How To Do Keyword Research That Drives More Organic SEO Traffic

Keyword research when it comes to building and scaling a website online is a vast ocean to dive into as a beginner or startup.

Not knowing how to do proper keyword research could mean that you're leaving your website open to lose traffic from keywords that your competitors are using.

And every website wants to drive more SEO traffic right?

I sure do.

In this blog post I'll tell you how to go about finding keywords, and actually setting your website up for SEO success!

Ready? Let's dive right in.

What is keyword research?

When you launch a new website, you're likely going to be creating pages, blog posts, product pages and much more.

You'll create your page, and whether that be on a platform such as WordPress or via a bespoke website design.

You know what content you want to put on the page, so just publish the content without thinking too hard about how people will find it.

This is what keyword research is all about, you're trying to optimise a web page around a certain topic to make it more relevant for the reader, and the crawlers from the search engine.

Keyword research isn't just about finding a few words and stuffing your content full of that particular word.

It's about creating content around a given search intent that the user is looking for.

What is an example of a keyword?

We often use the term "keyword" to describe a single word within our own lives, but the term extends beyond a single word.

Typically, you could have more than one word be a keyword, and if you're looking at more than several words, such as 5 or 6, then it'll be called a long-tail keyword.

An example of a keyword could be something like: "racing drones"/

Why?

Because a keyword is typically a topic or idea, and you can have more than one topic linked to your keyword, and many subtopics.

Keywords are search terms that are entered into a search engine, remember this simple definition and it should be easy for you to remember!

The qualities that go into a keyword

Keywords are more than just words, they're search phrases that people actually search for in a search engine.

Crazy right?

Who would've thought that these words have qualities associated with them.

Alongside the search phrase, here's a list of some of the main qualities:

• Competition - how hard it is to rank for this word
• Search volume - how many people are searching for this word
• The price - how much would you pay per click within an ad for example
• Search intent - what the user's intent is behind this idea
• The word count - how many words within your content contain this keyword

Keyword competition

If we briefly take a look at keyword competition, you'll quickly understand that a lot of keywords are very high in competition.

What does this mean?

Let's take the keyword: "cooking", how many people do you think will be searching for this keyword? How much content will be linked to this?

A lot.

Millions of blog articles, products such as cooking guides and books, recipes and much more.

It would be extremely difficult for you to rank for a piece of content with a high keyword competition, so how do you find out the competition?

You need to be using a keyword research tool, such as the one from Wordstream, it'll help you discover keyword ideas, and will show the competition.

Try to pick keywords that have a low competition as these will be easier to rank for.

Search volume

Despite what you might read online, the search volume associated with a keyword can often be a bit misleading.

Why?

Well, let's just say that the keyword: "grass seeds" is showing as 10 searches per month inside a particular SEO keyword research tool, the tool won't typically account for other intent and searches around that topic.

You see, not only have you got the keyword: "grass seeds", but you've also got the words: "grass" and "seeds" in there, which also could each yield say 100 searches per month.

So you've now very quickly gone from 10 searches a month, to 210 searches.

You'll likely have more ideas and content that surround this, so it's likely going to be many hundred if not thousands of searches per month for your website or blog that you could be exposing your content to.

Keyword price

If you've never heard of Google Ads before, it's a service offered by Google that allows you to put your website or landing page in front of the right people that search for a keyword of your liking.

Unfortunately, linked to this keyword is going to be the cost of the click for someone to click through to your site.

And I'm here to tell you, that it really doesn't matter.

Some keywords could be many pounds or dollars, whilst others might even be a few pence.

What counts, is ensuring that your content is optimised for keyword research and you'll be great!

Search intent behind a keyword

When you Google for something, you have an idea of what it is you're looking for don't you.

Whether it's to buy a product, learn how to do something, or even just find some fun, there's search intent behind every keyword.

Search intent is essentially the idea of...

"What is the user looking to achieve from this search, and how can we show them the most relevant piece of content"

Or, to put it another way...

"How do we answer the problem they're having"

Understand this, and you've literally unlocked the key to why so many blogs online fail.

Too many content creators are writing content that is there simply to make money, I call them the fake guro's, but there's many names and definitions that we could refer to them as.

Your content should always be solving someone's problem, in the most efficient way, whether that be through answering a question, or giving them the option to buy a product.

You should always be putting the user first, not the amount of money that you could generate.

Word count

Have you ever read pieces of content that seem to just go on and on about absolute rubbish?

Chances are, this content is here to try and out rank other websites, and guess what?

It doesn't work.

YOUR content when you're doing keyword research shouldn't be focussed on word count, it should be focused instead on providing the most value.

So whether you're writing content about choosing the perfect domain extension, or writing content about cooking, always ensure that the value comes before word count.

Ask questions before you begin keyword research

Okay, so you could quite literally go around to the people you know and start asking them questions to see if they know the answer, but I've got a better way...

Ask your question in a search engine.

Most content creators online will often swear by the book that you have to do keyword research, and that you must spend hours researching keywords when in reality, an hour or less should be sufficient enough.

If you type an idea into the search engine, scroll to the bottom of the web page, you'll find related searches.

Use this to construct your content, and use this to create content around that idea.

You'll likely notice patterns if you do this, patterns that suggest a lot of people are searching for that idea, especially if there's a lot of related searches or similar content.

What questions should you ask? Here's just a few:

• What ingredients do I need to bake a cake?
• What oven temperature does my cake need to bake?
• How do I bake a cake?
• How long should a cake take to bake?

It could get overwhelming searching for many topics, and ideas, so just stick to one to start with and ask a few questions, not loads.

What is the best keyword research tool for free?

There's many keyword research tools that you can use on the internet today, some cost a lot of money but are really good such as KWFinder.

There are others though, and I really like the keyword research tool that Wordstream offers.

Ultimately though, you don't want to be signing up to too many keyword research tools, in fact, I don't recommend having many tools other than a good quality keyword research tool and that's about it.

Why?

Because there's so many other ways, alternative ways that will help you find keywords to target, and the biggest free one is Google search.

You could also search for courses on Udemy, not because you're buying a course, but because you're often able to see what topics these courses cover.

And if a course has been made, has a lot of quality reviews, chances are, you can just take the general topics within the course and write some content around that.

Write content, and write BETTER content than the ones within the course.

One last thing

Don't let keyword research become a boring task, make it fun, try to discover new ideas and topics for your blog or website that you hadn't thought about previously.

I completely understand how boring it can sometimes become having to go out of your comfort zone to try to find new keywords to target, but with time you'll get better and better at it!