how to do keyword research with google

How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide

Published: April 04, 2024

While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin' out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.

In this post, we’ll define what keyword research is, why it’s important, how to conduct your research for your SEO strategy, and choose the right keywords for your website.

Table of Contents

What is keyword research?

Why is keyword research important, elements of keyword research, how to research keywords for your seo strategy, how to find and choose keywords for your website.

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

Keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.

Insights from these actual search terms can help inform your content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.

People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online.

So if your content is successful in getting in front of your audience as they conduct searches, you stand to gain more traffic. Therefore, you should be targeting those searches with content that features those keywords in a meaningful way.

Additionally, inbound methodology focuses less on creating content around what we want to tell people. Instead, we should be creating content around what people want to discover.

In other words, our audience is coming to us for helpful content that provides the answers they’re looking for.

In a nutshell, all of this starts with keyword research.

Conducting keyword research has many benefits, the most popular being:

Marketing Trend Insight

Conducting effective keyword research can provide you with insights into current marketing trends and help you center your content on relevant topics and keywords your audience is in search of.

Traffic Growth

When you identify the best-fitting keywords for the content you publish, the higher you’ll rank in search engine results — the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.

Customer Acquisition

If your business has content that other business professionals are looking for, you can meet their needs and provide them with a call-to-action that will lead them into the buyer journey from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.

Keywords vs. Topics

More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years and how seemingly unimportant keywords have transformed our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.

And to some extent, this is true, but in the eyes of an SEO professional, it’s a different approach. Rather, it’s the intent behind that keyword and whether or not a piece of content solves for that intent (we’ll talk more about intent in just a minute).

But that doesn’t mean keyword research is an outdated process. Let me explain:

Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience.

The operative term here is topics, plural. By researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics or buckets that you want to create content on.

Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.

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There are three main elements I have discovered that you should pay attention to when conducting keyword research.

1. Relevance

Google ranks content for relevance.

This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers’ needs.

In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?

2. Authority

Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative.

That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, informative content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks.

If you’re not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword’s SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can’t compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional.

You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. It's like setting up a shop in a ghost town.

Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.

• Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
• Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
• Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze accordingly.
• Research related search terms.
• Use keyword research tools to your advantage.

I’m going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting.

That way, you’ll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about.

Step 1. Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.

To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets.

You’ll come up with about five to 10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you’ll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.

If you’re a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they’re the topics that come up the most in sales conversations.

Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas . What types of topics would your target audience search that you’d want your business to get found for?

Drill down into your website’s traffic sources, and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site.

Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have.

Remember, if you’re having trouble coming up with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues — those who are in sales or service. Ask them what types of terms their prospects or customers have questions about.

Those are often great starting points for keyword research.

Here at HubSpot, we use the Search Insights Report in this part of the process. This template is designed to help you do the same and bucket your keywords into topic clusters, analyze MSV, and inform your editorial calendar and strategy.

Featured Resource: Search Insights Report Template

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Step 3. Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze accordingly.

Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google.

Today, it’s more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. So, how does this affect the keyword research you do?

It’s easy to take keywords at face value, but unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface.

Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra careful about how you interpret the keywords you target.

Let’s say, for example, you’re researching the keyword “how to start a blog” for an article you want to create. “Blog” can mean a blog post or the blog website itself, and what a searcher’s intent is behind that keyword will influence the direction of your article.

Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post? Or do they want to know how to actually launch a website domain for the purposes of blogging?

If your content strategy is only targeting people interested in the latter, you’ll need to make sure of the keyword’s intent before committing to it.

To verify what a user’s intent is in a keyword, it’s a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself and see what types of results come up.

Make sure the type of content Google is displaying relates to your intention for the keyword.

Step 4. Research related search terms.

This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it’s a great way to fill out those lists.

If you’re struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google.

When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input.

These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.

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Keyword Research: An In-Depth Beginner’s Guide

Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization. This guide covers what it is and how you should do keyword research.

Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization, and without it, you cannot expect to create sustainable and repeatable visibility.

Today, SEO is a much wider discipline than in the early days of the industry and has been segmented into many verticals.

But, at the core, SEO is about finding opportunities online and capturing relevant traffic to a website through visibility in search engines. Keyword research is at the heart of that SEO strategy.

This guide explains what keyword research is, why it’s important, and how you can make a start for a successful SEO strategy.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a process of finding words, queries, and phrases that users are searching for, which means a keyword that has search volume.

Research involves connecting the relevance of keywords to a website and its individual pages so that the user can find the best page to answer their query, known as search intent.

Keyword research also involves categorizing search queries into the different stages of a user journey and different categories of search, such as transactional, navigational, and informational.

Good keyword research enables users to find what they need:

• Shoppers who want to buy something can find the right product page.
• A user that wants to know ‘how to’ can find a page that explains a process in-depth.
• Users who want to research a person or brand can find out about that entity.

Keyword research should also carefully consider if ranking on a keyword is worth the effort it would take to rank highly and get visitors. Not all traffic is equal.

Download the ebook, How To Do Keyword Research For SEO .

Why Keyword Research Is Important For SEO

A search engine is an information retrieval system built around the queries that a user inputs to find an answer or relevant information to their search query.

The predominant focus of Google is to connect a user with the best answer to their query and the best website page so that a user is satisfied. Understanding this underlines SEO.

Good keyword research is the foundation of how a business can connect with its potential customers and audience. Understanding this helps to understand a good SEO strategy.

A business strategy starts with understanding its audience and their needs.

• What do they want?
• What do they need?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• What could solve their problem?

Keyword research is an extension of understanding your audience by first considering their needs and then the phrases, keywords, or queries they use to find solutions.

Keyword research is also important for SEO because it can show you where the opportunities are by knowing what your audience is searching for.

This will help you to find new areas of business and to prioritize where to focus attention and resources.

Keyword research will also help you to calculate where you can expect a return on investment to justify your efforts:

• Can a keyword deliver relevant traffic that has the possibility to convert to an end goal?
• What is an estimation of that traffic, and how much is each visitor worth to your business?

Basically, keyword research is the ultimate business research tool.

Read more: Why Keywords Are Still So Very Important For SEO

Keyword Research Basics

Monthly search volume.

Monthly Search Volume (MSV) is a predominant measure of keyword value. It’s a useful metric as a starting point to consider if anyone is searching for that keyword, but it shouldn’t be used in isolation or as the only measure of value.

Just because a keyword has a high MSV doesn’t mean it is the right keyword for you to rank on.

High-volume keywords generally deliver ‘browsing’ traffic at the top of the funnel. They are useful for brand awareness but not for direct conversion.

Low-volume keywords can be much more valuable because they can deliver users who are ready to buy a product.

Read more: A Complete Guide To Keyword Search Volume For SEO

User Intent

User intent refers to what type of result they want to see when they search for a query – the intention of their search.

You will hear user intent talked about a lot in keyword research, as it is one of the most important factors in the process.

User intent is important in two ways, firstly because your primary aim in creating content and pages on a website are to provide a user with information that they want to know.

There’s no point in creating a page about what you care about – your user only cares about their problems and needs.

You can have the best page in the world about the history of cupcakes, but if a user searching for [cupcake] wants a recipe for cupcakes, then they will not click on your link.

Secondly, Google considers relevance when serving results pages (as we said above, they want to deliver the best result for a query). So, the better your page fits user intent, the better it might rank.

Read more: How People Search: Understanding User Intent

When Google considers which pages it will show in search results, the algorithm will look at other pages that users are clicking on for that query.

If we have a query such as [cupcake], Google has to consider if a user wants to know what a cupcake is, how to make a cupcake, or wants to buy a cupcake.

By looking at a search result page, you can get a good idea of user intent from the other results.

Reviewing the search results page of a query should be part of your research process for every keyword you want to consider.

Keyword relevance and user intent are much the same things. It’s about knowing what the user really means when they search. This is more ambiguous for head keywords and less so for long-tail queries.

Long-Tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are called long-tail because they fall to the right of the search demand curve – where the graph looks like a long tail stretching to the right.

The search demand curve is a graph that shows keywords with high volume to the left and lower search volumes to the right.

Longer queries that are more focused fall to the right. Head terms with broad meaning and high volume fall to the left.

The value of long-tail keywords is that they are usually highly focused terms that convert well, as users are actively looking for something very specific.

For example, [iPhone 13] is a head term with high volume (2.7 million MSV), and [Best affordable iPhone 13 cases] (210 MSV) is a long-tail keyword with far fewer searches but would have a high conversion rate.

