What Is Keyword Research In SEO? Million $ question. Most bloggers know what is keyword research but don't know the proper way of doing keyword research before writing content.
In the end, articles don't get ranked and they become frustrated about blogging.
I am sure after reading the article properly you will get rid of common myths about SEO and keyword research. You will get a very clear idea about doing keyword research.
Well if you don't know how to create a free blog then read our article about free blogging.
Everything has its own way of doing perfectly. Blogging is done perfectly through keyword research. Many of us don't bother about keyword research and fail in blogging after a year or two.
In this article, we will define what is actual keyword research in SEO, why it is important, and how many types of keyword research exist.
As a bonus for you, I will discuss a few free keyword research tools by which you can do the keyword research for free.
Introduction
Keyword Research is the best SEO technique for learning the Google SEO algorithm. I will discuss Keyword Research & How To Use Keyword Research Tools to find low-competition keywords here.
Most importantly the end-to-end guideline for keyword research and keyword-finding tools will be discussed in this article.
Let's start in detail. As a blogger, if you don't know what keyword research is and how to do keyword research, you may face a lot of problems with your blogging career. In fact in the blogging world, search engine optimization is a must.
Many of you have asked me via email and comment, "Brother, how do you do keyword research for your article?". So, I will be discussing everything about researching keywords, rules, and procedures for finding high volume and less competitive keywords.
If you really want huge traffic to your blog please read the full article even if it takes 1 hour to read. I promise you will be able to rank your article in 1st page of google.
Before going to the research methods let's know what is important and why? Haha, confused? No issues, read below.
How do Keyword Research & SEO affect your search ranking?
See, today's online blogging platform is like a business and thousands of people are blogging about the same topic or niche. This means every blogger is creating a lot of competition in a specific area/niche.
Because of this, nowadays if you search on Google for any keyword, question, topic, or problem, Google gives you millions of results. But among these only 10 relevant websites appear on the first page.
However, as many people publish answers or solutions to the same question on their blogs, Google or other search engines get a lot of choices of information to choose & show.
So, Google and other search engines show the best, SEO-friendly, user-friendly, high-quality content blogs or websites with their top 10 results. And, content or blogs with low quality and poor SEO optimization are shown on the later pages.
So what happens, only the blogs or websites coming on the front page, get huge traffic or visitors from Google and other search engines. While others are getting less compared to those. So, if your blog is not getting traffic and visitors from Google or other search engines, then you may not be writing good-quality articles or you are picking the wrong keywords.
Moreover, even if you don't use proper keywords & SEO optimization techniques in your articles, it becomes difficult to get ranked on search engines.
Do you know What SEO is?
SEO stands for Search engine optimization. It's a technique of writing an article with proper keywords and proper formatting to get ranked in the google search engine which will lead to good traffic to your website.
There are 4 types of SEO, most bloggers say 3. Let's see what are those?
- Technical SEO (while creating a website or blog)
- Pre- SEO (before writing an article) (according to me)
- On-page SEO (while writing)
- Off-page SEO (after publishing)
- Technical SEO is about putting meta tags, connecting the site to the Google search console, submitting a sitemap, keeping proper page speed, using a good quality server for hosting, etc. In short technical things that a site should have. Mostly single-time work and doesn't change frequently.
- Pre- SEO is all about keyword research which is very very important. I am discussing everything on this today.
- On-page SEO needs some guidelines to be followed while writing like placing keywords, using proper schema, proper heading, etc. All about content writing. I will share a detailed guide on this.
- Off-page SEO is all about back-links and the promotion of your article. After producing a product how do you sell it? Through promotion, right? Off-page SEO is promoting your article and building trust for your blog. (optional for now)
What people do at the beginning is, find some guidelines for on-page SEO, follow them properly, and publish the article. Technical is good as well. After that they expect this article to be ranked quickly. Sometimes it really gets ranked but most of the time it doesn't. Why? Read Below.
SEO is fine but still not getting traffic?
If you are writing good quality articles and at the same time with good SEO optimizations but you are not getting traffic from search engines, then the reason may be "not doing keyword research".
If you are writing an article without any knowledge about "keyword research" and how to do keyword research, then in terms of SEO, this is your biggest mistake.
What is Keyword research? To answer this question, you first need to know what "keywords mean".
What are Keywords In Blogging?
In the industry of blogging, keywords are the main instruments for Google and other search engines to understand and know about your blog and the articles written on your blog.
