What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of finding the right words and phrases people use when searching online. It involves identifying the specific terms and phrases potential customers enter into search engines. The objective? To ensure your content ranks prominently in search engine results. Keyword research is like using the right bait for fishing in the vast ocean of the internet. It’s all about discovering the exact phrases that people type into search engines.
Do Customer Research Before Keyword Research
Before you dive into keywords, spend time talking to your customers. You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn in just ten minutes. Their words, their questions – these are golden clues that can lead you to the best keywords.
It's like a secret passcode – if you know how they talk about what they want, you can make sure those are the words you use on your website. It's not just smart; it's good business.
Knowing what people need and want guides the entire keyword research process.
Getting to know your customers’ needs and language shapes your keyword research, leading you to the right terms they use to find solutions online.
Here’s a secret.
Knowing your customers inside out is a huge competitive edge.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
Just like a solid foundation is vital for a house, keyword research is essential for good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It's the way you make sure your website shows up when people are looking for what you offer.
Keyword research gives you a way to tap into the masses to understand all the thousands of ways people search online, how often, and where to focus to help the right people to achieve your business goals.
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO
Keyword research is a blend of creativity and analytics. Even the most advanced tools aren’t perfect, but they are helpful guides. It is both nuanced and methodical. It requires a balance between intuitive understanding and analytical precision. Here's how we streamline the process professionally:
We take an approach to identify everything people in your total addressable market search for.
Here’s how we approach it. If you have questions, let us know.
Step 1: Create a List of Seed Keywords
A seed keyword is the root term or phrase present across a set of searches people make. They are basic terms related to your business that are part of many searches.
For an IT company, for example, seed keywords could be "Managed IT services" or "Cybersecurity solutions".
<div class="callout callout-info"><p class="p_margin-small"><strong>Seed Words:</strong></p><p>Managed IT services, Cybersecurity solutions, Cloud computing services, Network infrastructure, Data analytics, Software development, IT consulting </p></div>
Step 2: Research Keywords Using Ahrefs
Next, input your seed terms into a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
Plug your seed keywords into a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. This tool will show you how hard it is to rank for these terms (Keyword Difficulty), how many people are searching for them (Search Volume), and other useful metrics.
- Keyword Difficulty (KD): An estimate of how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 search results for that keyword.
- Search Volume: The estimated total search traffic per month for that keyword.
- Clicks: The average number of clicks on the search results that people make while searching for the keyword.
- Global Volume: The search volume of the keyword across different countries.
Step 3: Run a Matching Terms Report
We use the
Matching Terms report
in Ahrefs to begin tapping into thousands of ways people search for a topic.
Ahrefs can also show you a list of phrases that people actually search for that include your seed keywords. It’s like finding out all the specific things people might ask the bookseller.
In the Matching Terms report, we have two modes:
-
Terms Match:
Keywords that contain all the words from your query in
any order
.
-
Phrase Match:
Keywords that contain your seed keywords
in the order
they’re written.
Step 4: Use Filters to Remove Irrelevant Terms
Think of filtering as clearing away the stuff on the shelves that no one really wants to buy. This leaves you with the good stuff – the terms that are most likely to bring the right people to your website.
There are two main types of filters available: include and exclude.
INCLUDE FILTER
The
include filter
lets us only show keywords that contain our seed keyword AND contain terms we add to the include filter.
For example, we could add a term like “consulting” to our include filter, and it would only show us terms that contain one of our seed keywords AND consulting.
We can add multiple terms to the include filter using commas to separate them.
We like to save ourselves some trouble, though, and use something called wildcards. Wildcards enable us to short-circuit things and find all terms that follow a particular pattern.
Once we apply this filter, it gets us results that are a lot more targeted.
EXCLUDE FILTER
The exclude filter lets us only show keywords that contain our seed keyword AND DO NOT contain terms we add to the exclude filter.
A common way we use this filter is to exclude irrelevant terms
en masse
. We have a few sets of these we apply depending on the circumstance.
- Special characters
- States
- Cities
- Other local terms
Step 5: Export Every Remotely Relevant Keyword
This is where we diverge from the general approach of most agencies. We export absolutely everything that’s remotely relevant to your industry.
Why?
Because that’s the only way to accurately assess your Total Addressable Market.
This usually results in a set of massive CSV files containing hundreds of thousands of keywords.
If that seems like way too much data to go through and do anything meaningful with…it is.
But we have a solution.
Step 6: Process Keyword Data into Clusters
We have a proprietary topic clustering algorithm we’ve tuned specifically for the legal industry.
This algorithm ingests hundreds of thousands of keywords, gets real time results from Google, and clusters them together based on the similarity they share with each other on Google.
This gives us the ability to work with the data in a more efficient way by consolidating it.
It’s still a lot of data, though.
We solved that with a second algorithm that calculates a personalized priority score for the domain. You can think of it like
keyword difficulty
if it were uniquely calculated based on your business website.
Step 7: Analyze Keyword Data
Look at your organized groups and identify which keywords are the most important for your site. These are the terms you’ll want to focus on to attract visitors. This is where keyword research ends, and on page optimization begins.
In the next chapter, We’ll cover how to complete onpage optimization of your website.