Long-tail keywords are useful to include in a keyword strategy because they are usually much easier to rank for and achievable for a new website, and the cumulative volume of many long-tail keywords adds up to considerable targeted traffic.

This is a much more stable strategy than focusing on one high-volume ambiguous keyword.

Read more: Long-Tail Keyword Strategy: Why & How To Target Intent For SEO

Types Of Search Query

There are four types of keywords that are useful to understand as they categorize the different user intents and can help when planning a keyword strategy.

• Informational – users looking for information or an answer to a question (top of the funnel).
• Navigational – users wanting to find a specific brand, site, or page (brand searches).
• Commercial – users researching brands, products, or services (middle of the funnel).
• Transactional – users ready to complete a purchase or action (bottom of the funnel).

Local keywords can also be considered another category.

How To Do Keyword Research

Now that you have a better understanding of the basics of keyword research, we can look at where you would start with your research and keyword strategy.

1. How To Find Keyword Ideas

The first stage of keyword research is to brainstorm ideas for seed keywords, and there are several ways to do this.

Your Target Audience

Everything starts with your audience and what they want. Think about their needs, wants, and especially their pain points and problems.

Start to compile your wide list of words, ideas, and topics that surround your niche or business.

Think About Questions

Question-based keyword queries are valuable as they can help you to capture featured snippets and can be a way to jump rank on highly competitive keywords.

Ask your sales team and review CRM data to find the questions that your audience is asking.

Also, think of question modifiers that will start to build out your list:

• What [is a road bike].
• How to [ride a road bike].
• When is [the best time to service a road bike].
• What is [the best road bike].
• Where is [road bike shop].

Current Site Queries

If your site already has some online history, then Google Search Console can tell you what Google thinks your website is relevant for. This is insightful to tell you if your site is conveying the right message and to find opportunities.

If Google is showing a lot of queries that have nothing to do with your product or brand, then you need to apply more keyword focus to your pages.

Look for queries that are position 10 or greater, have reasonable impressions, and you think are relevant to your business.

These are potential quick-win opportunities that you can capture by making improvements and optimizing pages for the query.

Read more: A Complete Google Search Console Guide For SEO Pros

Competitors’ Keywords

Your competitors are a gold mine of information because they might already have invested in extensive research.

A business should be constantly monitoring its competitors anyway, so keep an eye on what content they are producing and the terms they target.

A keyword gap analysis will help you find opportunities your competitors are targeting that you might not have considered.

Read more: Competitor Keyword Analysis: 5 Ways To Fill The Gaps In Your Organic Strategy & Get More Traffic

Seed Keywords

Start with high-level ‘seed’ keywords that you can use as a starting point to then open up variants and related queries.

Seed keywords are ‘big’ head terms such as [iPhone], [trainers], [road bike], or [cupcake].

For each seed keyword, start to think of topics that are related:

• Road bike maintenance.
• Road bike training.
• Road bike clothing.
• Road bike lights.

Also, use question modifiers and buying modifiers such as:

• Best [road bike].
• Buy [road bike].
• Price [for women’s road bike].
• [road bikes for hire] near me.
• Reviews [of road bikes under $1,000].

When you have finished this process, you should have a raw list of potential keywords grouped in topics – such as maintenance, clothing, training, etc.

2. How To Analyze Keywords

Once you have your raw list, it’s time to start to analyze and sort by value and opportunity.

Search Volume

Search volume will tell you if anyone is actively searching for this term.

For a first-stage strategy, you should aim for keywords with a mid-range and long-tail volume for quick wins and then build up to approach more competitive terms with higher volumes.

Head keywords with super high volumes (like ‘iPhone’) are not the best keywords to focus on as they can be too ambiguous and rarely have a specific intent.

Also, the amount of work that is needed to rank can be too high a barrier for entry unless you have an established domain of significant authority.

If a tool shows a keyword with zero search volume, this doesn’t always mean you should discard the term.

If the keyword is shown in the tool, then there can be value to consider targeting it in your strategy. However, make sure you know your audience and what is relevant to them before you invest resources in a zero-volume keyword.

Read more: Why You Should Target Zero Search Volume Keywords

Search Intent

After you have sorted your raw lists by search volumes, it’s then time to review the intent for each keyword that you would like to target.

The SERP will tell you everything that you need to know, and you should always review SERPs for clues on how to construct content and rank.

Look at the other listing that rank highly:

• Are they ‘how-to’ guides that indicate it’s informational?
• Do the titles say ‘buy,’ ‘best,’ or include product names?
• Is there a shopping carousel that indicates a buying keyword?
• Is there a location map that indicates it’s a local search?

Tag each keyword type and then consider which are the strongest keywords from each group.

You can also use a research tool that will tell you the type of keyword.

Topic Clusters

Grouping keywords into topic clusters is an advanced keyword strategy that can help to strengthen the topic authority of a site.

To do this, you would start with a high-volume head keyword and then research a series of keywords that supports that head term.

After creating pages of content that target each keyword, you use internal linking to connect pages with the same topic.

Read more: Keyword Clusters: How To Level Up Your SEO Content Strategy

3. How To Choose Organic Keywords

After sorting the volumes, intent, and topics, you will need to decide if you have a chance of ranking on a term by looking at how much competition there is for each keyword.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is one of the most important keyword metrics when doing your research.

If a keyword is so competitive that you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to rank, then you need to get strategic.

The easiest way to calculate keyword difficulty is to use a research tool that gives a score for each keyword.

Or, you can refer to Google Keyword Planner Tool and look at the CPC and level of difficulty. The higher the CPC bid, the higher the competition.

If you are starting out, first approach the lower competition keywords that are achievable and then build your way up to more competitive terms.

Read more: Why Keyword Research Is Useful For SEO & How To Rank

Connecting To Your Objectives And Goals

Unless a keyword can actually deliver a result for you – do you want to target it?

As we said above, targeting head terms is not the best strategy as they will, at best, deliver browsing or drive-by visitors. Unless you are a big brand with a big budget that is aiming for brand awareness, this is not the best application of your resources and budget.

Choosing your keyword priority should start with what can give you the best return in the shortest time frame.

Good keyword research is not just about trying to target a high-volume popular keyword. A good keyword strategy is about finding the right keywords for your needs and outcome. Always keep that front and center.

Read more: How To Calculate ROI For SEO When Targeting A Set Of Keywords

Watch John Mueller talk about ranking for head keywords in this video from the 38:55 minute mark.

Using Keyword Research Tools

Doing your research without a tool is limited; for the most in-depth keyword research, you need help to find keyword opportunities you had not thought of.

The following keyword research tools are all free versions that you can start out with.

Google Keyword Planner

The original keyword tool has evolved over the years, but it still remains one of the best free keyword tools and a good starting point to find seed keywords and keyword ideas.

The Google tool is aligned with Google Ads, so the data is skewed towards paid ads but is still valuable for research.

You need a Google Ads account to access the tool. Google will try to force you to set up an active campaign, but you can access the account by setting up an account without a campaign.

Without a campaign running, you will only get limited search volumes displayed in ranges, but the tool is still useful for its suggestions of keyword ideas. If you have an active campaign, Google will show you the monthly search volume.

You can add up to 10 seed keywords and get a list of suggested keywords, and run competitor URLs in the tool to find keywords they are targeting. Doing this is a great place to start building out raw lists of keywords to work from.

Read more: How To Use Google Keyword Planner

Read more: 9 Creative Ways To Use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool

Google Trends

Google Trends offers data based on actual search query data. It doesn’t provide search volumes, but the data in Google trends can be compared with actual search volumes from other tools so you can get a comparative feel of what the actual volumes are.

Where Trends excels is to identify trending topics and subtopics in a niche and to find geographic search trends in a local area. Trends will recommend related keywords that are currently growing in popularity.

As part of a keyword strategy, this can show you where to focus resources and when to stop investing in terms.

Read more: How To Use Google Trends For SEO

Google Autocomplete

Previously known as Suggest, Autocomplete is integrated into the Google search box to help users complete their search with what Google calls ‘predictions.’

Google takes its predictions from common searches and trending searches.

As the suggestions are all variations around the topic you are typing, the results shown give you an insight into other related terms that users could be looking for.

Checking the predictions that Google provides in Autocomplete can help you find more variations and keywords to consider.

