What is the best SEO tool to find useful and valuable keywords?

1. What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding all of the possible search engine queries which may be relevant to your business and your customers. Keyword research includes not only finding these keywords but also sorting and prioritizing them into logical, related groups, which can then inform how you might change existing pages on your site or create new content.

Why Keyword Research Is (Still) Important for SEO

While some SEOs may argue that keywords are no longer important or won’t be essential in the future, they are still crucial not only for search engine rankings but for understanding the search intent behind a given query. As long as people search using the search engines by typing a query into a search box or making a voice query on an “assistant”, it will be crucial to understand the following:

• What those queries are.
• How important they are to your business.
• How you might create the best content to answer the intent of the query.

Even as search trends change, if people are looking for an answer to “something”, keywords will continue to matter.

Understanding Keyword Themes (Groups of Related Keywords)

Some may refer to groups of related keywords as topics or themes, but at heart, they are groups of individual keywords that signal a similar need or intent by a searcher. As such, keyword research should never be left as simply a list of keywords, but rather used to form various segments of interrelated keywords.

A single topic or theme might lend itself to a single piece of content that can answer all of the needs within that topic, and thus a single page is “optimized” for the entire group of keywords. Or, the topic may be broad enough to signal that you should have an entire section of your website with many pieces of content targeted at answering the user intents.

For example, if you were writing a post about “how to fry an egg”, one single article might satisfy the intent for all the keywords around that “theme”. Example:

• How to fry an egg
• How to cook a sunny side up egg
• How to cook an egg over medium
• How to fry an egg for a sandwich
• How to fry an egg in the microwave
• How to fry an egg over easy
• How to fry an egg over hard
• How to fry an egg over medium
• How to fry an egg sunny side up
• How to fry an egg with oil
• How to fry an egg without oil

Keyword/Query Trends 

Some SEOs argue that individual “head” keywords aren’t going to matter anymore because of voice search —which leads to long, natural language search queries. Search queries, in general, are becoming much longer, in part due to voice search. 

But, that doesn’t mean that shorter “head” keywords can’t form the basis for starting your keyword research and helping to uncover many longer-tail keyword variants.

This is partly because, at least for now, there really is no separate voice search results or database.

Google, for instance, simply returns essentially the same results for a voice query as if you had typed that exact query into the search box on the Google web interface or search app. For many of these long longtail queries, Google is simply going to parse out the most important terms in the query and return the results for that.

For instance, someone may search for “Hey Google, what are the best running shoes for a person who has flat feet?”. Looking at Google search results, it is easy to see that Google returns the exact same result set for that query as it does for “best running shoes flat feet.” 

So just because someone is making the longer more natural language query doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to know that people are making queries related to “best running shoes flat feet.”

2. How to Do Keyword Research

Keyword research for SEO consists of gathering all possible variants of keywords that might be relevant to your current site, content, products, services, etc. and/or relevant to your ideal customers or users but not directly related to your current offerings.

An example of keywords that are of interest to a site’s users but not directly related to the site’s products might be keywords related to marketing or hiring for small businesses when the site you are doing the research about sells accounting software for small businesses. In this case, small business marketing keywords might not seem relevant to the current site, but they are relevant for the same people the site is attempting to attract. 

After an initial list of all possibly relevant keywords is built (most tools will generate large lists of keywords which may or may not be relevant for you) the list needs to be trimmed down to those terms that are truly relevant for the site you are doing the research for and its potential users. Then the terms need to be grouped, sorted, and prioritized.

Note that we are focusing here on organic keyword research as opposed to keyword research for PPC. While the two can be similar, there can be significant differences, particularly where it comes to competitiveness. If you are a very small, new site and your competition on a particular search term is sites like Wikipedia and Amazon, ranking on that term might be a much longer-term strategy, or a lower priority, in the short term for organic rankings and traffic. Whereas for PPC, the decision you have to make is simply whether you can afford to bid competitively on the term. 

Building Your SEO Keyword List

Step one in your SEO keyword research is simply amassing your initial keyword list. There are numerous sources for possible lists of keywords. You need to decide which sources are right for you, but you should find that the ones below get you most of the way there.

When I am building my initial list, I attempt to capture, at minimum, for each keyword:

• The keyword
• Monthly search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Competitiveness
• CPC
• Current rank

Example:

In some cases, you may have to “normalize” some of the data to be able to compare data from one source to another. For example, some sites rank competitiveness or keyword difficulty of the term on a scale from 0 to 1, whereas others use a scale from 0 to 100. When merging this data into a single spreadsheet, you may have to multiply or divide one or the other sets of data by 100 so that the scale is at least similar.