And, depending on the targeted keyword in your article, search engines send the right traffic or visitors to your blog.
What do we write when we search for a problem or topic in Google search?
For example, we search by writing words like "How to earn money online?", "What is keyword research", "Which mobile is good?", "Best Android mobile" and so on.
And did you know, that keywords like "words" or "sentences" written in Google search are just keywords? Any keyword can be a word or a sentence of more than one word.
For example, "online income" and "online income tricks" are both keywords. However, keywords with more than two words can be called "key phrases". Isn't that cool?
This can be short words or a short sentence. Most "keywords" are like a sentence of 3 to 4 words which is also known as long-tail keywords.
To make it more simple, a keyword is a complete word or phrase what you are searching for by typing in Google search, bing search or yahoo search engine".
If you are talking about this article, then I have written an article targeting or based on the keywords like "what is Keyword Research", "Keywords", "SEO", "blog traffic", "Keyword Research Rules", and "low competition keywords".
So, if someone searches in Google with my targeted keywords, then Google will definitely show my blog or article in its search results. How do you know? Yes, Google might not show if my keyword research is wrong.
Well, even if everything is good, google may not be showing my article on 1st page because this article needs to be ranked higher. Day by day it will happen but How quickly? That depends on how much competitive keywords you have used.
So it is now clear that to get ranked or get a good amount of traffic you need to write an article with those keywords that are being searched by a lot of people in the world. This is simple right? If people are not searching for football then what's the point of producing football. Simple logic.
Now, the question is "How do you know which keywords people are searching most on Google?".
The answer is, "Through keyword research".
What does keyword research mean?
Keyword research is a very important part of SEO (search engine optimization), where the most searched keywords and key phrases in popular search engines can be found.
Moreover, through this process, you can find new topics and key phrases for blog articles, which is profitable and people are interested.
The first step to optimizing any article for "search engine" is keyword research. through keyword research, you can find better and more searched keywords in Google.
And, targeting profitable keywords and writing articles on those keywords can bring you more visitors from Google and other search engines.
Before Going too deep you need to know how many types of keywords are there. So, let's know this first.
Types of Keyword In SEO
Well, do keywords also have types? Yeah, why not? You will understand why in a while. There are 2 types of keywords.
- Single or Short Keywords
- Long Trail Keywords
Single or Short Keywords
Suppose you are hungry and want to eat pizza. But you don't know the restaurants nearby. So, tell me what you are going to do now. Definitely, you will go to google and search. What you will search for? Let's see the picture below.
You are searching for "Pizza" and written that on google. Hey, look, what do you see? A list of suggestions, right? what are those? The first 5 are the restaurant's names. Next is the recipe.
Why I am telling this? Well, did you notice that you have written one word and got suggestions for another word? Yes, right. These keywords are known as single or short keywords. It can contain 2 words. If it's more than 3 words it's called a keyword phrase.
If you are planning to write an article you might target this kind of short keyword or keyword phrase but these small keywords are very tough to rank.
For example, You are building one live cricket score website like cricbuzz. You can think of keywords as below.
"Cricket score" > "cricket Live Score" > "Cricket Live Score With Commentary"
I hope you understood what is short or phrase keywords. If you think short keywords are not enough to make people understand your blog. Or if see that most of the renowned bloggers are already ranked for these keywords then read below. This might help.
Long Trail Keywords
Long tail keywords is actually a group of keywords or short sentence. Let's go back to Pizza. You were trying to find a pizza restaurant. Now let's search in a different way. Simply like the below picture.
Now, what you see. A sentence in search. These are called long tail keywords. Especially when you search with 'wh-words like who, how, what, etc. These become long-tail keywords.
Let's plan for long-tail keywords for your website. How is it if you use keywords like...
"How To Check Cricket Live Score with Live Commentary" - This is a long-tail keyword. I hope you understood these two types of keywords.
You are halfway done with your traffic boosting tutorial, Let's Enter To the Practical game. If you find it boring to read still I suggest you read. This is business, not a movie. It will be boring but will bring money for you.
Why Keyword Research is so important to get traffic?
First of all, it is important to find the keywords that are profitable and the most searched keywords in Google search.
Second, you can find out how much Google search is being done on the topic you are writing about, whether people are searching on Google about the article you are writing about, and if yes, then how much.
Remember, if you are writing an article targeting a keyword that has less than 100 searches per month, then there is no benefit in writing that article.