Read more: Google Autocomplete: A Complete SEO Guide

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a powerful tool that scrapes data from Google Autocomplete and connects a seed keyword with a variety of modifiers to produce a list of variants.

Answer The Public will quickly provide a list of suggestions, especially based on questions that you can use as a raw list to then review.

Read more: More Free Keyword Research Tools

Paid Keyword Research Tools

Free keyword tools are great to get you started and to create raw lists of keywords that you can then drill into.

However, for the best results, you might want to invest in a paid competitive analysis tool that can help you get monthly search volume and keyword difficulty data.

Some tools will also help with assigning topics and clustering for more advanced keyword strategies.

Anyone who does keyword research in-depth or to an advanced level will have their own process. They will also use a variety of tools and a combination of paid and free resources to get the best results.

Read more: Best Keyword Research Tools

Advanced Keyword Strategies

Now that you have an understanding of how to get started with keyword research, experiment with a few different websites and niches. Doing the work yourself is the best way to learn.

Once you have a better understanding in practice, move into more advanced methods and strategies to take your keyword research to the next level.

Advanced Keyword Research

• B2B Keyword Research Done Right With Practical Examples
• Keyword Clusters: How To Level Up Your SEO Content Strategy
• Building A Keyword Strategy For Comparison Content

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Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide

Keyword research is an essential part of your SEO strategy. It’s the first step in the SEO copywriting process. Before you create your site’s content, you should find out what search terms your audience uses. Their search terms are your keywords. Based on these keywords, you can start writing useful, high-quality, and findable content. In this post, we’ll take you through the steps involved in keyword research.

Table of contents

What is keyword research, originality versus findability, a video on keyword research, focus keyword, long-tail keywords, keyword strategy, search intent, how to do keyword research in 10 steps, quick keyword research, prioritize your keyword list, a focus keyphrase and its synonyms only need one page, add related keyphrases to help google understand your text, check out results for singular and plural keywords, use a keyphrase only once, ready start writing.

Are you looking for a guide to keyword research for ecommerce? You can find more information tailored to your needs in this post about keyword research for online stores .

Keyword research is part of SEO (search engine optimization). It’s the work someone does to come up with an extensive list of keywords they would like a website to rank for. To obtain such a list, website owners need to dig into their desired audience and search engines. What search terms do people type into Google when looking for a particular product, service, business or type of organization? And what do they expect to find? With this list, website owners can create content that will attract more high-quality traffic to their site. Keyword research is never finished: repeating it regularly is essential to staying up-to-date!

Read more: What is keyword research? »

Why is keyword research important?

Proper keyword research is important because it makes clear what search terms your audience uses. At Yoast, we frequently come across business owners who use one set of words to describe their products, while their target audience uses a completely different set of words! As a result, potential customers can’t find those websites. In other words: there’s a mismatch.

To avoid this mismatch, you should do thorough keyword research. This research will make sure that you use the same words as your target audience. In addition, you should also consider your audience’s search intent . This will help you figure out what exactly your audience is looking for. All that’s left is for you to write high-quality content that answers your audience’s questions!

What about originality? Isn’t it better to stand out from the crowd and use different keywords than your competitors? Let’s say you (or your marketing department) decides to give a product an uncommon name. This can be a smart marketing decision, because people could remember your product more easily. If you rent out vacation cottages instead of vacation homes, for example, you might stand out more.

But beware: very few people search for [vacation cottages]. So if you optimize your text for cottages , you’ll probably rank well on that specific term. However, because your audience uses a different word, you won’t generate a lot of traffic, and you won’t reach a large part of your potential customers.

In this video, Michiel tells us more about keyword research and how we think it should be done. It’s part of our SEO for beginner’s course , available through our Yoast SEO Academy subscription :

Essential concepts of keyword research

Before we jump to doing keyword research , we’ll briefly explain some of its essential concepts.

A focus keyword or keyphrase is the word or phrase you want a certain page on your site to be found for in Google. You determine your set of focus keyphrases by doing keyword research.

Long-tail keywords are more specific and less commonly searched for than head keywords. They focus on a niche. The longer and more specific search terms are, the easier it will be to rank for them. Why? Because there will be less competition.

However, long-tail keywords are still worth ranking for! Because even though less people are searching for them, they might be more motivated to buy, subscribe, sign up, etc.

Your keyword strategy is about the decisions you make based on your keyword research. For instance, what content are you going to create first? Will you focus on the head or tail? How and where will you publish it? Will you create a piece of writing, a post or a product page, a video tutorial or an infographic?

Digging into search intent is key here: you have to discover what a searcher actually wants or needs. You’re not just looking at keywords. You’re also looking at the underlying goals of what a searcher wants to know, do or buy. Your content should provide a solution to the searcher’s “problem”. This is also known as content design .

There are 10 crucial steps to follow when carrying out keyword research. We’ll guide you through the process, and give you practical tips so you can conduct your own keyword research:

Before you start, think about your mission . Reflect on questions such as: What is the main goal of your business or organization? What makes it special? Who exactly are you trying to reach? And, what promises do you make on your website? Take your time and literally write down your mission. Once you’re able to answer these questions in detail, you’ll have taken the first and most important step in developing your keyword strategy. What if you’re in a competitive market? The market you’re in determines whether you’ll be able to rank high with your chosen keywords. Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. It’ll be hard to compete with these companies, because they have huge budgets for marketing in general and SEO in particular. If you’re launching into a competitive market, your best bet is to start out small. Once you ‘own’ a small part of that niche and become a bigger name in your business area, you could try to level up and sell your cruises to a larger (more general) audience. Your mission will then become more general as well. The scope of your business mission should align with your SEO goals, too. Be realistic about what kind of rankings you can achieve with the size of your business, and focus on what will help you achieve your mission. An example Let’s say you sell cruises to Hawaii. You offer great facilities for children, which makes your cruises especially suitable for parents with younger kids. If there are no other family-friendly cruises to Hawaii, you will stand out from the crowd. It will make your service unique. So it would be smart to make this your mission, your niche – because this is what you have to offer your audience.

Based on the data you’ve collected now, you can determine a keyword strategy . If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have a spreadsheet with a substantial amount of keyphrases, plus information about the competition and the search intent of your audience for those keyphrases. Now think about this question: How does my website hold up compared to the websites in the SERPs? Are you of equal size and marketing budget? Then go ahead and focus on those head terms. If not: try more long-tail keywords first. Focusing on a whole bunch of long-tail keywords combined could very well attract a lot of traffic. Once you’ve managed to rank for those long-tail keywords, aiming for more head terms will become easier. When you’ve decided where to jump in, think about the type of content: What was the search intent for my keyphrases? What is my audience looking for? But also, which content can I create that isn’t there yet, and how can I stand out in terms of quality or providing solutions? This will help you decide on the type of content you’re going to create .

In theory, this step is out of the scope of keyword research itself. Nevertheless, creating awesome landing pages is essential if you want to get traffic to your website. So, you’ll need to build optimized landing pages for your search terms. You don’t have to create all these pages immediately – it can be a long-term effort. Your keyword strategy will help you prioritize. Cornerstone content For your most important keyphrases you’ll create cornerstone content articles ; articles that provide the best possible content about that keyword – authoritative and all-encompassing. All your supporting long-tail articles should link to your cornerstone content pages. This is part of your internal linking strategy , which Yoast SEO Premium can help you implement . You can also use our SEO workout: the Cornerstone content approach to build a strong internal linking strategy in a few easy steps.

Once you’ve done a thorough analysis of your chances to rank on each specific term, published some amazing articles (and optimized them accordingly), you should wait a little. Check out your rankings. Does your article pop up? Did it hit the first page of Google’s SERPs? Or is it hidden away on page 2 or 3? Make sure to evaluate your results in the SERPs. There are various ways to check how your content is performing in the search results. The simplest way is to Google the terms you’ve optimized your articles for. Another option is to use Google Search Console to find out which queries you’re ranking for . While the Google Search Console method is a bit more complicated, it can be a great way to find new opportunities! And finally, a third method is to use a keyword tracking tool to monitor your rankings ; you can do this easily using the integrated Wincher features in the Yoast SEO plugin. However you do it, it’s always a good idea to check if your efforts are paying off. If you’re not able to rank on the first page, try to write another article, focused on an (even) more long-tail keyword. Make it a little bit more specific, more niche. And see how that goes. Evaluate again. Continue this process until you hit that first page of the SERPs!