Ideas for initial keyword discovery:

• Spend at least a couple of hours exploring and using the website and make notes of keywords that may be important.
• Send an initial “SEO keyword discovery questionnaire” to the client or main stakeholder asking questions and for information, such as:
• List of business objectives.
• Is there any seasonality to your business or traffic? Do offerings or content change seasonally?
• List what you believe are your most important keywords.
• Are you launching or discontinuing new categories of products, services, or content in the near future?
• List your target audiences.
• List your main competitors.
• What geo-locations do you operate in?
• Consider interviewing marketing managers, salespeople, product specialists, or even current/potential site users or customers to fully understand the possible variations of how a product or service may be referred to and what problems they are trying to solve by visiting the site.

PPC Keywords

If you already have keyword lists compiled for pay per click advertising like Google Ads, that is another great place to start. As previously mentioned, not all of these keywords may be ideal in terms of competitiveness for your organic keyword list. Some obvious terms to include, and ones which should be high priority in your list, are those that are currently generating conversions.

If you are paying to get traffic on those terms and the traffic converts, you really need to be trying to rank on those terms organically and get that traffic for “free”. 

You can get Google Ads PPC data from your Google Analytics account, as long as your Google Analytics and Ads accounts are connected. Go to Google Analytics and navigate to "Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries" and export the data for the time period you wish to analyze. 

The timeframe you want to analyze will vary based on the amount of traffic and conversions the site gets (usually, the higher the traffic, the shorter the time period you can use), on seasonality, the variety of keywords, etc. 

Simply export the data to your spreadsheet medium of choice: Excel (XLSX), CSV, or Google Sheets.

You will want to exclude branded terms as you likely are already “optimizing for them." You want to look for terms which show positive metrics like low bounce rate (they are relevant for users), and which have good conversion, transaction, and/or revenue numbers (they are essential for the success of the site). You may want to look at terms with poor conversion rates to see if they are actually relevant to the business. If they are, there may be other business or site usability reasons they are not converting; you should still include the terms in your list. 

For example, in the graphic below, the branded terms are in orange (they obviously have good traffic, engagement, and conversion numbers). The term in red gets lots of traffic and averages more pages per session than other terms, but it is not converting. That is one that you want to look at more carefully to see if it is relevant. The term in green may be one to really look for more variations of, as it gets a higher conversion rate than most. 

Google Analytics Keywords

You may not think that can give you meaningful data in the way of keywords, particularly organic keywords, due to the fact that the vast majority of your keywords going to be reported as “not provided”.

SEMrush

To get all the terms a site is currently ranking for, just input your domain into the domain overview search box in the SEMrush tools, scroll down to the Top Organic Keywords section, and select “View full report”. Note that you will need to sign up for a free trial or have an SEMrush subscription to use this.

Depending on your time and resources, and how deep you would like to go, you can filter this list in various ways. For example, my particular account is limited to the top 10,000 keywords, and in this case, the results come back with over 75,000 available keywords. Use the filters at this point to filter out any obvious groups of terms that may not apply. 

For example, if you wanted to exclude all of the branded terms from this list on the basis that you don’t really need to “try” to rank for, you could use the filters to exclude branded terms. Here I am excluding “rush”, as that would remove terms that include either “SEMrush”, “SEMrush”, or “SEMrush.com”.

Make your Business Visible- Boost your Local Rankings with SEMRush

Competitor Keyword Research

Just as mining your own site for possible keywords can be useful, mining competitor sites can often be even more useful. Looking for terms where competitors rank reasonably well and where you may not, or even where you both rank on the same term, can definitely help you build out your keyword list.

How do you find or define keyword competitors?

This can often be a stumbling block, particularly with higher-level managers on in-house teams or with clients for consultants. Often the client will insist that a particular list of sites are their “competitors.” However, it is often the case that these business competitors are not actually very competitive in terms of organic search.

You can certainly include some of these competitors when mining possible keywords, but far more critical is to find "search" competitors — those sites ranking on the same terms and types of terms as the site for which you are building your organic keyword list. A business may not see Amazon as its competitor from a business perspective, but if they are ranking above the site in search for a relevant term, they are sure as heck a search competitor.

