How to do keyword research for blogs and websites
Keyword research is one of the very important steps in search engine optimization. It provides you an insight about what your target audience will be searching for in the search engines, so that you can develop content around those keywords to rank higher in SERP.
So what are these keywords? They are basically words or phrases which when entered into a search box on any search engine, generates results which are related to your product or service. You want to choose these keywords carefully because they need to be relevant and highly competitive.
What kind of keywords should I focus on?
There are five major groups in which you should look for your targeted keywords:
When you encounter a keyword, look at the URL if it contains either your targeted keywords or an exact match. If not then move on to other URLs from that site. Do this for all URLs from that domain and add these words in the search box. The top 3 results should be closely examined because they are highly relevant to what you are looking for. In addition, check out if any of them rank on the first page of Google using Adwords Keyword Tool ( https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal )
1- Keywords with high commercial intent
These keywords have highest chances of conversions as they directly relate to your business or organization and aims to solve a problem. It is the easiest to rank for and tend to give you quick results, in terms of ranking and business revenue.
2- Long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are two or three words that makes up a phrase which when entered into search engines yield search results with low competition but high conversion rates. This means less traffic but higher chances of conversions. These kinds of queries generally indicate user’s further interest because they have already researched something similar and now looking for more information on it. For example: “Where do I find the nearest petrol pump” shows that the search is about finding something i.e., petrol pump near them instead of just any random word like “petrol”. The second sentence could be an indicator that the user has already done their research and is planning to buy something soon. This kind of search phrase is commonly used by users who are planning to purchase something in the near future.
3- Head terms keywords
Head terms keywords are your most popular search phrases or words that people generally use when they search on any search engines. These words, however, do not directly relate with your business but people may consider them while looking for you product or service. For example: “Wichita restaurants” means that the user is just looking for restaurants in Wichita without knowing where exactly they can get one. The searcher might be interested in getting restaurant suggestions depending upon their preference like proximity to home/workplace etc., However, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore these keywords.
4- Competitor’s brand names
One of the most overlooked keyword research technique is using competitor’s brand name in your SERP analysis. You can use this trick when looking for long tail phrases when you have a few competitors who are already ranking for them, find their brand name in lower case letters and add them to your list. For example: If you type “bob’s burgers” again in Google Keyword Tool then it will give not only “bobs burger” but also related ideas like “bobs homes”, “bobs burgers coupon” etc. Hence, all these head terms added together makes it very competitive and difficult to rank quickly without any effort or time invested.
5- Company names or organization name
If your organization or business is relatively new and does not have any brand name then you can use commonly used keywords for your products and services by adding company name. These words can be added to all head term, long tail and competitor’s brand name phrases to find valuable real time data which is very helpful in making strategic decisions such as: – If the company has a website that needs optimization if not then it should be taken into consideration immediately. – How many sites are ranking for these same keywords where my site cannot rank even on the base page of SERP? – What kind of content these websites are using which makes them more relevant than you and how it could be improved upon.
How do I check if a keyword has commercial intent?
In simple terms, whenever a user enters a keyword into search engines it is one of the following types:
– Synonyms – An inquiry about a process – A location or place
Note: The list above is not exhaustive but these are the most common searches that indicate commercial intent.
How do I check if a keyword has commercial intent? – Method 2
Step 1: Go to Google Keyword Tool and sign up for an account
Step 2: Look for keywords with high average monthly searches as you can see below. It displays data from Google Adwords which means that those keywords will have high search volume as they are used by advertisers to drive business. Hence, this technique is best suited for ecommerce sites where ad spend plays a vital role.
Step 3: Look for keywords with high competition as you can see above, this doesn’t mean that these keywords are not suitable but they will take more effort to rank better than other low competition keywords.
How do I check if a keyword has commercial intent? – Method 3
You can use your website or blog analytics data which shows what kind of traffic is coming to the site and where it is coming from (organic search vs paid ads). Here are few simple steps which you should follow to find out how many people are actually visiting your site by typing “site:yoursite.com” in Google search box. You can also track the top performing posts on your blog using Google Analytics real time report at Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
How do I check if a keyword has commercial intent? – Method 4
If you want to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for and not having any success then you can use Spyfu tool which is free and very easy to use:
Step 1: Type in domain name of your competitor’s website and click on search button as shown below:
It will display all the information about how much it cost for them to get that result (PPC advertising or Adwords), how much they spend each month (estimated) and traffic data like number of visitors, backlinks etc.