As time goes on, things will change. Your audience may start using different words to search for what they want, so you might need to add new keywords to your sheet. And with the rise of generative AI , the competitive landscape is bound to change, either making it easier or harder to target particular keywords. Who knows? Blogging might not be relevant anymore. When you look at the situation from year to year, a lot can change. That’s why it’s important to reevaluate and refresh your keyword research once in a while. Take the time to update your sheet with the latest information. And don’t forget to keep your content fresh and up-to-date , too!

In an ideal world, you would do your keyword research, make a beautiful spreadsheet and create landing pages for each one. Your site structure would be flawless, and you’d blog and write every day, making your site rank higher and higher in Google. But we live in the real world.

Of course, your keyword research will not always be as extensive. And some posts or articles aren’t written as part of an awesome strategy, but just because the topic was in the news or something inspired you to write it . That’s just how these things work. But this doesn’t have to be a problem.

If you’re writing something that doesn’t exactly fit your strategy, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make that content rank. You could still use it to rank for something related to the terms in the list of your keyword strategy. Use the tools mentioned in step 3 and Google Trends to quickly check which keyword you’d like to rank for. At least, take some time to think about how to make your article or blog fit your strategy. After all, if you are writing valuable content, you might as well make it rank! You can find more tips on how to do keyword research on the fly in our focus keyword article .

Tips for keyword research

This all might sound pretty straight-forward, but we know it’s a lot of work and easier said than done. When put into practice, you might bump into some common issues or questions. Here we’ll give you some tips to make it work!

Pro-tip: Want us to guide you through keyword research step-by-step? With videos, quizzes and other training material? Take a look at our keyword research training in Yoast SEO academy and let us help you!

How many keywords should you target? Well, we can’t tell you the exact number of keywords you should have, but we can tell you that you need a lot of them – as many as you can think of. However, more than 1000 keywords is probably too many! Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords.

But there’s no need to create pages for all of these straight away. You can add content bit by bit. Think about which keywords you want to rank for now (perhaps the more long-tail ones?) and which ones aren’t as important right away. Understand your priorities and plan the creation of your content.

Keep reading: Managing a growing blog: content planning »

In the past, each of the keywords you wanted to be found for got its own landing page. Today, however, search engines are so smart that they mostly use search intent to give searchers the best answer to their questions. The page that answers those questions best will rank on top. Search engines also understand subtle differences between keywords, so you don’t have to create landing pages for every subtle variation of a keyword, like synonyms.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use synonyms! In fact, synonyms can really improve the readability of your copy, so make sure to use them. Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin can help you with this; it allows you to optimize your content for synonyms and related keyphrases . You can fill in synonyms of your keyphrase under the SEO analysis tab in your Yoast SEO sidebar. If you want to fill in more than one, you can separate them by commas. When it comes to adding related keyphrases to your text, we have an awesome feature you will want to know more about. So let’s discuss that next!

Glossary of terms

In the following paragraphs, we use a few words that you might not be familiar yet. Such as related keyphrases, word forms and exact focus keyphrase. Don’t worry! We wrote a glossary of terms that can help you out when you’re not quite sure what we mean when we use a specific term.

Related keyphrases are words and concepts that deepen and broaden the understanding of your focus keyphrase. They even help Google better understand the topic you’re talking about . By using related keyphrases in your text, you can paint a complete picture of your focus keyphrase in the article you’re writing.

How do you find related keyphrases?

You might be able to think of a few related keyphrases, but we think using proper keyword data is the safest bet. That’s why we have a Semrush integration in Yoast SEO. It suggests related keyphrases and even shows you the search volume and trend for every keyphrase. As Semrush is one of the leading SEO and marketing software companies in the world, this will help you find the right related keyphrases for your content.

You can find this feature in the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box. Simply go to the ‘Get related keyphrases’ button underneath the ‘Focus keyphrase’ field and click it. The first time you click this, you will need to connect your Semrush account or create an account and authorize Yoast SEO to use it. After you’ve connected your account, you will be able to click the ‘Get related keyphrases’ button and find related keyphrases right away:

The related keyphrase feature is available for free, but if you use Premium you can also use those related keyphrases to optimize your content with the related keyphrase feature . This feature allows you to add related keyphrases or synonyms to a field in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. That way you can easily optimize your content for multiple keyphrases and synonyms. If you want to know more about this integration, we have an article on how to use the Semrush related keyphrase feature .

Should you aim for the singular or the plural keyword? Well, this depends on the query. As Google learns more about the search intent of your query, it is able to better guess what you’re looking for. For instance, if you search for book , you get different results than if you search for books . Apparently Google thinks that in the first case you’re looking for a definition, in the second case it believes you’re intending to buy a book. So make sure you know what you offer on your page and that it fits with the query and results Google gives on that query.

Yoast SEO Premium has word form support , so it automatically detects all the different forms of your focus keyphrase (known as keyword stemming ). So, you no longer have to optimize your post for a specific word form. Optimizing your post has become a much more natural process. However, there are reasons why you’d still want to optimize for a very specific word form of a keyword. In this case, you can put your focus keyphrase in quotes: “best books ever”. Yoast SEO will now only take that exact focus keyphrase into account when checking your content.

Beware, you shouldn’t use your exact focus keyword more than once . If you do, your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization . Google has a hard time distinguishing between content that’s very alike. Therefore it might rank very similar posts or pages lower.

Not sure if you used a focus keyphrase before? The post why and how to export your focus keyphrases with Yoast SEO Premium will help you get an overview of the focus keyphrases you’ve used before and on what page. Also, Yoast SEO gives you a warning in the SEO analysis if you use one twice.

Did you find out you’ve already used the same or very similar keywords or keyphrases on various posts and pages? Then, it probably makes sense to audit your content and perhaps merge/delete/redirect some of it. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to solve keyword cannibalization issues .

Keyword research should be the start of any sustainable SEO strategy . The result will be a long list of keywords for which you’d like to be found. But the hardest part is still ahead: writing all that content. You should write articles and blog posts on every single keyword you would like to be found for. That’s quite a challenge. Check out our ultimate guide to SEO copywriting to get started!

Read on: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

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Camille is a content specialist at Yoast. As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO.

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8 responses to keyword research for seo: the ultimate guide.

Wow, this ultimate guide on keyword research is incredibly detailed! As a blogger, I know how crucial it is to target the right keywords for SEO, and this article has provided me with a wealth of information and strategies to improve my keyword game.

The step-by-step process of conducting keyword research is well-explained and easy to follow. I’ve always struggled a bit with finding the best keywords, but now I feel more confident in selecting the ones that will boost my website’s visibility.

I appreciated the explanation of long-tail keywords and their importance. It’s fascinating how these less competitive keywords can drive highly targeted traffic. Any tips on how to use long-tail keywords effectively in blog content?

The section on understanding keyword intent was an eye-opener. I never realized how crucial it is to align my content with what the audience is actually searching for. I’ll definitely be implementing this in my content strategy.

I noticed that the article focuses mainly on keyword research for written content. How can I apply these techniques to optimize my video content for better search rankings?

It would be great to see some real-life examples of successful keyword research implementations. Case studies or before-and-after scenarios would be incredibly beneficial to understand the practical application.

Hi there! Thank you for your comment :)

We actually have an article on how to do keyword research for YouTube which can help you figure out what keywords to use for your videos! If that’s not quite what you’re looking for, I can also recommend our article on video SEO in general. Good luck!

Clear and detailed information, thanks for sharing.

You’re welcome and thank you for your comment! :)

What an excellent analysis you have done on research. Your research is very good and it was an excellent guideline. Best recharge tools ever in your research.

Thank you very much, glad you found it helpful :)

This is a nice article on keyword research. I find it very useful. To my experience Ahref has the best keyword research tool ever. But of course there are many other useful tools available as well.

Thank you for your comment, Ehsan! Good to hear that it’s helpful, lots of luck with your keyword research :)

• Keyword Tool Pro
• Keyword Tool API

Keyword Research: The Complete Guide to Find the Best Keywords

Keyword research is the first and most important part of your SEO strategy.

Before you start writing content for your website, you will need to identify suitable high-volume search terms .

The SEO keywords will inform the direction of your content, ensuring that the content produced will be relevant and easily searchable on Google. And that is, in summary, what keyword research is all about.

It’s usually a pretty time-consuming task and involves a lot of effort to pour through details, numbers, and comparing long lists of keywords. But it’s incredibly important to do it well. A thorough keyword research will be the foundation of your SEO strategy and content development.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is defined as the activity of analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords for the purpose of SEO copywriting . The keywords, or search terms, often become a guide for the direction of your content and marketing strategy.

