Getting started with SEO on your site can be overwhelming, so we have created a guide to help you get up and running with the starting point of SEO, keyword research. To effectively optimize your website, you need to know what keywords you want to rank for. Keyword research attempts to understand what your potential customers are searching for. If your content is irrelevant, you will be penalized due to bounce rates. When you are done with this tutorial, you'll be able to use free tools to find multiple keywords to rank for.
Intent and Search Engine Optimization
When you create content, user intent is the most important thing to focus on. Intent is the ultimate goal of the search engine user, and webpages are ranked on whether they are relevant and useful in achieving this goal. Intent is also why SEO, is so effective. Content that matches intent allows you to attract viewers trying to solve the problems your product or service does.
Brainstorming For Keywords
For this tutorial, we are researching keywords for a hypothetical shoe store in Chicago, IL. If I were looking for information about shoes, what might my search term be? First, let's start with some simple and obvious ones.
Potential Keywords
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shoes
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cheap shoes
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shoe repair
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red shoes
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green shoes for hiking
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green hiking shoe sale under 50 dollars
After a quick brainstorming session, we have six keywords to start with. Since keyword research can potentially generate thousands of keywords, organizing them with a spreadsheet application helps you keep track of them. You can use our free template to follow along using keywords for your website.
| keyword | search volume | intent | keyword difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| shoes | null | null | null |
| cheap shoes | null | null | null |
| red shoes | null | null | null |
| green hiking shoes | null | null | null |
| shoe repair | null | null | null |
| green hiking shoe sale under 50 dollars | null | null | null |
You'll notice that the spreadsheet contains attributes that describe the keywords we are researching. Keyword research is as much about determining the quality of keywords as it is about discovering possible keywords. The goal of keyword research is to find and classify the objective value of the keywords. After all, our time is limited. Because our time is limited, we need to focus our limited resources on optimizing for the right keywords.
For this example, we have "exhausted" our creativity with the six keywords we came up with above. When you run into this roadblock while brainstorming keywords, you can generate new keywords using tools. Let's examine some of them.
Google Autocomplete
A quick way to generate keywords quickly is to play "alphabet soup" with Google autocomplete. You may have noticed during your searches, Google provides suggestions based on what other users have searched. If you are unfamiliar, look at the picture below and try it yourself.
To generate new keywords with autocomplete "alphabet soup", type your keyword into google. Once you have done that, see what google suggests for every letter you place after it. We are going to have to evaluate a lot of keywords to find the one's that are important to us. Please use this complementary template to organize your research as you follow along with this guide.
Google Suggestions
Google provides us with information about what other users who searched for our term searched for. They are a quick and easy way to find keywords.
- People also ask
Found after the first few results
- People also search for
Found at the end of the search page
Analyzing Keywords
If you have followed along so far, you should have a lot of keywords. You could have upwards of 200 keywords to analyze. Let's pick out a few keywords and learn more about them.
| keyword | search volume | intent | keyword difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| shoes good for flat feet | null | null | null |
| shoes for under 30 dollars | null | null | null |
| shoes best for soccer | null | null | null |
| hiking shoes near me | null | null | null |
| nike | null | null | null |
| shoe wholesalers for small businesses | null | null | null |
How Intent Relates to Relevant and Useful Content
When we are optimizing our websites, it is important that our end users are humans, NOT search engines. If you "trick" the search engine into boosting you higher temporarily with irrelevant information, you will be punished by a high bounce rate. It is important to note, that the end goal of attracting visitors to your website is conversion. You either want the user to buy a product, or you want to be able to establish a relationship. To do this you need to create content that speaks to the intent of the user. The intent of a keyword can be broken up into four primary categories, navigational, informational, transactional, and commercial.
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Navigational Keywords
| keyword | search volume | intent | keyword difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| nike | null | navigational | null |
"Nike" is an example of a navigational keyword, the intent is to find the Nike website. You can optimize your site for navigational keywords by making sure to include your brand information in your page's title and content.
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Informational Keywords
| keyword | search volume | intent | keyword difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| shoes good for flat feet | null | informational | null |
| shoes best for soccer | null | informational | null |
| shoes repair guide | null | informational | null |
Informational keywords are used when a user is looking for information. These keywords can be optimized by creating pages dedicated to answering common questions, or frequent blog posts about the issue.
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Transactional Keywords
| keyword | search volume | intent | keyword difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| hiking shoes near me | null | transactional | null |
| shoes for under 30 dollars | null | transactional | null |
Transactional keywords are used when a user is trying to make an immediate purchase. You can optimize these keywords by creating pages in your online store dedicated to these products. You can optimize for them by creating pages on your site dedicated to the service they are looking for.
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Commercial Keywords
| keyword | search volume | intent | keyword difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| shoe wholesalers for small businesses | null | commercial | null |
Commercial keywords are used when a user is looking to build a long lasting relationship with a company to solve a specific problem. These are generally used by corporate purchasers and should be optimized for laying out the value proposition for B2B customers.
Search Volume and the Trade-Off Between Popularity and Discoverability
Now that we have analyzed intent and understand why it is so important, we need to look at other attributes of keywords. It may seem obvious at first that you should focus exclusively on search volume when you are deciding which keywords to focus on. After all the higher the search volume, the more potential clicks you can gain for ranking for those keywords. This is flawed thinking and to explain the flaw in the logic we need to look at our other variable, keyword difficulty.
If you are just getting started, it is going to be extremely difficult for you to rank for the most popular keywords. The sites you would be competing with have been up for much longer, and have had plenty of time to build up a reputation and backlinks. While you are still building domain authority it's best to target keywords that are relatively undervalued.
Long Tail Keywords
Long Tail Keywords make up the majority of total keywords, but receive a minority of the traffic. The reason it makes sense to optimize for them is the scale of the internet. These keywords receive a smaller percentage of searches, but because the number of total searches is so high they represent a significant amount of potential traffic. The traffic that they offer to you is qualitatively different from the traffic that popular keywords offer. Let's compare two keywords to drive this point home.
hiking shoes for people with flat feet fast free shipping
vs
popular shoes
Popular shoes will receive far more searches than the hiking shoes term, but the intent is less clearly defined. The searcher could be doing market research, writing a paper or blog about fashion trends, or just doing some window shopping. The hiking shoes keyword was searched for somebody who is almost certainly looking to make a purchase for themselves or as a gift.
To evaluate the keyword difficulty we are going to use another tool called free keyword research tool. The tool is straightforward and doesn't need much explanation. You type a keyword into the tool and it returns information about the keywords search volume and difficulty. Take the time to repeat this process for every keyword you have generated.
Prioritizing Keywords
Which keywords should you target first? When you're done with keyword research, you can have hundreds if not thousands of keywords that you need to rank for with limited time and resources. For that reason it is important to start with the keywords that will give you the most bang for your buck and move down to the ones likely to give you a lower return on investment. We've come up with a basic formula we think will do the trick.
SV/KD = Keyword Priority
The search volume divided by keyword difficulty lets you see which keywords bring in the most traffic for the least effort. Basically, you pick the low hanging fruit before you buy a ladder and start climbing the tree.
We hope that this introductory blog post has helped you get a better understanding of keyword research and we would love to help you more. Please contact us if you have any questions about keyword research.