How to do keyword research for SEO

Content is King.

At least that’s what Bill Gates said nearly 30 years ago.

If you ask me, Bill has a lot to answer for. Because content is everywhere now. Websites pumping out blog after blog because that’s what they think they have to do.

I prefer author Arjun Basu’s take on content:

“Without a strategy, content is just stuff. And the world has enough stuff.”

This is particularly true with SEO. SEO isn’t just about writing content. It doesn’t matter how well your blogs or webpages are written. Or how interesting they are. With no strategy, these pages are just stuff. And there’s definitely enough stuff on the internet.

And this is where good old keyword research comes in.

Of all the things that have changed in content marketing and seo over the years, the importance of keyword research is the same.

In this blog, I’m going to show you how to do it properly.

H2: How to do keyword research

1 – Understand your audience

Keyword research starts by knowing who your audience or customers are.

Remember, the ultimate goal of any content is to attract qualified buyers to your site so they eventually become paying customers.

So you need to know what they’re looking for. And what they search for. Whether they’re ready to buy. Or are earlier in the buyer journey and are looking for information or answers to questions.

Understanding this search behaviour will help you understand what keywords or content topics you need to cover. This will help guide your keyword research. And this will influence your business’ content strategy.

2 – Brainstorm your commercial keywords

Your commercial keywords (sometimes called seed keywords) are what you’ll use for your product or service pages.

These are keywords that will bring bottom of the funnel customers to your website. Those actively shopping for products or services.

For us, a commercial keyword would be SEO agency.

For you, it could be estate agent in St Helens.

This is a real example from our estate agent client Stapleton Derby. We targeted this commercial keyword when we started working with them and, as you can see below, they rank top of search because we properly targeted the right keywords.

This is bringing in qualified traffic to their site for people looking to either buy or sell their home in St Helens.

Once you have your commercial keywords, you can start to branch out.

3 – Expand keyword research to informational keywords

There are lots of keyword research tools you can use to help expand your keyword list.

We’ll get into what those tools are later.

To expand your keyword list, start to think of questions or problems your customer might have that they’ll be searching for answers.

We’ll use another one of our clients as an example here.

Clarke’s Golf sell golf equipment, including clubs and clothing.

So their commercial keywords are golf clubs, golf shoes etc.

But let’s think about their customers and what they might be looking for.

Many people are taking up golf for the first time. So they could be looking for something like “best golf clubs for beginners”.

They’ll be looking for recommendations for a good starter set.

So they have a blog recommending the best beginners golf clubs, which is driving traffic for that search term.

Another search people might make, is golf related Christmas gifts when it comes to that time of the year.

So again, we created a blog answering the question “what are the best golf xmas gift ideas.”

This means when potential customers are making these informational searches, Clarke’s Golf is showing up. It also means they getting in front of customers earlier in the buyer journey, and not just relying on being found for their products or services.

These are just a couple of examples of expanding your keyword list, but you can see how using in depth keyword research and understanding your customers needs, you can quickly start to build an SEO content strategy that will attract customers.

4 – Keyword metrics

Finding a keyword, writing a blog, and expecting it to rank is like planting one seed and expecting a forest.

You need to be choosy. Ruthless, even.

Here’s what you should be looking at before you commit to a keyword:

• Search volume – How many people type this in each month? No searches = no traffic.
  
• Keyword difficulty – How tough it’ll be to outrank everyone else fighting for the same space.
  
• Cost-per-click (CPC) – Yes, it’s more of a PPC thing, but a high CPC usually means a high-value searcher.
  
• Search intent – What the person expects to see when they click. Misjudge this, and they bounce faster than a golf ball on concrete.
  

We’ll get deeper into intent later—but just know this: get it wrong, and your content might as well not exist.

5 – Let’s prioritise your keywords

The thing with keyword research, is that once you’ve done everything you need to do, you’ll finish up with a huge list of searches to go after.

And you can’t do them all at once. So it’s time to prioritise.

The authority of your website will play a part in your priorities.

Newer websites, for example, won’t prioritise the same keywords as more established sites because of the difficulty of ranking new sites for competitive keywords.

These are the main things to consider when prioritising your keywords.

Is it realistic you’ll rank?

If a keyword is highly competitive, a new site isn’t likely to rank highly for it very quickly. So you should look for keywords with lower competition or long tail variations of the keywords you want.

Let’s look at Clarke’s Golf for another example.