A keyword can consist of a single word but more often than not it’s made out of several words. For example, “ search terms ” is a keyword, as is “ best keyword search tool “.

Why is keyword research important?

Finding high-volume search terms itself is not enough. You need to ensure that the SEO keywords used in your content matches with your brand, product, or service to the keywords that your customer use. And this is where keyword research happens.

Once you have performed adequate and thorough research, only then will you be able to craft a viable SEO strategy. With a good strategy, you can then create a detailed plan of action to achieve your goals.

For example, if you are in the business of leasing out vacation homes, you may choose your focus keyword as “ vacation house. ” However, by doing a quick keyword research, we find out that the keyword ‘vacation home’ is much better to use in terms of search volume data.

Both terms might mean the same thing, but your target audience is searching for something different, as you can see above. Search volume for ‘vacation home’ is 33,100, whereas search volume for ‘vacation house’ is 6,600.

You would have never guessed the difference if not for keyword research.

Keywords that you choose to use should be those that your target audience is searching . Only then will it make the effort of optimizing your page worthwhile.

But more importantly, two similar keywords often have different search volumes, trends, and competition levels. Choosing a more relevant, higher volume keyword could give you better results compared to its other semantic or related keywords.

How to do keyword research

There are many ways to do it, either manually or using a keyword research tool like Keyword Tool . But whichever way you choose, there are a number of important steps that you need to take.

From outlining your goals to executing your keyword plan, follow these detailed step-by-step guide to performing a proper and thorough keyword research:

Step 1: Study your niche

Before you figure out what are the best keywords to optimize your page, it’s best that you start by diving deep to learn more about your topic or niche. It can give you out-of-the-box ideas and help discover angles to your marketing and SEO strategy that you might not have thought about before.

Here are a few ideas on how to study your niche :

• Talk with your existing customers and get to know them better. Find out the terms that they use when describing your brand, company, product or service.
• Try to think from the perspective of your potential customers. If you were to share the brand’s offering to a friend, how will you talk about it?
• Get involved in your topic or niche’s online communities, like forums and social media networks. Read the discussions and find out any pain points that are mentioned regarding your niche.

Step 2: Define your goals

A plan needs to always begin by defining the end goal . But before that, you should ask important and introspective questions like:

• Who are you?
• What is your brand about?
• What makes you special?
• What is your website about?
• What promises do you make on your website?

Once you have effectively answered these questions, then you need to specify what is your brand’s mission . Do you want to increase the number of subscribers? Or do you have a sales target by a certain date?

It’s important to define your goal because it will provide a direction for your SEO strategy and plan. The search terms that you will eventually use should be aligned to your goals, ideally segmented into different content marketing funnels . Your goals will also inform the purpose of your SEO copywriting and content.

Write down your goals. Draw charts. Document them. These will provide the framework and direction needed for your top-level content and online marketing strategy.

Step 3: Make a list of relevant topics

Based on your the main category of your brand and the goals you aim to achieve, break it down to smaller topic buckets . Make a list of all the topics related to your brand that you want to rank on Google.

For example, if you’re an FMCG brand specializing in men’s personal care products, some topics that are related to your brand can be:

• men’s facial wash
• antiperspirant deodorant
• male pattern baldness

They need to be topics that are important to your business and related to your buyer personas . Think about what type of topics will your target audience search for on Google? These topic buckets can then later be broken down to keywords that are related to those topics.

Step 4: Create a list of seed keywords

Now that you’ve broken down your main category to different buckets of sub-topics, you can start creating a list of seed keywords. These keywords need to be related to your various topics , and more importantly, are terms that your target audience might be searching on Google.

Seed keywords, or focus keywords, are important as they will become the foundation of your keyword research. They define your niche and identify your competitors.

If you’re wondering how to find the seed or focus keywords of your brand or product, it’s actually a lot easier than you think. All you need to do is describe your offering as simple as possible and brainstorm how other people might search for it on Google.

Step 5: Use good keyword research tools

You might assume, “ shouldn’t keyword research begin with using a keyword tool? ” There’s no right or wrong answer there, to be honest. But there is an obvious advantage to researching search terms from your brand or business perspective first and foremost .

It avoids you from getting too bogged down with keywords and helps you gain a wider perspective for your content and SEO strategy.

Once you have identified your goals, topics, and a list of seed keywords, it’s time to use keyword research tools to further refine your search terms .

One option is to use Google Keyword Planner . Unfortunately, Google only gives approximated search volumes. Instead, you can use a tool like Keyword Tool . It will give you a lot more details and help you narrow down on the right direction for your search terms. On top of that, it can also give additional ideas on related keywords.

All you need to do is type in the topic (or seed keyword) into the search box and it will give you a list of alternative keywords, including those that contain prepositions and questions :

Step 6: Study the search intent

Plugging in high-volume keywords to bump up rankings for a page used to work pretty easily. But it’s not so simple anymore these days. Today, Google’s machine learning search algorithms compare search terms with user queries to learn about search intent.

Search intent is defined as the intent or reason behind why people search for a specific term. There are many driving factors behind people’s search habits, such as:

• Why are they searching?
• Are they searching because they have a question and want an answer to that question?
• Are they searching for a specific website?
• Are they searching because they want to buy something?

Try to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Why would they search for your topic? How will they key in the terms? Are they looking to buy something? Or are they looking for a service to solve a specific problem?

Once you have a good idea of the search intent behind potential readers or customers, you will be able to use it to fine-tune your keyword research . Getting a list of high-volume keywords related to your brand or topic is great. But finding keywords that directly match  your target audience’s search intent is even better.

Step 7: Identify long tail keywords

Seed keywords are often shorter search terms that are closely related to your brand’s main topic or category. Long tail keywords , on the other hand, are more descriptive and often related to your brand’s smaller buckets of sub-topics. Matching your target audience’s search intent to long tail keywords is far easier compared to seed keywords.

For example, if your website published content about golf equipment reviews, using long tail keywords like “ what is the best 9 iron golf club ” will attract a more relevant audience compared to the seed keyword “ golf club .”

Long tail keywords usually get fewer clicks, but since they are focused on a specific topic or product, they often get a higher conversion rate .

Step 8: Find out about your competitors

Doing keyword research on Google about your brand alone is not nearly enough. You also need to be aware of what your competitors are doing . The better you understand the content landscape of your industry, the better it will be for your SEO.

Understanding the competitiveness of different keywords will also allow you to identify search terms that might be too difficult to rank . But most importantly, you will be able to find keyword opportunity gaps . These opportunities occur when you find related keywords that are related to your brand or industry with low to medium competition level .

To find these keyword opportunities, you can perform a keyword search on your competitors . The paid version of  Keyword Tool Pro  has a competitor analysis function that does exactly that. Key in the URL of your competitor into the search box and the results will show all the keywords that the page ranks for.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, you should have enough insights to craft a good content and SEO strategy . You would also have gotten adequate data for SEO copywriting for your content.

Whether you’re running a content-focused blog, a small business, or a brand marketer, you will need keyword research to kick-start your content and marketing activities.

Doing keyword research can be a tedious and time-consuming task. But more often than not, it pays off handsomely in the long run.

Frequently Asked Questions

⭐ what is keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that people use when searching online. Keywords can be used to create content that will attract visitors from the search engines.

⭐ Why keyword research is the most important part of SEO?

To get more traffic from search engines, you need to understand what people are searching for online and produce content that targets popular keywords. If you produce content without doing a prior keyword research, your chances of getting meaningful traffic from the search engines are slim.

⭐ What is the best source of keywords?

The search engines themselves are the best source of keyword ideas. To easiest way to find good keywords from various search engines is to use the tools like Keyword Tool .

⭐ How do I know how many people search for a particular keyword on Google in a given month?

The easiest and probably the cheapest way of getting this data is using Keyword Tool Pro . Alternatively, you can start running paid Google Ads, and might be able to eventually see the number of searches for a keyword in Google Keyword Planner.

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How to do Keyword Research (for FREE) using Google

by Josh | Jan 19, 2022 | Web Design Tutorial | 2 comments

There are a lot of great keyword research tools out there but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do some basic research for free? Good news! You can do so using good old trusty Google. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how!

There are many other tactics, strategies and methods for both free and paid keyword research but these methods are the easiest to learn and implement.

