consider those keywords which have low CTR. If lots of people are searching for it, you should work on it if the keyword is related to your industry.

Difficulty

If your site is new and doesn’t have too many backlinks for it, you should always choose long tale or low competitive keyword at first.

As your website started growing, you can start targeting more competitive keywords.

Your first step to driving traffic to your website is to target easy keywords which have low volume. In many, you’ll see that once the webpage rank on long-tale keywords with the LSI, it will automatically start ranking on seeds keywords also.

CPC

To identify the best keyword in your list, CPC is a really good option key point that you can consider. CPC stands for cost per click that tells you the commercial intent of any keywords. In simple language, a cost per click of any keyword describes doing people searching for this keyword actually spend money.

So, now you should understand that only having a good volume in a keyword is not going to help you if it doesn’t have commercial intent.

Even, sometimes you can get good ROI if keywords do have not good volume but enough CPC.

The keyword that Fit for Business

Suppose you are a training institute of web development so would you like to show your webpage on the keyword “best web development service”?

Your answer would be no!

Because if you are providing training so, the target audience would be different for your business.

Keyword Trends

An SEO professional always works on long-term goals for their clients. Identifying the keyword trends is always a good idea to check your keyword, whether it is growing fast or dying slowly.

And the best way to check it? Google Trends.

Conclusion –

I wish you enjoyed my keyword research guide, and it helps you a lot. I have created this in-depth content for beginner to advance level users to give them the right understanding of keyword research. And now I would like to hear from you, about which tip you want to test in your keyword research. Let me know in the comment section below.

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