One of their main keyword searches is “men’s golf club set”.

This has a difficulty of 24, which isn’t insurmountable, relatively speaking.

But if you were to set up a new golf store today, that would be a difficult keyword to rank for.

So you’d need something a little easier to start with.

Let’s look at variations that you could go for.

How about Iron golf sets?

With 2,900 monthly searches, and only a difficulty of 7, this could be a more realistic keyword for a newer site to target. Plus, it still has huge commercial value.

This keyword would also meet the other requirements we’d want for a realistic keyword.

First, it’s got lots of search volume.

Second, if you’re selling golf equipment, this keyword is highly relevant to your business, and will attract customers looking for a specific product.

6  – Let’s organise keywords into groups

The easiest way to organise your keywords is to split them between commercial (service and product pages), and informational keywords (blogs).

Commercial: Golf clubs. Golf Putter. Golf Shoes.

Informational: Ideal loft for a driver. Golf club fitting process explained. Best golf clubs for beginners.

Your commercial keywords likely aren’t going to change. Although you may add to them.

But you can organise your informational keywords even more to create content clusters.

Content clusters are a good way of organising your blogs and content to give your website some structure. They also help create “topical authority” for your site.

This basically is a signal to Google of what your website is about and helps it rank your site for relevant searches.

The alternative is to create blogs at random. Which increases the risks of you creating the same blogs and making your website’s structure messy.

So, what would a content cluster look like? Let’s use Clarke’s Golf again.

Say their main topic could be something like Golf club set.

So, golf club set would be the “pillar page”.

What we need now is blogs to fit around, and link to this pillar page.

So our cluster keyword list would look something like this:

• How to choose a golf club set
• Golf club set vs fitted clubs
• Best beginner golf club set
• Golf club loft explained
• Graphite vs steel golf clubs

All you would have to do now, is take all your commercial and pillar content topics, and build clusters around it.

7 – Understand search intent

If you take one thing away from this blog, then it should be how important search intent is when it comes to your SEO keyword strategy.

Search intent is what your reader expects to find on a page when they make a search.

And there are four types of search intent:

Informational

The reader wants to learn something or get an answer.

A good keyword for this would be: “How to choose a golf driver.”

A good content format would be a blog, guide or FAQ

Commercial

The reader is looking to compare products or is researching before making a purchase.

A good keyword here would be: “Best golf club for beginners.”

A good content format would be a comparison article or product roundup.

Navigational

The reader is looking for a specific page or brand.

A good keyword would be: “Nike golf club sets.”

A good content format would be a product page, landing page or even a homepage.

Transactional

The reader is looking to take a specific action.

A good keyword would be: “buy golf clubs online.”

A good content format would be a product page or a pricing page.

I’ll say again. It’s very important you understand the search intent behind each keyword you research. Failing to match the search intent not only provides a poor user experience, but can stop your site from being visible in search.

8 – Use keyword planning tools (Google keyword planner, SEMRush, Ahrefs)

The good news about keyword research, is that there are lots of keyword research tools that can help.

We’ve got another blog on the best keyword research tools we recommend, so we won’t go through them all now, but below are a couple we use consistently.

Google keyword planner

This is a great free tool for helping you find relevant keywords for your site and can provide additional information like search volume and cost per click.

Wincher

Track your keyword positions and use it to research new keywords you can go after.

Ahrefs

A great all tool that let’s you track keyword positions. It also help you dive deeper into your content strategy to find gaps and also research backlink opportunities.

SEMrush

Another good all rounder. Track your keyword position and find insights to help drive your SEO keyword research strategy.

9 – Common keyword research mistakes

Before we finish, it’d be wrong not to give you a steer on the main mistakes we see people make with keyword research.

These mistakes can be costly, and can take a long time to put right, so they’re worth paying attention to.

Ignoring search intent

Can’t make enough of this. You have to understand the intent behind your keywords if you’re to give your customers the content they’re searching for.

Only targeting high volume keywords

High volume can be great. But relevance is way more important.

Ignoring keyword difficulty

If you’re a new website, targeting high difficulty keywords isn’t going to work (at least not quickly).

Learn more about keyword research and SEO

Getting your SEO keyword strategy right can deliver some great returns from your digital marketing

Hopefully now you’ve got a better idea of how to go about keyword research.

If you still need help ranking your website in search and winning more customers organically, why not give our SEO agency a call.

Or if you want to learn more about SEO or digital marketing, check out our other content.