Here are my top 5 methods for using Google for free keyword research:

We’ll start with what is probably the most obvious method…

That’s right, typing your keyword or key phrase into Google and seeing what it suggests is the first method and easiest way to do basic and free, keyword research.

Using Google for free keyword research – Method 1 using the search bar suggestions

Using Google for free keyword research – Method 2 detailed alphabetical suggestions in search bar

Using Google for free keyword research – Method 3 “People also ask” section

Using Google for free keyword research – Method 4 “Related searches” section

Using Google for free keyword research – Method 5 suggested videos

So there you go! My top 5 methods for using Google for free keyword research.

I hope this has helped give you some ideas of how to use Google the next time you’re looking for the best keywords to optimize your content for.

Again, there are a plethora of tools (both free and paid) that can assist with this and I’m sure there are other free strategies as well so if you know of one, feel free to drop a comment below!

Related articles, videos or podcasts:

• Podcast 107 – How to do free keyword research with my personal SEO guru Michelle Bourbonneire
• Podcast 162 – How Google algorithm updates can effect your SEO strategy with Julian Goldie

And for those of you ready to learn a little more about SEO, be sure to sign up for my free SEO Masterclass “A Beginners Guide to SEO for Web Designers” below!

Are you ready to learn SEO for Web Designers ?

Watch the FREE 1-Hour Video Training Masterclass!

" A Beginners Guide to SEO for Web Designers" 

Great article Josh. In addition to what I call “mining the SERPs” which is basically what you talked about here, I also love and recommend two other resources for keyword research … LongTailPro and Ubersuggest.

My affiliate link for LTP is https://www.premiumwebdesign.com/longtailpro/ .

Keep up the great work!

Great additional suggestions, Glennette! Haven’t heard of or used LTP but heard good things about Ubersuggest. Thanks!

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A Step-By-Step Guide to Keyword Research (Bonus: Best Keyword Research Tools Compared)

Imagine getting over a quarter million visitors to your site every month. We did it thanks to keyword research:

That screenshot is from one of my sites called The Wandering RV . My wife and I grew this site from a brand new site to a quarter million monthly visits in just three years with less than 30 articles.

Yes, you also have to create great content and build links to that content, but those actions come AFTER you know the best keywords to target. Every successful SEO campaign begins with keyword research ; skip this step at your peril.

Ready to get started?

How to Do Keyword Research (Quick Steps):

Good keywords make or brake a successful SEO marketing campaign. Here’s the key steps to get started with keyword research :

Step 1 : Find keyword ideas based on key terms, related search, long-tail keywords, and LSI. Step 2 : Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume. Step 3 : Determine user intent.

In today’s guide, I share a step-by-step guide to keyword research that covers not just how to find hundreds of great keywords, but also how to tell which ones can move the needle for your business and which aren’t worth your time. Let’s dive in!

Keyword Research Fundamentals

Before I talk about the exact steps to find keywords for your SEO campaign, let’s briefly cover what keyword research is and why you should care.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the act of finding and vetting keywords to target in an SEO campaign.

This is done using a number of free and/or paid tools that show you what people are searching for on Google and other search engines .

Suggested in-depth guides: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools .

The Role of Keyword Research in Digital Marketing

As you’ll learn in the next section, the quality of your keywords is the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a waste of time. The keywords you pick will determine your SEO marketing strategy from beginning to end.

Let’s see how.

How Important is Keyword Research? (Don’t Skip This!)

SEO can be complex, but it boils down to three fundamentals:

• Keyword Research
• Link building

Of those three, keyword research is the most important.

Why? Because you can create the best content and build incredible links that score you #1 Google rankings and still get zero benefits in terms of business growth or revenue if you target the wrong keywords.

For example, let’s say you want to write some content on your site’s blog so you can show up on Google’s first page. You have an idea of a blog post and think you have a good keyword to target. You make amazing content, build links to it through guest posting and email outreach (here’s how to find anyone’s email address ), and end up on the first page of Google . You’re getting hundreds of visits every month…

But your income from that article remains a big fat $0.

That’s because you didn’t properly research your keyword ahead of time. You may have found a keyword, but finding a keyword and doing keyword research are very different things.

Properly researching a keyword means understanding it’s income potential, how competitive it is, and even the exact kind of content you need to create to be able to rank for it. You’ll see what I mean by the end of this guide.

In a nutshell: Proper keyword research can be the difference between a wildly successful SEO campaign that makes your business tons of money and an utter waste of time and money.

Search Volume and Long Tail Keywords

The first concept to understand about keywords is search volume .

This is what most people look at when they first start researching keywords, and also one of the worst metrics to look at.

A high search volume is very deceiving for two reasons:

• The raw number of people searching for something has very little to do with how much you can actually earn from that traffic. For example, if you rank for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per month, but if people are just looking for information and aren’t ready to buy (hint: you’d need to define the search intent. More below.), that does nothing for your bottom line.
• Just because 10,000 people search for a keyword doesn’t mean all 10,000 people actually click on a result. Take a look at the keyword “How old is Biden”, for example—it gets 51,000 searches per month, but only 17% of those people actually click on anything. That’s because people get the answer right on Google and don’t need to click through to find it.

On the other hand, a low search volume doesn’t mean a keyword is bad or that the number you see is the number of visitors you’ll get. Virtually all pages that rank on Google for one keyword also rank for dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of other keywords.

These other keywords are usually synonyms and long-tail variants. There are also Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, which I get to in a section below.

For example, take a look at this post that my wife, Kayla, wrote for The Wandering RV. She was targeting the keyword “best camping gear”, which gets around 2,700 searches per month according to Ahrefs. But as you can see in the screenshot below, it also ranks for 1,912 other keywords and even ranks on page one for “camping gear” at 32,000 searches per month!

The point of the story? While search volume is an important metric, you shouldn’t base your target keywords solely on how many people are searching for it every month (unless you’re only focused on brand awareness and/or advertising revenue on a per-impression basis).

Search Intent

Search intent is exactly what it sounds like—the intent of the person searching for a given keyword. It’s similar to the marketing concept “buyer intent”.

In other words: What is the user looking for?

Are they searching for an item they are ready to buy right now? Are they doing research before they make a purchase decision? Or are they just looking for information that has nothing to do with buying anything, but rather with a problem they may need a solution to?

Let’s look at an example of each.

High Buying Intent : A high buying intent keyword may be a product name, such as “RV rental las vegas”. If you type that into Google and look at the results, you see a bunch of ads for RV rentals and a map showing Las Vegas RV rental companies. Someone searching this is likely ready to buy, or very close.

Research Intent : These are keywords where people are still doing research on solutions, but will likely buy soon. “Best” and “Review” keywords often fall into this category, such as “best RV rental companies”.

Informational Intent : These keywords are for people strictly looking for information and aren’t ready or even thinking about buying anything. The “how old is Biden” example falls under this category. Another example that fits with RV rentals might be something like “how to travel the country with a pet”.

However, don’t think that you should only go after buying intent keywords. Informational keywords can help you build your email list and get people into your marketing funnel to eventually buy from you.

Search intent is also important to know because it affects what content ranks on Google. If you try to create a landing page to rank for an informational keyword when Google is ranking long-form blog content, you probably won’t rank even with perfect on-page SEO and plenty of backlinks because it’s simply not what the user is searching for.

For example, let’s say you want to rank for “small campers”. So you create a guide to owning small campers. However, when we look at Google, we can see that people aren’t looking for a guide, but rather, they’re looking for a list of small campers to buy.

That’s why even after you find good keyword ideas , you should always manually type them into Google and see what’s currently ranking to get an idea of what you need to create. Don’t write a massive guide when people just want a quick answer and don’t try to rank a blog post when people are looking to buy a product.

The Role of LSI and Synonyms

Earlier, I mentioned LSI keywords. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, and it’s a fancy way for Google to say “synonyms and related keywords”. They’re words that are commonly found together within a single topic and are semantically related to each other.

They’re important to tell the search engines what your content is about since there can be multiple meanings to the same keywords.

For example, let’s say you’re writing an article about cars. There are five different potential “cars” you could be talking about:

• Cars, the vehicles
• Cars, the animated Disney movie
• CARS, the Canadian Association for Rally Sports
• CARs, the Canadian Aviation Regulations
• (The) Cars, the American 1970s music band

How does Google know which version of “cars” you’re talking about? By LSI keywords! Take a look:

• Using the words “vehicle”, “used”, “new”, “buy”, “sell”, etc.
• Using the words “film”, “movie”, “Disney”, etc.
• Using the words “association”, “rally”, “sports”, etc.
• Using the words “aviation”, “regulation”, “administration”, etc.

