How to Do Keyword Research for SEO [5 Easy Steps]

on October 28th 2021

The number of daily searches on Google is now almost 10 billion. Statistically speaking, everyone googles something once a day every day.

What does this mean for businesses?

If you can make your website #1 in Google search results, you can reach any type of customer you can possibly imagine.

Of course, as long as you understand what SEO keyword research is and how to do it.

In this keyword research guide for beginners, we’ll answer the following questions:

What is exactly keyword research?
How does it connect with SEO?
How to find keywords that drive traffic?
What are the best practices of SEO keyword analysis?
What should a good keyword research report include?

What is SEO keyword research and what is its purpose?

Keyword research is the process of finding out which search queries are most popular (and easy to rank for). It also allows you to pick keywords that have the greatest business potential. A thorough keyword analysis helps you attract organic visitors.

SEO keyword research helps you find the most popular topics that people search online.

The most important information you get by doing keyword research include:

Keyword search volume. How many people type in the keyword in Google every month.
Keyword difficulty. How competitive your keyword is and how difficult it will be to reach top positions.
Cost per click. How much you would pay per visit if you started a Google Ads campaign for those keywords.
Related keywords. Different variants of similar search queries that you should use throughout your page, in your title, headings, and URLs.
Keyword positions. How high existing websites rank for a given keyword.
Keyword traffic. The estimated number of monthly visits that a website generates when ranking for it on a specific position.

You can obtain all this information with popular keyword research tools.

How to do keyword research for SEO

In keyword research, the order in which actions are performed is important. We need to determine our business goals before we select our keywords. And before preparing our content we should know what is the main intent for every article or landing page that we plan to publish.

Choose the right topics or find your competitors

This is actually step zero. It should happen before the main part of your keyword research. You need to know where to start. Once you have some general direction, it's an easy ride.

If you are a blogger, focus on your niche and things that you enjoy writing about. For example, if you are interested in music journalism, you can start with topics such as songs, albums, singers, musicians, or music genres.

Go to Keyword Research and choose Keyword suggestions from the dropdown menu. You can enter any word and click Search keywords.

If you are a business owner, choose topics related to your products or services.

Now, let’s assume that our business is an online bookstore. We want to sell more non-fiction books, novels, and comic books. We are also interested in building brand loyalty and encouraging people to subscribe to our newsletter.

Instead of starting your keyword research with a word or topic you can generate content ideas by naming your competitors.

Generate keyword reports with information about their volume and difficulty

Once you've checked what your competitors' sites are ranking for, you can save your favorite ideas or export reports in CSV format. Many SEO professionals prefer to work with spreadsheets.

Identify your main keyword and searcher’s intent

The explanation of what is the right order of reading the witcher books seems to be a good content idea. But, at this point, we need to double-check what are some other keywords related to our main topic.

Some queries are about the tv show, the video game series, or the characters from the story. Keywords like the witcher book order and witcher books in order are two separate keywords but they have the same searcher’s intent. This means that writing two separate pieces of content about the Witcher books—one targeting book order and another targeting books in order—would cause keyword cannibalization. You should create one page and use different variants as synonyms.

Use incognito mode and analyze the SERP

Trying to guess the main intent behind each of the queries that searchers type into Google is a good exercise. The longer you do keyword research, the better you get at making the right predictions and it will become your second nature. However, it is always a good idea to take a quick look at the search engine result pages themselves.

Prepare a list of keywords for your copywriter

SEO keyword research and SEO copywriting are two very different activities. Sometimes they may be carried out by the same person but it is also possible to divide the tasks between SEO research experts and content creators/copywriters.

How to research keywords for SEO—key takeaway

Keyword research is a powerful online marketing technique. It can give you a competitive edge and increase organic sales by attracting the right visitors.

You can use quick keyword research tricks or advanced techniques to:

Win higher positions and increase your website traffic
Steal the best content ideas from your competitors
Find what the most popular products or services in your niche are
Build online authority and increase brand awareness
Discover evergreen topics that generate predictable numbers of visits
Save money on your SEM campaigns or improve them
Plan your long-term content strategy