Finding competitors can consist of asking business stakeholders their opinions about who they feel the competitors are (remember this is one of the things we asked in the original discovery questionnaire). You can also find competitors by simply looking at the search engine results pages for the top sites ranking for terms you know are relevant for the site in question. 

You can also use the SEMrush “Main Organic Competitors” report.

At this point, the process is fairly similar to mining keywords from your own site. You can download the “common keywords” here, which are only the ones for which your site and their site both rank. But keep in mind, to capture keywords you may be completely missing, you should download the entire list of search engine keywords from your competitor.

As with your own site, you can do this in both Google Ads and SEMrush. But within SEMrush, you can also limit the download to terms where your competition ranks above a certain point, say 20th or 30th, on the supposition that if they rank worse than that, it perhaps isn’t the greatest term for you to pursue. I prefer downloading the whole list and assessing the terms individually. Within SEMrush, this is also a good place to filter out any terms which include your competitions’ brand names. Moz is likely going to rank for a bunch of terms that include “Moz”, but they really wouldn’t be very relevant in a keyword strategy for SEMrush to pursue ranking on organically.

Keyword Gap Analysis

Another great way to find keywords where you either overlap with your competitors or find terms where they are ranking and you aren’t is through keyword gap analysis. This strategy allows you to input one or more competitors and find terms where there is either common ground or where one or more of those competitors rank and you do not.

SEMrush

Simply enter your site and the sites you want to analyze, select the type of keywords, and get back your list of keywords.

You can also enter a specific word and see where you rank versus your competitors on the term, and see pages that rank the highest. You can review the pages where your competitors rank higher and see what related keywords they included that you may have forgotten.

Unique Keywords

The list below shows “unique” keywords, which are keywords where only one of the sites ranks for them, and the others do not. You can play with the advanced filters here to set parameters and see only see keywords where one or more competitors rank in the top 10 or 20, and your site does not.

Another way to segment this is to look for keywords where you are “close” to the competitor but not quite there yet. This keyword data can help you determine whether you should optimize existing content or create new content, but those terms should certainly be on your list. One way I use this is to look for terms where my competitor ranks in the top 5 and where the site I am analyzing is ranking between 6 and 10.

3. Keyword Research Tools

Google Ads

Google Ads isn’t perfect, but it is still a tool to use — it is a source that has an awful lot of keyword information and provides variations of keywords that may be relevant for you. Google Ads tends to be a little bit biased towards keywords that are bid on in PPC rather than the entire universe of organic keywords, but it is still worth using.

As previously stated, you aren’t going to get very good data unless you are using a Google Ads account that spends a reasonable amount of money. If you don’t have access to one of these, see if you can make friends with someone who does.

The Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool is pretty straightforward. Go to the main Google Ads interface > Tools and Settings > Keyword Planner > Discover new keywords > input your keyword or keywords > Get Results.

SEMrush

The Keyword Analytics > Overview report will give you pretty deep insights into the data around a single keyword and links to “phrase match” and “related” keywords. 

Of more use at this point is the Keyword Magic Tool.

Just input your keyword and select your region (country) if you wish, and SEMrush will generate a list of keywords where you can modify the match type by broad, phrase, exact, or related keywords. You can also select individual keywords at this point. Export all of the keywords in the list to Excel and use them to continue to build your initial organic keyword list.

Topic Research Tool

One more option provided by SEMrush is the Topic Research tool. By inputting a particular keyword, the tool will return a massive set of related topics and concepts in different formats. Frequently these can be used to further expand the root keywords you might want to input into the Keyword Magic Tool.

Below you can see that by entering a keyword, you are given related keywords and recent headlines related to those keywords. Also, notice that "Cards" is selected. 

If you click on a card, you are given recent headlines, questions frequently asked, keyword difficulty, and more. Both the headlines and questions will allow you to see what topics matter to those searching for this keyword. 

Notice the plus signs above? They are available across the tool so you can add the topics and questions to your "favorites", which allows you to save a lot of data for keyword research. 

The tool allows you to see data in many different formats, including the mind map: 

Summary

Building a comprehensive, relevant keyword list is one of the most important SEO projects you can undertake. Keyword research should be one of the first tasks you undertake when starting a new SEO project; it is the basis for your on-page content optimization and new content creation. Of course, the next step is putting that plan into action and creating the best of the best content to satisfy the search intent of each of your potential readers or customers. Don’t forget to update your plan regularly and monitor your progress taking over the SERPs!