You will find a lot less traffic or visitors in an article written with that keyword even if you rank in position 1. Because fewer people are searching that keyword.
Therefore, it is often seen that bloggers write very good quality content, the article gets ranked still traffic to their blog is less from the search engine.
The only reason for this is "writing articles without keyword research".
You should know this about keyword research
Here I am writing about 'keyword research and I know millions of people search on google to know about this. So what will happen, if my content is good, Google will put this article in the top and show it to those people who search for "keyword research". Understood right?
So, the purpose of doing keyword research before writing a blog article is to find some keywords that have a good number of searches per month in the Google search engine. Maybe 5 thousand people search with this keyword on google, so you will have a chance to get those 5000 unique visitors to your site from google.
Not only search volume but also there is something to look at while you are doing keyword research.
- Does your keyword have 1000+ search volume?
- Did you search with this keyword in Google?
- How many search results have you found and who are the top 3?
- How much domain authority do they have (search on google how to check DA)
- Can you write more than them? (More words mean more information)
- How many areas/topics they have covered? Can you add more?
If the search volume is good, if you can beat the top 3 websites by writing better articles than their content, then you can go for this keyword.
NOW WE KNOW ABOUT KEYWORDS AND KEYWORD RESEARCH. BUT HOW TO FIND THE BEST ONE?
Rules & Procedures of Keyword Research
There are two ways to research keywords and find the best one.
- Manual using google search & Brain(less effective but free & easy)
- Using Keyword Research tools (a few free and mostly premium/paid)
Let's Talk about the manual way first. This is very good if you are someone who just came to know about keyword research.
Manual using Google Search
Feeling bored? Have a cup of coffee and sit strong. The most important part is starting now. Well, I assume you are a new blogger and started your career recently. Unfortunately, you don't have money or you don't want to invest in blogging now.
Then This method is for you to get started with blogging for free. It is simple and free but that doesn't mean that it's not effective. if you can analyze it properly this will save you 100 dollars.
How manual keyword research is done. Simply by searching in google, as you do regularly. I will show you a very interesting experiment that I did with manual research. Which people do with premium keyword finder tools.
Let's say you have planned to create a movie download website. Now, what keyword can give you most of the traffic? You are a guy who just knows what a keyword is and how it works. And you know nothing except that. What you will do now if I tell you to find one keyword for your site. Okay let me tell you,
"Movie Download Website"
"Latest movie download website"
"free movie download website"
"free movie download 2020" - this one is good but not specific
"Bollywood movie download" - seems good, more specific but think you are targeting only the Indian sub-continent ( maybe 200 crore people)
"English Movie" - targeting at least 400 crore people, good but very short keyword.
"English Movie 2020" - Great but don't specify your niche. Whether you are a moviemaker or content provider is not specified.
"English Movie 2020 free download" - Perfect !!!
Now search for this keyword in Google and let's see what happens.
See how google shows results for this. Confusing? Not at all. Let me explain.
2.5 Billion results with this keyword !!! Don't panic. Our target is clear so let's analyze.
1st & 3rd result: It's a movie download site. See the title I have highlighted a few parts that are matching with the words of our search keyword. See the link/URL, some parts are matching here as well. now see meta description. 3 words, "download" "movies" and "free" are matching.
Now you got an idea of how to do keyword research manually. At this moment you need to analyze these top 3 websites as I said earlier. Simply read their article and find out that can you write a better article than them? If yes, this is your keyword, and start working.
After getting the keywords, you need to check some basic things. let's list those below
- Check how many words they have written (you must write bigger than that)
- Generally, 2500+ words are enough but need to be sure more than this is not available
- Check how many images they have used
- Check how many headings they have used
- Check how many times the primary keyword they have used in the article body.
- Check if anything they have missed ( note that and must include it in your article)
These are the on-page SEO rules. Remember your article must be better than those. One thing you need to remember in blogging is, "Content is King". Whatever research you do, if your content is not satisfying people will come but will exit as well and never gonna come back. That will create a bad effect on your search ranking. Because Google tracks how people behave with your site.
So far this is easy but I said less effective. Do you know why? Because you still don't know how popular those top 3 websites are. This is also a ranking factor. If the top 3 website is very popular means they have already gained lots of traffic and trust. Beating them is very difficult.
So what you can do now? You need to know the authority value of those websites. There are websites to check domain authority but that is time-consuming. Here comes the magic of keyword research tools.
