How to do Keyword Research for SEO: A Quick Start Guide

Keyword research is a process that is an important step in your SEO strategy. It’s a complete system of discovering and studying the search terms that audiences enter on search engines like Google, and Bing to get their desired solution from the search results. 

Keyword analysis can find out the queries, seed words to target, the popularity of these phrases, user search intent for these search queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

It helps you understand how many times a certain keyword, query, or phrase has been searched for over a period of time.

Once you understand the way your target customer or audience is searching for your niche content, You have a great chance to build a new winning SEO Strategy.

What Is Keyword Research? How does it Work?

Keyword Research is a complete system finding search terms that people use to find any services or products.

In Short, When people are looking for any answer or solution, we use Search Engines like Google/Bing or it can be other search engines to find our answer.

At that time people uses the “search term” “Words” and “phrases” to get their answers on the Search Engine Result Page also it is known as SERP)

For example, my target audience is digital marketers and small businesses who need SEO-related help. This means if I want my website to show up in search results, I need to research the keywords that people search for the most.

So, How it works?

Well, I’m giving you an example if someone that is my target audience is searching on google for “SEO Strategy guidelines” Here I must have content for that search term on my website. Like…

Luckily my website is top of the search results as you can see. 

It happened because before Creating content I properly researched keywords that users are searching on Google.

This is the way Keyword works!

Why Keyword Research is Important?

As we know that by doing research we can present people desired information in front of them.

People get the information they want in the search results as a result of our research.

Keyword research helps to find those “phrases”, “words”, and “questions” that people are asking using various search engines.

For any type of content, if we understand what people are asking on Google or other search engines, we can easily write great blogs/articles based on that keyboard. 

In another example, Let’s say a business owner searches Google for “How to Promote Business on Social Media“.

So, how do we know what search query they are searching on Google? Here comes the importance of keyword research! 

By knowing what topics our audiences are searching for the most, we will be able to create the best content.

This way, your content has a great chance of being clicked, and the more clicks you get, the more visitors you will have.

On the other hand, by using the same keyword you can easily use them to run PPC Ads campaigns on different platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and so on.

Keyword analysis lets you notify every step of your content optimization journey

Importance of Researching queries:

• It helps you know the queries using your targeted audience on Search Engine Like Google.

• It is important to help you Identify what people are searching for

• keywords to help you Find out what your audiences are looking for.

• It helps you understand what your competitors are doing at the same time.

• keywords help you know what your targetted customers are looking for to get their services.
• The most important thing is as we all know that search engines work on user intent so researching keywords totally helps you identify what search engines want.

Types Of Keywords

Let us assume we have searched a term like “Gaming Monitor” So our audiences can Search with different intent.

• Your targeted audience could search to understand which monitor is best for gaming.
• Your audience may ask how to get the best review gaming monitor right now
• Your targeted audience may be ready to buy the best gaming monitor on a budget
• Your audience may want to see a comparison between the two monitors.

I think you have got what I’m trying to say. You can see the same query used in a different way when the purpose is different.

On the other hand, you can see the 4 most common types of keywords like…

1. Commercial 
2. Transactional
3. Navigational
4. Informational

Here you can see under the red mark is keyword intent. These four types of keywords let you notify which queries will most likely make you benefit. 

However, However, we know keywords by two other major names, for example:

• Short tail Keyword (EX: Gaming Monitor)
• Long Tail Keyword (EX: Best Gaming Monitor under 500 dollars)

How to Get Free Keyword Ideas from Google

It is very important to know what our audience is searching for and whether are they searching Short Tail or Long Tail Keywords on search engines.

In this sanction, I will show you the way you can get keyword ideas for free.

To do so you can use Google Search Suggestions and after placing your seed keyword on the search bar as a result Google gives us an extra opportunity like The “People Also Ask” section

This is very important that google suggesting you what most people are searching for with what keywords, phrases, and queries.

You can use these queries in your further advanced research.

What is essential to start Keyword Research?

Good research obeys a well-structured system, a set of stages that help achieve all the goals of the research.

• A Free or Paid tool to research keywords.
• A list of focus words or competitive businesses/websites.
• Focus words are used for SEO keywords where Competitive websites are used to find beneficial keywords.
• Excel, Google Sheet, or similar to Note down the keywords.
• analyzing the ranking using any keyword rank tracking tool.

Whenever you complete your research process it will help you grow your online presence easily and organically.

This is a process that I also follow to get the best keywords for my blog website. You are now viewing my website here I follow this process.

Let’s assume you have got all the things that I intend to say, So this is the perfect stage to show the ways to research keywords!

3 Quick start ways to do Keyword Research

If you search for SEO keywords you will find various techniques but what if the best keyboards are available in just a few steps?

