What Is Keyword Research?

 

Keyword research is the most important aspect for search engine marketers in increasing website rankings and targeting their specific audiences. The keyword is the pillar of all SEO marketing strategy. Targeting the right keyword to rank on a search engine means a lot for your website in regards to the effectiveness of your SEO and PPC campaign. Keyword research is what most SEO professionals practice to identify and find what most people search for in search engines. It’s also looking at possibilities to increase website visibility on all major search engine results pages (SERP’s).

 

Based on the image above keyword research is the central core of all online marketing strategy. It is divided into four main areas:  

1. Finding
   This is where you do findings on users’ recent searches, check competitors keywords, look for new keyword opportunities to target and brainstorm existing keyword phrases.
2. Analysis
   After listing your keywords on your personal excel file, you need to do keyword analysis and check each keyword ranking’s difficulties. Some search term results in SERP, estimated keywords volume, keyword cost per click for PPC, keywords competition, and keywords estimated ROI. You can do all these things using SEO online tools like Semrush, Spyfu. Check our top 16 keyword research tools below.
3. Testing (For PPC)
   This area tells you the results from your Ad copy, changes in your Google Adwords advertising campaign, Google keyword search analytics clicks, keyword impressions and Ad Copy SERP positions.
4. Content URL-Mapping (For Organic Traffic)
   In this area, it tells you what keyword to use on your blog post URL permalink, blog post niche topic and content outline composition. This is for your external and internal permalinks structure for organic traffic purposes. Let’s say, for example; you do keyword research for “flowers in Melbourne”, then your content permalink structure should be www.yourdomain.com/blog/flowers-in-Melbourne.

 

How To Measure Keyword Difficulty

 

Keyword difficulty measures how easy and hard it is to rank a particular keyword in SERP. It measures a  score from 0-100 based on current first-page keyword competition. Moz and SEOquake are the most common tools that measure keyword difficulty. To begin checking each keyword’s difficulty using MOZ, follow these steps:

1. Login to your MOZ pro account.
2. Go to MOZ keyword explorer.
3. In the small search box, type your desired keywords and you can also filter each targeted keyword country location.
4. It will instantly give you the list of keywords data for the search term you’ve typed in.
5. From the main interface, it offers keyword MOZ estimated traffic volume, keyword difficulty, opportunity, and potential. Check the image below for reference.

Using the SEOquake tool to check keyword difficulty is easy. It gives you the straight results of your data from your browser. These are the things you need to do to be able to get keyword difficulty using SEOquake:

1. Go to browser extensions.
2. Scroll down to the bottom and click “Get more extensions.”
3. Then search web browser store (if you’re using Google Chrome) and type in “seoquake.”
4. Then click the +Add To Chrome button.
5. Once you’re done adding it on your Chrome browser extensions, type in and go to Google.com and search your desired keyword. Let’s say you’ve search for “keyword research”, below the small Google search box you will see a small SEOquake icon along with keyword difficulty data measure. Check the image below for reference.

You can also get the full data report and it will redirect you to semrush.com. SEOquake is owned and developed by Semrush, one of the powerful SEO online tools for keyword research and comprehensive SEO data insights.  To learn more about Semrush SEO data insights, visit this post: PPC tools.

 

Keyword Research to Content URL-Mapping Guide:

Follow these steps below for proper content URL permalink structuring:

1. Gather list of keywords.
2. List your keyword on an excel file.
3. Get keywords volume using Semrush, Moz, Google keyword planner and Bing keyword tool (6 months data).
4. Do a content audit and research through Buzzsumo or do a manual search on keyword niche topic through Google search.
5. Look for questions and answers related to your keyword on Quora.com to gain few ideas.
6. Gather keyword term questions on http://answerthepublic.com/.
7. Gather article sources.
8. Outline your content from headings down to sub-headings.
9. Collect image sources for featured images.
10. Use the desired keyword as blog content URL permalink ex. www.yourdomain.com/blog/yourkeywordhere.com

 

Top 16 SEO/PPC keyword research tools

Top 16 list of useful keyword research tools that provides you more in-depth data for estimated keyword volume and traffic insights.

1. MOZ keyword explorer (https://moz.com/explorer)
2. Semrush (https://www.semrush.com)
3. Spyfu (https://www.spyfu.com/)
4. Wordstream free keyword tool (http://www.wordstream.com/keywords)
5. Google trends explorer (https://www.google.com/trends/explore?)
6. Google keyword planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner)
7. Ubersuggest (https://ubersuggest.io/)
8. KWFinder (https://kwfinder.com/)
9. Buzzsumo (http://buzzsumo.com/)
10. Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/)
11. WordTracker (https://app.wordtracker.com/)
12. SERPwoo (https://www.serpwoo.com/)
13. GrepWords (http://grepwords.com/)
14. SEcockpit (https://secockpit.com/)
15. Longtail Pro (https://longtailpro.com/)
16. Keyword Tool (http://keywordtool.io/)