8 Successful Strategies for Keyword Research

If your website traffic numbers aren’t reflected in how well written you know your content is the problem may lie with your keyword research.

Great content is one thing, but does it answer a searcher’s question, solve a problem, or provide a solution? If it doesn’t, then Google has no reason to put your page at the top of their search results, regardless of how eloquent, or thought inspiring your carefully crafted words may be.

Every piece of content you publish should focus on just a few keyword phrases, but finding the exact keywords you need to be targeting can be tricky.

Believe it or not, keyword research doesn’t have to be the hours-long grind-fest many “SEO experts” would have you believe. Here’s how to quickly unearth the keyword phrases that will earn your content the highly sought after first place in the search engines you know it deserves.

1. Get to Know Your Customers

A lot of marketing is about getting inside your ideal customer’s head. What are their pain points, what problems are they trying to solve, and what questions do they want answered? Knowing how to answer all of these will help you develop a persona, which will then provide some insight into how your target demographic might go about finding your business online.

2. Define Your Niche

Start your keyword research by brainstorming ideas for content topics related to your niche. Your goal should be to land on a few that you know will bring in floods of traffic should those pages make it to the top of the first page in the SERPs.

Bloggers will easily come up with five or ten topics, and these are what will receive most of the focus in your SEO content production. However, the process works for any business. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself how they would start a search that could end up with them on your site.

When you have a few topic ideas, you can then use them to drill down deeper into your niche. For instance, if you’re in the battery operated personal transport market your topic list might look like this:

Electric scooter, electric skateboard, unicycle, hoverboards, scooter batteries

These are a good start for digging into finding what your customer is likely to use as a search term. You can then base your article topics around what you discover. For example:

Electric Scooters and the Law in San Francisco

Fulfill Your Need for Speed with These Fast Electric Scooters

Build Your Own Electric Scooter with these Electric Scooter Conversion Kits

How an All-Terrain Electric Skateboard can Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Exploring the Road Less Traveled with an Electric Off-Road Unicycle

3. Use Google Webmaster Tools

As Google starts encrypting even more keyword searches, the Google Keyword tool is becoming less useful for those of us who don’t run Google Ads campaigns.

Fortunately, you can still reveal the keywords that are triggering impressions of your website through their webmaster platform, but you will need to sign in and add your website.

Even if your site isn’t showing up on the front page, the Webmaster platform will still give you numbers for impressions for a particular keyword. You can use this information to discover how people are looking for your site, and then start adding more SEO optimized content, or refine existing content to target those phrases.

Read More: Google Keyword Planner vs Google Trends

4. Use the Suggested Searches Feature

Google’s algorithm likes to keep track of our behavior online, which might sound a little creepy, but it creates a handy tool we can use to find related keywords to add to our core set.

Go to Google Search and start typing in any keyword from your list. For instance, beginning a search for electric scooter brought up a list of results that included phrases such as electric scooter for adults, electric scooter with seat, and electric scooter parts.

These phrases are what are known in the SEO industry as “long-tail keywords,” which are phrases that are made up of three or more words. Long-tail keywords are more specific which usually means that fewer people are searching for them.

A lower search count means less competition and less competition means long-tails can be lucrative as a target for a first-page ranking. Five long-tails will be much easier to rank and potentially bring in more traffic than one standard keyword with high competition.

5. Ask Your Audience

www.seedkeywords.com is a great resource that helps you make use of your existing audience to come up with even more ways you can help them.

Head on over to the site and create your scenario.

“You want an electric scooter to commute to work. How would you find one?”

Once you create the scenario, you are then free to share it wherever you like, such as on your website, or any of your social media platforms. The answers that come in will automatically populate your list.

Of course, the main drawback is that you need an established audience. However, if you already have a sizeable email list or social media following then you stand to gain many new ideas for very little work. It’s also completely free.

6. Look to Your Competitors

Discovering what keywords your competitors are ranking for is an excellent way to find out where you can improve, or consider ideas you may not have thought about before.

SEMRush allows free users to run a few daily reports that provide a list of keywords for which a domain is ranking. Neil Patel also has his free UberSuggest tool.

Enter the domain you want to research, and a list of keywords that the domain is ranking for will appear. Ubersuggest is handy because it provides a number related to ranking difficulty. You can instantly see which phrases will take a lot of time and which ones have potential to provide a near instant traffic boost.

7. Local Long-Tail Keywords for the Local Market

Local and mobile searches have been growing by a staggering 146% every year, so being able to capitalize on that traffic could reap you some serious rewards. There are also keyword generators that can help you grow your list of long-tail keywords that target your local area.

They allow you to choose your business type, enter your area and generate an extensive list of local long-tail keywords.

Most times, you can even download the results as a CSV file so you can keep it on your hard drive and load it into any spreadsheet.

8. Sorting It All Out

It’s entirely probable by now that your keyword research has created an extensive list of phrases that may number in the hundreds, but now it’s time to focus on finding the ones with the most potential.

SEMRush has a tool that can help with this, showing you if your keywords still have traction. It’s not much fun working hard to rank for a keyword, only to realize that once you get there, people are no longer searching for it.

With SEMRush, you can also check the Paid Search competition as this can be a gauge about how much work will be needed to rank the keyword. The closer to one the number is the tougher your competition. Fortunately, SEMRush also provides a list of alternative phrases that may be easier to rank.

Conclusion

You can spend a lot of time researching and agonizing over your keyword list, and it’s always soul-crushing when you realize that most of them may not be worth your time.

However, when you use the right toolset you will dramatically reduce your time in keyword research, which is more time you can spend producing SEO optimized content around keywords you know will create value.

Free Marketing Tools:

Trapica Suggest: Keyword Research Tool

AdEspresso Facebook Ad Examples