While LSI keywords don’t necessarily matter during your keyword research, they are important when developing your actual content. You should include various LSI keywords naturally in your content without stuffing them, including in headings and image alt text.

You can find LSI keywords (and learn more about them) with a tool like LSI Graph .

How Do You Do Keyword Research? (Step-by-Step Guide)

Alright, now that you have a firm understanding of the important metrics behind keyword research, it’s time to actually find your very own keywords! There are three steps I follow when I’m doing keyword research for a new site, with an optional, more advanced fourth step:

• Find keyword ideas
• Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume
• Determine their search intent
• (Optional) Find & utilize keyword silos

Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Find Keyword Ideas

Finding keyword ideas is the easy part. There are loads of tools that will spit out hundreds of ideas at the click of a button. It’s vetting them that takes effort, but we’ll get to that.

For now, go take a look at the “Best Keyword Research Tool” section below and pick your poison. I’ll be using Ahrefs in the examples because it’s my favorite tool and has all the bells and whistles, but the other tools can work as well.

My favorite way to find great keyword opportunities is spying on my competition. You can do this by plugging their site into any keyword tool and look at their keywords. Ahrefs has a nifty tool called the Content Gap Analysis.

Here’s how it works:

1. Plug your site into Ahrefs, then click the Content Gap link in the left-hand menu.

2. Plug in 1-10 competitors who are ranking on Google for keywords you want to rank for. You can find them by Googling those keywords and grabbing the URLs off of Google or by using Ahrefs’ Competing domains tool right above the Content gap link. Run the tool.

3. From here, you can export the list to an excel spreadsheet if you want. I like to comb through the list right in Ahrefs. If I see a keyword I might want to target, I open it in a new tab and add it to a keyword list using the + Add to button in the top right.

If you don’t have access to Ahrefs or another keyword tool that allows you to see competitor’s keywords, you can also use a tool like Keyword Shitter to give you a ton of ideas, then vet them using other free tools such as Uber Suggest.

Step 2: Check The TRUE Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume

Once you have a list of keyword ideas you’re comfortable working with (I aim for 50-100 at a time but you can do far more), it’s time to see which are even worth pursuing based on keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume.

There’s just one caveat… the search volume and KD you see in most keyword research tools are usually way off. KD in Ahrefs is solely based off the number of linking domains to the top results, which isn’t a 100% accurate depiction of the true difficulty to rank for a keyword.

This is because SEO is a complex beast, and things like domain rating (which I’ll cover shortly) and internal linking can have a massive impact on rankings. Backlinks are only part of the picture.

And the search volume? That’s not including LSI and long-tail keywords!

Remember that camping gear example I showed you at the beginning of this article that ranks for over 1,900 keywords? The main keyword only had 2,700 searches per month, yet the article gets over 5,000 visits per month. That’s because it’s ranking for other keywords besides the main keyword.

So if you see a keyword with 200 searches per month, chances are it’s really more like 500 or 1,000 if you include the related keywords that you’ll rank for.

To determine true search volume, grab the #1 result on Google for the keyword and plug it into Ahrefs or Uber Suggest to see how much traffic that page actually gets. That should give you a more accurate picture of the search volume for a given keyword.

Here’s the traffic for the #1 ranking page for “tiny campers”, a keyword that gets ~3,400 searches per month:

See how the page gets over 10k traffic, despite the main keyword getting a third of that? That’s true search volume potential.

The other metric, keyword difficulty, is also not 100% accurate. But figuring out true difficulty is usually as easy as looking at the top pages domain authority (DA), or domain rating (DR) if you’re using Ahrefs. Let me explain.

If a keyword has a difficulty score of 8, but the top ranking pages are all DR 80+, ranking your site for those keywords may be difficult if you have a low DR, despite the low difficulty score.

My advice is to aim for keywords with a 30 KD or lower if you’re under a 40 DR, then branch up as you build more links and gain a higher authority. As your DR climbs, your internal links are worth more “link juice” (or pass more “page authority” depending on what source you listen to).

But this isn’t an article on technical SEO, so I’ll leave it at that for now!

Step 3: Determine Search Intent

At this point, you should have a pretty decent list of keywords with a difficulty you’re comfortable tackling and a search volume potential you’d be happy to capture. Now it’s time to figure out what people actually want when they search for these terms and whether or not it fits in with your marketing and revenue goals.

This part is as simple as Googling each keyword on your list and looking at the top 3-5 results. Review their meta title and description, click on them to view the page, and check out the angle they took on the page.

• Are they mainly listicle posts? How-tos? Ultimate guides ? A landing page? Something else?
• How do they seem to be monetizing the page ? Are they using display ads ? Selling products as a solution to the problem? Affiliate marketing ? Just capturing emails and not actually selling anything?
• Take a look at the comments. Are people asking questions that weren’t answered in the article? Do they seem happy, angry, or neutral?

All of these questions will help you dial in on the type of post/page you need to create, how you can monetize it (or use it to capture emails/push notification subscribers/social followers), and what you can do to improve it.

As you’re going through each keyword, keep your answers to these questions in a spreadsheet or word document to keep track of which ones you’re interested in pursuing. Your final list is the list you can start pursuing!

To give you a better idea of how to determine search intent, here are a few examples courtesy of this Moz post :

Informational Intent:

• [product name]
• what is [product name]
• how does [product name] work
• how do I use [product name]

Commercial Intent (AKA Research Intent):

• best [product name]
• [product name] reviews
• compare [product name]
• what is the top [product name]
• [colour/style/size] [product name]

Transactional Intent (AKA Buying Intent):

• how much does [product name] cost
• [product name] in [location]
• order [product name] online
• [product name] near me
• affordable [brand name] [product name]

This graph from Ahrefs may also help:

Now take your list and go crank out some content! Or, you can follow one last step.

Step 4: (Advanced) Find & Utilize Keyword Silos

If you really want to do well, you can optionally take it one step further and look for keyword silos to create corresponding content silos on your site.

A keyword silo is a list of highly related keywords that you can create content around to interlink between on your site (also called the “hub and spoke” method). Here’s a visual I created to help you understand:

Essentially, you create a hub page targeting the primary head term you want to rank for, then create “spoke” pages based on related and long-tail keywords.

For example, while doing keyword research for my wife Kayla’s vegan food blog, I found a series of related keywords asking “Is ___ vegan”. People wanted to know if common foods, such as bagels, donuts, or Oreos are vegan.

To rank for these keywords, we created this hub page which links to all of her “Is ___ vegan” articles. These articles all link to one another, as well as back to the main hub page.

This inter-linking is called content siloing, and it works so well for two reasons:

• Because all the pages interlink to one another, if you build links to any of the pages, it improves page authority across all of the other pages.
• Google uses relevancy in its algorithm, and since these topics are all highly relevant to one another, it can improve your rankings further.

So how do you find keyword silos? There is no silver bullet solution — you have to be good at picking up on patterns and noticing relevancy. However, there is one trick you can use to try and find them: books.

Look for books on your topic on Amazon and browse the table of contents. Oftentimes, books are full of keyword silos: that’s what makes them a book! Think of the binding as the hub page and the chapters as the spoke pages.

Of course, as you can see in the example above, these keywords aren’t exactly what people are searching for on Google. People aren’t typing “vegan out in the world”, but rather “how to eat vegan at restaurants” or “how to eat vegan at family gatherings”. So you may have to do some sleuthing to figure out the keyword that corresponds with the chapter title in the books you find.

Once you find a potential silo, be sure to run the keywords through steps 2 and 3 before you commit to it! Just because you found a silo, doesn’t mean you should pursue it. Think logically about how all that content will fit into your business and how you can expand on it in the future.

What Is The Best Keyword Research Tool?

There are dozens, if not hundreds of keyword research tools on the market today. Some are extremely unique, but most are just slightly different takes on the same idea. So what’s the best one? Let’s break it down by free and paid tools.

Free Keyword Research Tools

There are two free keyword research tools I’ve used and recommend:

Ubersuggest

Keyword shitter.

Let’s put on hold all the conversions about Neil Patel for a second. This tool does its job and, if you’re on a budget, it can work to get you started with SEO.

Ubersuggest is basically a free, scaled-down version of Ahrefs or Moz. It lets you spy on competitor’s backlinks, see what keywords they’re ranking for, and do some decent keyword research. If you’re doing SEO on a budget, it can get the job done.

