How to Do Keyword Research for SEO

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. If nobody is searching for what you’re writing about, you won’t get traffic from Google—no matter how hard you?try.

That’s why we wrote this beginner’s guide. It teaches you a proven keyword research framework that you can easily adapt to your website and goals. We used the same framework to grow our blog traffic from 15,000 to over 700,000 monthly search visits in just a few?years.

We also tried hard to keep everything as jargon-free as possible without holding back on detail and linked to some extra resources at the end of each section for if you find yourself wanting to learn?more.

Let’s get started.

Chapter-1. Keyword research basics

Before we dive deep into the intricacies of keyword research and how to find the best keywords for your business, let’s make sure we understand the basics.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of understanding the language your target customers use when searching for your products, services, and content. It then involves analyzing, comparing, and prioritizing the best keyword opportunities?for your website.?

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research is the only way to figure out what people are typing into search engines. You need to know this to avoid creating content about things that nobody is searching for.?Many website owners make that mistake, and it’s likely a big part of the reason why 90.63% of pages get no traffic from Google, according to?our study.

Keyword research also helps you to answer questions like:

• How hard will it be to rank for this keyword?
• How much traffic am I likely to get if I rank for this keyword?
• What kind of content should I create to rank for this keyword?
• Are people searching for this keyword likely to become my customers?

Finding the right answers to these questions will help you pick your battles wisely.

Chapter-2. How to find keyword ideas

Keyword research starts with thinking about how potential?customers might be searching for your business or website. You can then use?keyword research tools to expand on those ideas and find even more keywords.

It’s a simple process, but two things need to be true to do it?well:

1. You need to have good knowledge of your industry.
2. You need to understand how keyword research tools work and how to get the most out of?them.

In this chapter, we’ll run through a few actionable ways to improve your knowledge in both those areas and discover potentially winning keywords for your website in the process.

1. Brainstorm ‘seed’ keywords
2. See what keywords your competitors rank?for
3. Use keyword research tools
4. Study your?niche

1. Brainstorm ‘seed’ keywords

Seed keywords are the foundation of the keyword research process. They define your niche and help you identify your competitors. Every keyword research tool asks for a seed keyword, which it then uses to generate a huge list of keyword ideas (more on that shortly).

If you already have a product or business that you want to promote online, coming up with seed keywords is easy. Just think about what people type into Google to find what you?offer.

For example, if you sell coffee machines and equipment, then seed keywords might?be:

• coffee
• espresso
• cappuccino
• french press

Note that seed keywords themselves won’t necessarily be worth targeting with pages on your website. As the name suggests, you’ll use them as ‘seeds’ for the next steps in this process. So don’t obsess too much over your seed keywords. It should only take a few minutes to find them. As soon as you have a handful of broad ideas related to your website’s topic, move on to the next?step.?

2. See what keywords your competitors rank?for

Looking at which keywords already send traffic to your competitors is usually the best way to start keyword research. But first, you need to identify those competitors. That’s where your brainstormed list of keywords comes in handy. Just search Google for one of your seed keywords and see who ranks on the front?page.

If none of the top-ranking websites for your seed keywords are like your site (or where you’re trying to take it), try searching for relevant ‘autosuggest’ queries instead..

For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you might find more actual competitors in the search results for “cappuccino maker” than “cappuccino.” That’s because it’s mostly ecommerce stores like yours ranking for the former, and blogs ranking for the latter.

Either way, you still need to use your best judgment when determining competing websites. If you see huge brands like Amazon or The New York Times ranking for your seed keyword, you shouldn’t necessarily treat them as competitors. Always look for websites that resemble your own—or where you’re trying to take?it.

Once you find a few websites that fit the bill, you can plug these websites into a competitive intelligence tool like Ahrefs’?Site Explorer?one by one, then check the?Top Pages?report. You’ll then see their popular pages by estimated monthly search traffic. The report also shows each page’s “Top keyword.” That’s the one sending it the most organic traffic.

Data via the?Top Pages?report in Ahrefs’?Site Explorer.