Now I will show you below how to find suitable keywords in just three steps…

1. Find Out your Competitors

First of all, we can easily find out who are my competitors on Google. We identify 1-4 websites that are top in the niche or keyword we are targeting For example: “Best Gaming Monitor”

This is the fastest way to see who (your competitors) are ranking on Google for your targeted keywords for free. You can also start analyzing this process in SEMrush. although, you can get a lot of features in Semrush to make your work easier.

So now go to SEMrush dashboard and enter the domain that you already got from Google and ranked.

This tool lets you know which keywords are getting maximum traffic to the website.

We also understand search volume, keyword difficulty, and keyword positioning.

Which particular webpage on the website is getting the most traffic from which particular keyword? However, SEMrush also gives you the opportunity to get the best keyword list by analyzing its cool feature called “Keyword Magic Tool.” That we’ll discuss in the bottom stage.

2. Keyword Gap to find easy wins

It goes without saying that this one is the best for research. It can help you see the unique keyword that your competitors are ranking for, where you’re not ranking.

This can make your content strategy more complete, fix your weaknesses, and fill in the gap between you and your competitors.

• With this tool, you can compare side-by-side keywords with up to five competitors’ domains.
• Through this, you will be able to know the searches that your visitors have done but you didn’t know.
• You can create new content by knowing what your audience needs that you didn’t know before.
• This can build your website content strategy faster.
• This will fix your weakness and give you the way where you should go ahead.

Its data works wonders as a result, it allows you to plan a winning campaign for your SEO because you can see where the best opportunities for your niche/keywords are.

3. Seed Keywords for researching Keywords

As we all know it’s very important to do research for the best keyword that drives traffic to our website. So now the process will be shown to you that can be a time-consuming stage but it really works better.

With this, it’s possible to get top organic keywords that you need to drive search traffic to your blog.

1. Go to SEMrush 
2. Click on its “Keyword Magic Tool” option on the left sidebar.

As in the image above enter your Focus Keyword and select the country that you’re targeting and then press the search button.

Within seconds, SEMrush will generate & show you a quick list of keywords.

You should know that there is some keyword modifier that you can use  with your seed keyword to get a more specific result. 

You can choose the seed keywords like Exact Match, Broad Match, Phrase Match, or Related Match.

Exact Match will show you the exact same form that includes all keyword concepts for the seed keywords.

Broad Match is usually the default report. It shows a list of keyword ideas for the focus/seed keyword as it found them. and this is such a modifier that returns a large number of keyword ideas.

Phrase Match shows the exact same keyword list form as the seed keyword but here you will see the various hierarchies. You will be able to see the variation of your focus word for example ing/ed/s etc as a result.

Related Match option will show you those keywords that are committed to being relevant to the seed word based on similar search engine results.

Here, it is mandatory to look at the keyword search volume, intent, trends, and keyword difficulty which results in high chances of getting the best engaging keyword list.

You can select the keyword that you want to add to your keyword list.

But you can do the same research by using Google Keyword Planner which is FREE to use. Here is one disadvantage the Keyword Planner of Google(GKP) has built for PPC also it’s not the best option for SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Keyword Research.

Things to keep in mind When Keyword Research

Some key things are mandatory to keep in mind when researching keywords. 

To make your research more creative I encourage you to take the following three steps…

No-1: Search volume

Keyword Search Volume is a worthwhile term in SEO.

It lets you know how many times a particular keyword or query has been searched for over a period of time.

It is better to accept keywords that have high search volume but not for all keyboards because you select word queries that have a lot of competition, in which case it is better not to select them.

no-2: Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty is a valuable metric that Search Engine Like Google tells the possibilities of each keyword whether it’s possible to rank or difficult.

It’s a factor of many SEO factors that drive into deciding which keyword of your website ought to rank for. all in all, if you have high-difficulty queries or phrases on your research list then those keywords are going to be tough for Google to find them easily.

No-3: Trends

As you can see the Keyword Trends tool that helps researchers imagine current trends from the audience’s search behavior. 

I think looking at Keyword Trends is an immensely useful metric when it comes to studying the success of any business SEO strategy.

It helps marketers to make better marketing plans and strategies relying on current queries or popular search trends.

If you do your keyword research according to the directions shown above, hopefully, you will be able to pick the best keywords for your content.

hopefully, you will be able to pick the best keywords for your content.

As I’m using the SEMrush tool for researching keywords but this is not mean you also should use SEMrush, you can use the free SEO tools or any other paid tools like Ahrefs, KDFinder, UberSuggest, and so on.

As you have completed reading this blog now you can onto the following blog…

• How to write SEO-Friendly Content
• How to Stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends every time

Some Frequently Asked Questions of KR

Final Verdict

Hope This step-by-step guide helps you understand what is Keyword Research and how to do it in some simple way.

But another thing worth mentioning is that if you put more effort into keyword research and practice continuously, you can master it.