Step 2: Here you can see Google Keyword Planner Tool where you need to exact match type as suggested by Google in the screenshot below. This tool only shows keywords which are relevant to your competitor’s website or blog and not all search queries.
How do I check if a keyword has commercial intent? – Method 5
You can also use a very simple chrome extension from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/broad-and-specific-phrases/gndlknidddmnnhfknkigckghojodelhi that quickly shows you how much traffic each result is getting from Google organic search results:
Once you have done your research and compiled all of the keywords that you think are relevant, the next step is to create a list of keywords that your competitor’s website does not rank for. This can be done by using any number of free or paid tools such as Market Samurai, Uber Suggest, SEO Quake, and many more.
Then you need to make sure that these keywords are relevant to what your site is about (i.e., if you have a health-related website, then you don’t want to have any keywords on your list that are related to computers).
Once you know what words and phrases you want to target (and that the search engines care about), it becomes important to optimize your pages for those keywords. This brings us back full circle; content is king. 
The best way to make sure that your site shows up when someone searches for a particular phrase or keyword is by having lots of content with the words people are searching for showing up in the body of your text (not contained in an image, not contained in title tags, not contained in link anchor text pointing toward other webpages – only inside the actual webpage’s HTML code itself).
When targeting keywords that you would like to use in your content, it is important to sprinkle them throughout the text without overusing them. SEO experts deal with the ratio of target phrases to total words on a page every day when they work on client sites, and they can tell you that if there are less than 11% of your keywords on a particular page, then you need more words.
If there are 13% or more of your target phrase showing up inside your text, then this might be too much repetition. So anywhere from 4-10% seems to be the sweet spot for these things (11%-13% still works but anything beyond that is considered spammy).
As an example, let’s say you have a page about “organic dog foods,” and you want to rank well for a variety of phrases.
You can include your target phrase in your title tag, your meta description, your image alt text, your first sentence (which often gets bolded by search engines), and on any outbound links that point toward other pages within the site (or even on pages outside of the site).
For each page of content that you write on your website, try to create at least 3-5 different variations of keyphrases that are relevant to what you’re writing about. Using one particular keyword variation more than once is not considered overuse because it’s important for web crawlers to know exactly what they are dealing with before they even get to the page itself.
The good news is that just by following some of these simple guidelines, you are more likely to have your site show up higher in search engine results pages. Remember that it’s essential for anyone writing content for a site to be aware of how people use keywords while searching online so they will know what to write about and use appropriately while creating content.
How to do keyword research for blogs and websites?
Just using one or two keywords on your webpage isn’t enough – you cannot fake being an authority on something if people don’t trust you yet – so make sure that you’re doing all the proper pre-publishing steps before sharing too much information with potential customers/clients.
Keywords are important because they are the main tool that search engines rely on when ranking sites.
People often use keywords to find information online, so your site must always be available for anyone searching for words or phrases you would like to target regularly.
There are many different ways of using keywords to get the desired results. Still, before doing anything else, it’s essential to make sure that you have researched all of your options and seriously considered how much work needs to be done on your end before taking action.
This can be tricky because getting involved with SEO means having more than one webpage. Each page should contain its own unique content with different keywords sprinkled throughout in order to get the best results possible.
Once you know what words and phrases you want to target (and that the search engines care about), it’s important to make sure that each page of content has enough room for these keywords to be included on a regular basis without looking like you’re trying too hard.
The more quality content you produce, the higher your rankings will be – this is something that can’t be stressed enough because high rankings don’t happen overnight (usually).
It takes some skill and expertise to get the desired results every time, but once you become familiar with how things work in the SEO world, you’ll know what keywords need to appear on which web pages and why they are so important – nobody wants to surf for information on Google or anywhere else only to find themselves stuck searching for answers when an authority blog isn’t even listed at the top of the results page.
Conclusion:
The first step in working with keywords is to determine how much research one needs to do on the subject. If the keyword is something that you know a lot about because it’s your profession or passion, then extensive research may not be as important as would be asked of someone writing on a topic he or she knows nothing about.
In cases where there is less experience available for research, many websites now offer tools which generate ideas for keywords based upon what type of search traffic a certain phrase might receive.
By using this insight coupled with a little common sense and business knowledge, eventually an SEO expert will learn what types of words and phrases are going to provide people with what they need when visiting their website.
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