Here are a few interesting keywords we discovered for our hypothetical coffee store, just by analyzing one competing website with?Site Explorer:

• how to use a french press
• turkish coffee
• moka pot
• how to make coffee
• neapolitan coffee maker

As you can see, even if you’re quite familiar with your industry, you can still find plenty of unique keyword ideas by studying your competitors that you probably wouldn’t have found from brainstorming alone.

If you checked all the competitors in the search results but still want more keywords, you can find more competitors in the?Competing Domains?report in?Site Explorer. Just plug in one of your known competitors, and it’ll suggest other similar sites based on the number of the overlapping keywords that they rank for Google.?

Competing Domains report in Ahrefs’?Site Explorer.

You can repeat the process above over and over for near-unlimited keyword ideas.

ARE YOU SEEING A LOT OF TOPICS YOU’VE ALREADY COVERED?

If you’re doing keyword research for an established website in your industry, you might find that you’ve already covered most of your competitors’ keywords. In this case, you can try using our?Content Gap tool. It finds keywords that one or more competitors rank for, but you don’t. To use it, plug a few competing domains into the top section, then paste your site into the bottom field and hit “Show keywords.”

Enter competing sites in Ahrefs’?Content Gap tool.

Get a list of keywords that competitors rank for, but our site doesn’t, in Ahrefs’?Content Gap tool.

Here are just a few keywords of the thousands that Homegrounds and Roasty Coffee rank for, but yourcoffeestore.com doesn’t:

• moka pot
• manual coffee grinder
• coffee oils
• espresso

Learn more about performing a content gap analysis in?this video.

3. Use keyword research tools

Competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas. But there are still tons of keywords your competitors aren’t targeting, and you can find these using keyword research tools.

Keyword research tools all work the same way. You plug in a seed keyword, and they pull keyword ideas from their database based on that keyword.

Google Keyword Planner is perhaps the most well-known keyword tool. It’s free to use, and although it’s mainly for advertisers, you can also use it to find keywords for?SEO.

Let’s enter a few of our seed keywords and see what it kicks?back:

• barista
• macchiato
• irish coffee
• americano
• flat white
• cold brew
• percolator
• turkish coffee
• arabica
• k cups
• frappuccino

You’ll notice that Google Keyword Planner is smart enough to show you relevant keyword ideas, even if they don’t contain your seed keywords. Take “k cups,” for example. Unless you’re a hardcore coffee connoisseur, you probably wouldn’t know this relates to coffee.

SIDENOTE.?The “Competition” metric in Google Keyword Planner has nothing to do with SEO. It shows how many advertisers are willing to pay money to show ads in the search results for that keyword. You should pay no attention to it if you want to rank organically.?

Beyond Keyword Planner, there are quite a few other?free keyword research tools. These are great if you’re on a budget, but you’ll quickly realize that they’re all very limited in their data and functionality since their goal is to convert you to a paying customer.?

If you’re serious about keyword research, you may as well skip the free tier and use a ‘professional’ tool like Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer?right off the?bat.?

Let’s enter a few of our seed keywords and see how many ideas it generates.

The ‘Phrase match’ report in?Keywords Explorer?gives us almost four million keyword ideas from just four seed keywords.

3.7 million ideas. And that’s just from the “Phrase match” report. Other keyword ideas reports match keywords ideas in different ways.?

Here’s how the reports in?Keywords Explorer?match keyword ideas:

• Phrase match:?Keyword ideas that contain the ‘seed’ keyword as is. For example, if your seed keyword is “computer chair,” then “black?computer chair” would be a match. However, “black?chair?for?computer” wouldn’t, even though it also contains both?words.
• Having same terms:?Keyword ideas that contain all the individual terms from the ‘seed’ keyword in any order. For example, if your seed keyword is “computer chair,” then “black?chair?for?computer” would appear in this report.
• Questions:?Keyword ideas that contain each term from the ‘seed’ keyword in any order, plus a “question word” like “how,” “what,” “where,” “when,” or “why.” For example, if your ‘seed’ keyword is “computer chair,” then “what is the best?chair?for?computer?work” would appear here.