Let's see how keyword research is easy with keyword research tools?
Using Keyword Research tools
In order to find out the most frequently searched questions, topics, or keywords which is profitable and popular in Google search, we need to use some "Keyword research tools".
There are many good tools like this. However, most are paid tools and you have to pay a lot of money to use them. There are free tools as well. I will discuss both because if you have money to use the premium one, I will suggest you do that as they are delivering accurate results most of the time.
But the main factor is using free or paid tools whatever it is will save your time by providing a lot of data about your competitors for specific keywords within seconds. Which is difficult to find manually. Sometimes all those data are not possible to find without tools.
Paid Keyword Research Tools
- Ahrefs.com
These three are the best keyword research tools that many bloggers or website owners use to find profitable keywords. I am discussing Ahrefs, others are almost similar.
Ahrefs: Undoubtedly the best keyword finder and backlink checker. You can find keywords, check the authority of any website, and most importantly you can find your competitor's traffic source. From where they are creating backlinks and all these.
Okay, so Ahrefs is something that will give you a complete idea about keywords and what need to do to rank between 1-10 using your targeted keywords. Let's say you want to write about "SEO Audit". Let's see in Ahrefs pictures.
See, the "SEO Audit" keyword has 4.3K monthly search volume means 4.3 thousand people search with this keyword monthly. Among them 63% click and visit websites from the search results. 1.5 is the return rate, which means if 10 people click on your site 5 of them will return.. Which is great.
Now the important part. How to get ranked on google's 1st page with this keyword. See the lower part of the picture that you need backlinks from 134 sites to get ranked.
This implies that, if you write one article on "SEO Audit" and Post your links on 134 websites through a comment or guest posting then you might rank. Isn't that great?
To rank your article, every piece of information you need will be provided by Ahrefs. Even you can find how many websites ranked high with these keywords and how many backlinks they have created.
This is great. If you find the list of backlinks of your competitor sites then you know you also can get backlinks from those sites if your article is better. In this way creating backlinks will be easier as well.
See how keyword research tools help and save time in keyword research. But what if you don't have money to buy tools. There are free tools as well. They will not provide you with this much data for free but at least it's better than manual research.
Free Keyword Research Tools
To find profitable keyword ideas for my blog article I use the following 4 processes.
Through these 4 I do keyword research for free, find profitable keywords, topics, or article topics for each article in my blog, and also understand how popular a keyword/topic is in Google search.
Google keyword planner tool
Using this free tool from Google, I also find keywords.
As you can see in the picture above, when I type a keyword or key phrase in the search box of the Google keyword planner tool, the tool shows me how many times a word or phrase is searched on Google.
In addition to showing you the number of months of keywords you searched for, the keyword "shows how low or high the competition is."
You can research English as well as Bengali keywords, Hindi keywords and other language keywords through this tool.
Using this tool, it is possible to know the location, language as well as the amount of keyword demand in a month or time.
Moreover, there is one more component to this tool.
Shows all the other keywords related to the word or sentence you searched for and the amount of their search on Google. In it, you can add more profitable keywords associated with the targeted keywords to your content.
Again, you'll continue to get useful keyword ideas for writing new articles in the future. The Google keyword planner tool is a free service from Google.
So, to use this tool, you will need a Google account. In this dashboard, go to the "Discover new keyword ideas" option.
Then, you should type in the keyword you want to research and click on the "Get results" option below.
Ubersuggest tool
After Google's Keyword Planner Tool I suggest using the "Ubersuggest tool".
Sometimes this is better but you can search only 3 keywords per day in the free version.
As you can see above, after I searched "how to start a blog", the tool showed me that the keyword was searched on Google 60,500 times a month.
Moreover, with the SEO Difficulty Score, you can also understand how easy it is to get traffic using keywords. It is actually a competitive rate of this keyword.
Remember, the lower the SEO difficulty score (lower the 20), the easier it will be to rank an article in Google with that keyword.
This is how you can take advantage of keyword research from free keyword research tools.
Our Opinion
This is already a very long article and I know you are tired of reading. But I wish you have learned each and every aspect of keyword research in SEO and now you can start blogging with a different approach.
If you have time I will suggest you use both keyword research methods like manual and tools. Because if you analyze a keyword in both ways then it will be beneficial for you in the long run.
Get a good keyword from the tools first and then check that manually in Google. I hope you will get the best one.
No more for today. Take care and stay tuned with Inforevz.