How To Do Keyword Research Like a Growth Hacker!

Keyword research is critical.

We don’t just use it to improve our SEO, but it’s also an important tool in trying to understand how your prospects work.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to do keyword research like a growth hacker and figure out what it is you really need to be paying attention to.

Why Should Everyone Be Doing a Little Bit of Keyword Research

Search engines are everywhere, you’ve got Google, video search with YouTube, and, of course social searches with LinkedIn and Facebook.

To use a search engine, people use keywords.

If you think about them, they’re sort of a demand indicator in the web.

The more search volume a keyword gets, the more people are interested in that particular topic.

Now if you want to provide for people’s demand, you have to make sure that you’re doing research on the types of things that they’re searching for.

This is why every SEO, content, and website audit, places such a significant emphasis on keywords. As the web is still primarily text-based – and the future of voice searches uses keywords, you’re going to keep seeing keywords for years to come.

Let’s end this section with this thought:

If you want to rank, you’ve got to know what keywords you want to rank for.

Intent

Before we go any further, we have to take a look at intent.

Intent looks at the psychology behind a particular search on a search engine.

What your average searcher types on the search bar is dependent on what they are looking for.

For example, if you were to simply take the keyword “growth hacker”, the possible reasons for the search would include:

• Trying to figure out what the term means
• Someone looking to hire a growth hacker

But, here’s what.

Say people are also looking at the keyword “growth hacking”. This may seem to be an identical keyword to “growth hacker” but the intent could be something else.

• Since “growth hacking” does is not adjective that describe a person who growth hackers, there is a stronger tendency that the search is about the meaning of the word.
• The searcher could also be looking for ways to growth hack their own organization.

As you can see, similar keywords can suggest major differences in what people are looking for.

Buyer Keywords

Now that you’re familiar with intent, let’s take a look at buyer keywords. These are keywords that have a lot of buyer intent in them.

These are usually the keywords that B2C marketers go for when they want to sell something that’s considered fast moving.

Keywords that suggest that the searcher wants to make a buying decision are keywords that are critical to rank for regardless if you’re in B2B or B2C, because you want to be the first brand that comes up when a prospect wants to part with their money.

It’s also important to note that keywords with high buyer intent are also considerably more expensive than keywords with less buyer intent.

The Caveat About Intent

So, should I just focus on buyer keywords?

Absolutely not!

Here’s the thing.

A large percentage of the population that buys things online don’t make a decision immediately. They often spend time this

This is particularly true for B2B industries with longer buying cycles.

You want to capture the lead at the beginning of their buying journey when they’re first considering a solution that your organization so happens to offer.

This means you should be aiming to rank for keywords that can help guide them through the buying process such as ones with a more educational intent.

In this way, you get to introduce them to your brand earlier and when they finally decide to buy, they’re more likely to purchase from someone who was educating them from Day 1.

And, that’s not all.

Trying to rank for keywords with high buyer intent are more expensive when it comes to ad spend, and require more backlinks according to a lot of SEO experts.

You also don’t want to spend most of your time trying to figure out how to compete for a keyword that’s too heavily saturated. It would be better to spend time trying to go after “low hanging fruit” or promote on other platforms altogether.

How to Do Keyword Research Like a Growth Hacker

1. What Are You Trying to Rank For?

First of all, take a look at your organization and what you have to offer.

For sure, you already know what it is you’re selling, but also think about what else you have to offer.

Here are some questions that you can ask yourself (and your team):

• What other industries does my product appeal to?
• Do I want to launch an educational campaign regarding how to best use my product?
• What topics and other subjects will this cover?
• What else do I want to cover in the future?

Once you done with this step, you should have a general list of topics that you want to rank for.

Don’t stop there.

Take a look at your website’s service pages.

You want to build keywords for each of those pages as well, so go through this process again.

2. Developing Seed Keywords from These Topics

The topics that you get from the first step are what you’ll use to form seed keywords.

And, usually, the main topics are already seed keywords themselves.

Make a list of these seed keywords and start running them through a keyword research tool of your choice. Once you hit search, it will show you a list of related keywords that you can build a list of keywords from.

There are a lot of these tools and most of them offer a free trial.

Here’s our list of free keyword research tools that you should take a look at.

3. What Factors Should You Screen For?

Most keyword research tools will show you four metrics:

• Volume – this is the number of searches for the keyword within a given time frame, usually a month.
• CPC – Cost Per Click, this is how much it will cost if you just paid for Google AdWords to rank on top of the SERPs.
• Keyword Diffi...

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