Now, that might seem like an overwhelming amount of ideas, and it is. But don’t worry. You’ll learn how to narrow these down right in the tool in the next section.

SIDENOTE.?Keywords Explorer?has millions of keywords for other search engines too. Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and Baidu are just a few of?them.?

4. Study your?niche

Everything we’ve discussed so far is enough to generate an almost unlimited amount of keyword ideas. But at the same time, the process kind of keeps you “in the box.” It’s limited by your seed keywords and by the size and freshness of your chosen keyword tool’s database. Because of this, you’ll almost certainly miss some good?ideas.

You can solve this by studying your niche in more detail. And a good starting point is to browse industry forums, groups, and Q&A sites. This will help you find more things that your prospective customers are struggling with that didn’t show up in keyword tools and that none of your competitors bothered to?cover.

For example, here’s just one popular thread from the /r/coffee subreddit:

This person is asking a question about a coffee maker called Aeropress.?If we plug that topic into?Keywords Explorer, we see that it gets 61,000 monthly searches in the US, on average.

We might not have found this using tools because it doesn’t include any of our seed keywords.?

Here are a few other interesting topics from that subreddit that which might be worth covering:

• pour over without a hario filter
• how to make a carajillo
• growing coffee at?home
• ethiopian coffee
• coffee subscriptions

If you notice any trends?among these keyword ideas, you can use those as new seed keywords in?Keywords Explorer?to find more ideas. For example, if we use “aeropress” as a seed keyword and check the “Phrase match” report, we see thousands of keyword ideas.

Thousands of keyword ideas in the “Phrase match” report in Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

Beyond browsing forums, your customers can also be a fantastic source of keyword ideas. Remember, these are the people you’re already doing business with. You want to attract more people like them to your?site.

Here are a few ways to extract insights from clients or customers:

• Chat with them face to?face
• Look through past emails
• Look through customer support requests
• Try to recall common questions that came up in past conversations

Make sure to pay attention to the language they use when doing this. It will often differ from the language you might use. For example, if you sell coffee machines online, maybe your customers search for comparisons of specific machines

Chapter -3. How to analyze keywords

Having tons of keyword ideas is all well and good. But how do you know which ones are best? After all, going through them all by hand would be a near-impossible task.

The solution is simple: Use SEO metrics to narrow things down and separate the wheat from the chaff before adding them to your content calendar.

Let’s explore five keyword metrics you can use to do?this.

• Search volume
• Clicks
• Traffic potential
• Keyword Difficulty
• Cost Per Click (CPC)

Search volume

Search volume tells you the average number of times a keyword gets searched per month. For example, “moka pot”?has a monthly search volume of 40,000 in the US?alone.

There are three important things to note about this number:

1. It’s the number of searches, not the number of people who searched.?There are cases where someone might search for a keyword multiple times a month (e.g., “weather in singapore”). These searches contribute to the search volume, even though it’s the same person doing?them.?
2. It doesn’t tell you how much traffic you’ll get by ranking.?Even if you manage to rank number one, your traffic from a keyword will rarely exceed 30% of this number. And that’s if you’re lucky.
3. It’s an annual average.?If there are 120k searches for a keyword in December and none for the remaining eleven months of the year, it’s monthly search volume will be 10k (120k / 12 months).

In?Keywords Explorer, you’ll see a search volume filter in every keyword ideas report.?

This filter is useful for two main things:

1. Filtering out super high-volume keywords.?If your site is new, then you probably don’t want to sift through pages of keywords with 100k+ monthly searches because they’re likely to be competitive.
2. Filtering specifically for lower-volume keywords.?Perhaps you want to find uncompetitive, low-volume keywords where you can easily suck up additional traffic with short articles. These are known as?long-tail keywords.

DID YOU KNOW THAT MOST KEYWORDS ARE LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS?

Long-tail keywords are terms with low search volumes. They get their name because of where they end up on the so-called “search demand curve:

As you can see, at the front of the curve, we have a very small number of incredibly popular search queries, like:

• youtube —?181M
• facebook —?168M
• weather —?52M
• google translate —?42m
• craigslist —?30m

These are called “fat-head” keywords by?SEOs.

And the long tail of that curve consists of hundreds of millions of keywords with very low search volumes. Examples include:

• best fonts for a resume —?150
• four pillars of a man’s heart —?150
• definition of deuteronomy —?100
• 5 by 5 meaning military —?100
• how much is my overwatch account worth —?50
• angel food cake without pan —?50
• funny christmas cards for singles —?50

If you want to learn more about dealing with different types of long-tail keywords, check out?our full guide.

If you need to see search volumes for a country other than the US, there are 171 countries in?Keywords Explorer?to choose from. You can also see global search volumes (the sum of search volumes from all countries).?Both of these options are useful if you do business internationally for two reasons:

1. You shouldn’t limit yourself to one country.?If you sell products worldwide, then the US might only be a small segment of your market. If people are searching for what you offer elsewhere, you need to know about?it.
2. You should consider the “buying power” of countries with search volume.?Perhaps you see a promising keyword with 100k monthly searches, but 90% of them come from a country with low GDP. In this case, the keyword might not be a great target as the “buying power” of searchers is probably quite?low.

For example, take a look at the keyword, “backlink generator.” It has a global search volume of 13,000, but over 70% of those searches come from countries with a low GDP?per capita like India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. So even though you could probably get a lot of traffic by ranking for this keyword, the ‘business value’?of that traffic would probably be quite low compared to a keyword that gets 70%+ of its searches from the?US.

Another important thing to remember about search volumes is that they vary from tool to tool. That’s because each tool calculates?and updates this metric in different ways. You can read more about the intricacies of search volume estimations and why even Google’s data isn’t truly “accurate”?here?and?here.

BE AWARE OF KEYWORD TRENDS

Given that search volume is an annual average, it’s often useful to check the trend graphs in?Keywords Explorer?for keywords that you’re considering. If keywords are seasonal or spiking or declining in popularity, then search volume might not be the best predictor of month-to-month traffic.

Christmas-related searches are a good example. They all spike in December before dropping to zero in February, but the search volume doesn’t reflect this.

Read our guide to?Google Trends?for some more actionable tips on researching trending keywords.

Clicks

Many people might search Google for something, but that doesn’t mean they all click on search results and visit the top-ranking pages. That’s where the Clicks metric in Keywords Explorer comes in handy. It tells you the average number of monthly clicks on the search results for a keyword.?

Just take a look at a query like “how much caffeine in coffee.”

Monthly search volume and clicks for “how much caffeine in coffee,” via Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

Despite having a monthly search volume of 48,000, it only gets 8,600 clicks.

That happens because Google answers the question right in the search results. There’s no need for people to click to find the information they’re looking for.

Google is providing answers in the search results for more and more queries. That’s why the Clicks filter in?Keywords Explorer?is so invaluable. You can use it to weed out keyword ideas with miserable search traffic potential.

Filtering by Clicks in Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

You should also be wary of keywords where paid ads “steal” lots of clicks. For example, 28% of clicks for “braun coffee maker” go to paid ads, so that keyword might be a better target for?PPC.

28% of all clicks from “braun coffee maker” go to paid ads. Data from Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

Traffic potential

Let’s say that you’re considering a keyword like “side effects of coffee.” According to?Keywords Explorer, this gets an estimated 1,000?searches and ~800 clicks per?month.

US and global search volumes for “side effects of coffee.” Data from Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

However, keep in mind that if you rank for this keyword, your page will probably also rank for all kinds of related keywords and synonyms, like:

• what happens if you drink too much coffee — 450 monthly searches
• effects of drinking too much coffee?— 200 monthly searches
• too much coffee side effects — 200 monthly searches
• side effects of drinking too much coffee — 100 monthly searches

Since all these search queries mean roughly the same thing, estimating your potential search traffic from just a single search query is a mistake. It’s better to look at how much traffic the current top-ranking pages currently get, which is super easy to do in?Keywords Explorer.

Here, we see that the top-ranking page for “side effects of coffee” gets an estimated ~3,500 visits per month and ranks for over 930 keywords:

Estimated monthly US organic search traffic to the top-ranking page for “side effects of coffee.” Data from Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

Ranking for more than one keyword like this is quite the norm. We?studied?three million search queries and found that the average top-ranking page ranks in the top 10 for almost 1,000 other keywords.

The moral of the story? Don’t judge keywords on their Search volume (or Clicks) alone. Look at the top-ranking results to estimate the total search traffic potential of the topic. In most cases, the search volume of a keyword will indeed correlate with the topic’s overall ‘traffic potential’. However, being attentive to this detail will help you prioritize your keywords and find keyword opportunities that your competitors have overlooked.?

Keyword Difficulty

SEO professionals typically gauge the ranking difficulty of a keyword manually. That is, by looking at the top-ranking pages for their target keyword. They account for many different factors to judge how hard or easy it’ll be to?rank:

• Number (and quality) of backlinks;
• Domain Rating (DR);
• Content length, relevance, freshness;
• Use of the target keyword, synonyms, entities;
• Search intent;
• Branding;
• etc.

This process varies from person to person, as there’s no consensus on precisely what is and isn’t important here. One person might believe that DR is important, and another might think that relevance plays more of a role. This lack of consensus makes life a little difficult for keyword research tool creators, as they each try to distill the ranking difficulty of keywords down to a single actionable score.?

After talking to many professional SEOs about the signals that a reliable Keyword Difficulty score should factor in, we realized that everyone agreed on at least one thing: backlinks are crucial for ranking. So, in the end, we decided to base our Keyword Difficulty (KD) score on the number of unique websites linking to the top 10 ranking pages.

As you can see in the image above, each KD score relates to an approximate number of websites that should link to your page for it to get to the top 10 search results.

SIDENOTE.?Please don’t miss the “top 10” reference in the explanation above. Ahrefs’ KD score does not tell you what it’ll take to rank #1 for a given keyword. It merely advises you on what it should take to get into the top?10.?

Knowing how KD works, many people misuse the score by setting the filter from 0 to 30 and focusing solely on the “low-hanging” opportunities. They never bother to cover high-KD keywords on their websites, and that’s a big mistake for two reasons:

1. You should go after high-KD keywords sooner, not later.?As you’ll need lots of backlinks to rank, it pays to create your page and begin promoting it as soon as possible. The longer you delay, the bigger headstart you give your competitors—making it harder to outrank them in the future.
2. You should see high-KD keywords as link opportunities.?The fact that the top-ranking pages have lots of backlinks is a sign of a ‘link-worthy’ topic. In other words, if you nail this topic, it might attract a lot of backlinks for?you.

The bottom line is this: KD is not there to deter you from targeting specific keywords. It’s there to help you understand what it’ll take to rank for a given query and the ‘link-worthiness’ of the?topic.

Just know that you should always manually assess keywords before going after them and not rely solely on any tools’ keyword difficulty score to make your final decision. No keyword difficulty score can distill the complexity of Google’s ranking algorithm into a single number. Be wary of tool creators that suggest otherwise.?

If you want to learn more about Keyword Difficulty, check out?our Keyword Difficulty guide.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost Per Click (CPC) shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for each ad click from a keyword. It’s more a metric for advertisers than SEOs, but it can serve as a useful proxy for a keyword’s value.

Monday.com pays for clicks from the keyword “project management software. It costs them money every time someone clicks this.

For example, the keyword “office coffee” has a relatively high CPC of $12. That’s because most searchers are looking to buy coffee machines for their office, which can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But it’s the opposite story for “how to make good espresso.” That’s because most searchers aren’t looking to buy anything. They’re looking for information on?how to brew espresso.

Estimated CPC for “office coffee” and “how to make good espresso” in Ahrefs’?Keywords Explorer.

However, one important thing to know about CPC is that it’s much more volatile than Search volume. While search demand for most keywords stays roughly the same from month to month, its CPC can change any minute. That means that the CPC values you see in third-party keyword tools are snapshots in time. If you want real-time data, you’ll have to use?AdWords.

Source : Ahrefs