Keyword Shitter is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You type in a keyword and get hundreds of keyword suggestions. It’s great if you just need tons of ideas, but it mostly only spits out related keywords to the one you typed in, not unique, separate ideas.

Paid Keyword Research Tools

Now we’re getting into the big-boy (or girl) tools! If you’re serious about SEO and you have the budget, these are the tools you want to use.

Keyword Insights

Keywords everywhere.

Ahrefs is hands-down my favorite SEO tool; not just for keyword research, but also for link-building, rank tracking, coming up with content ideas, and more. It has all the bells and whistles and is easily the best all-around SEO tool on the market. However, it comes at a steep price, with just the basic tool being $99 per month.

SEMrush is another great keyword research tool. It’s more affordable than Ahrefs, but it doesn’t have quite as many features. It’s more geared towards search engine marketing and PPC (thus the SEM in SEMrush). However, if you want a great paid tool but don’t want to pay the premium on Ahrefs, it’s a valid option. It even lets you try out the product for free!

Keyword Insights claims to be “the smartest way to group keywords and classify search intent at scale”… and with good reason. The tool utilizes geo-specific, live search engine result page data to cluster keywords into similar groups whilst also working out the search intent behind them.

A user simply uploads a list of keywords (as many as you’d like) and the tool will spit out a preformatted Google sheets document with the clustered keywords and the intent pulled through. Its most recent update also sorts the grouped keywords into “top-level themes” so you can see what their content hubs should be and what their spoke content might look like. The insights will also tell you which keywords you can target a single page with, or which need to be broken into multiple pages.

Keywords Everywhere is an awesome tool that used to be free and now is credit-based. The tool shows you search volume, competition, and average CPC right on Google whenever you type something in. It also shows you stats on related keywords and the “people also search” keywords. Regardless of which other tools you use, I highly recommend grabbing this one.

Want more SEO tools? Check out Kinsta’s list of must-have SEO plugins for WordPress .

Suggested Stack

So what keyword research tools should you get? My suggested stack is Ahrefs and Keywords Everywhere. Ahrefs is a complete SEO software that will help you rank your site, not just find keywords. And Keywords Everywhere lets you see search volume and keyword ideas any time you’re searching something on Google. Plus it’s free, so what’s not to like?

Here’s a quick recap of everything we’ve covered:

• Keyword research is extremely important to any SEO campaign and should not be skipped or taken lightly.
• Search volume and keyword difficulty can be deceiving. Do some deeper research by typing the keyword into Google and reviewing the results before you make a decision.
• Don’t be fooled by low search volume. Check the true search volume by reviewing the top pages search traffic using Ubersuggest or Ahrefs.
• Search intent is king. Make sure the content you’re creating matches the content people want to see (and what Google is already showing).
• Look for keyword silos. They’re can be a shortcut to ranking your pages faster.

And that’s all there is to it! If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment below or shoot me an email. For more help with SEO, click here to read my step-by-step guide and this awesome in-depth guide on how to drive more traffic to your website.

Bill is a content marketing and SEO expert with over 6 years' experience. When he's not nerding out over Google, he loves traveling, playing video games, and spending time with his wife.

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Keyword Research is predominantly a statistical analysis of trending interests that are expressed by internet searches.

Although I realize the importance of said statistics, I am “right brained” and have struggled with being interested in numbers, all of my life. When I look at a keyword research result, the numbers tell me nothing in terms that I can understand. In fact, I’m totally bored by the concept.

I have read many posts, papers, and websites about the subject, and although not many agree with the same approach, they basically are saying the same things. b-o-r-i-n-g!

What is stopping a keyword research tool (once the stats have been gathered) from asking what it is that you sell, and then saying… well, to sell that, try concentrating on this…, and spare me the statistical analysis.

Really helpful article. Especially for the newcomers who want to be an SEO expert.

Thanks, Eva! Glad you enjoyed it. :)

What if I’m a business owner with a brand new site with no blog posts yet? How would I start this if I’m new to KW research? Are there services (real people services) that help with this or do it with me?

Hey, Johnny!

No problem! The steps with the content gap analysis are the same – you just have to manually find your competitors rather than using a tool. To do that, Google some keywords you think you want to rank for and grab the URLs of the top-ranking sites that monetize their sites similarly to you (whether that’s through ads, affiliate marketing, or selling similar products).

Paste those URLs into the content gap tool and follow along from there! Hope this helps! :)

Awesome! i am using this article to share with my students while i m teaching keyword research.

Lots of great information here ! Just wanting to introduce to a free alternative to Keywords everywhere, a chrome extension – WhatsmySERP.com/everywhere it gives you unlimited searches for volume and CPC.

Our team has launched this tool and it already has 5 star reviews and 20k+ users. I’d love for you to try it and see what your thoughts are.

I’d love to know your thoughts :)

This article is really really helpful for the newcomers. specially the one who recently started a blog or a website and Also, wants to Learn SEO.

The thing with the search intent is really important!

This was really what i was searching. perfect timing, thanks Bill such an valuable post.

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How to do keyword research for beginners.

Keyword research is critical to search engine optimization (SEO) , which can help you earn more conversions and revenue. Every business should know how to do keyword research, regardless of their digital marketing experience.

With this beginner’s guide to keyword research, you’ll learn how to do keyword research for SEO so that your company can maximize the performance (and return) of SEO. We will cover the following topics:

What is keyword research?

Why is keyword research important, how to research and incorporate keywords, how to choose the best keywords, best keyword research tools for your business.

Keep reading to learn how to do SEO keyword research! If you’re looking for keyword research tools, consider SEO.com , a free alternative for do-it-yourself SEO!

Keyword research is the process of finding, analyzing, and choosing  search terms — which people use to generate results on search engines — for SEO. SEO uses keywords to  help search engines rank pages accurately in search results and help people understand a page’s context.

For example, if you Google “bike shops in Harrisburg,” that would be your keyword, and these are the most relevant results:

This keyword is telling Google what information you want when searching. Doing keyword research for SEO can help you tell Google (and users) what your site is about.

Finding keywords is invaluable to your SEO process, as you’re targeting users’ search right from the start and building content around their needs. Keyword research for SEO is critical for a few stakeholders, including:

• Search engines: Search engines like Google use  keywords  to rank websites in search results. A blog post with a  title tag  with the keyword, “best running shoes,” and a list of the best running shoes tells search engines that it’s a relevant page to show for searches with that keyword.
• People: Searchers use keywords to search for content online — and choose which content to click on from search results. Someone looking for a compilation of the best running shoes, for instance, is more likely to click on a round-up blog post of the best shoes than a product page.
• Companies: Businesses that use keyword research generally earn a better  return on investment (ROI) from SEO  because they target keywords with the most value. A business that does SEO keyword research, for instance, may focus on  long-tail, low-competition keywords .

When you know how to research keywords, you make data-driven decisions about your  SEO strategy . Instead of guessing what your target market searches for, you know what terms will help users find your business.

You know why SEO keyword research and integration is important, but how do you get started? Here are eight different steps to help you learn how to find and incorporate SEO keywords:

• Brainstorm potential keywords
• Research competitor keyword targeting
• Compile a list of long-tail keywords
• Use a keyword research tool
• Choose the best keywords to use
• Integrate keywords throughout your site
• Organize your keyword hierarchy
• Make keyword research continuous

Keep reading to break down how to research and implement keywords for SEO.

1. Brainstorm potential keywords

The first step to keyword research is brainstorming a list of possible keywords. These keywords can be as broad as you want and include anything that relates to your industry, products, or services.

A bike shop in Harrisburg might use keywords like, “bike shop,” “bike rack,” “bike seats,” or any other bicycle parts that you sell. You can also use location-based keywords — words and phrases that describe your state, city, region, or area.

2. Research competitor keyword targeting

Check out your competitors’ sites and see the keywords they’re using to describe the similar products and services that they have. Investigating your competitors can help you come up with original ideas and inform the rest of your keyword research.

As you look for keywords, see what sites typically rank high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You can then use these websites as  “seed list” for keyword ideas.

Enter a website in SEO.com , for example, and it’ll show the site’s keyword rankings:

Filter by topic, URL, position, and more to find relevant ideas. When researching keywords based on competitor data, though, ensure the topics are relevant to your audience.

3. Compile a list of long-tail keywords

Once you have your basic list, the next step is to expand this into a longer list of long-tail keywords . Short-tail keywords are around 1–2 words and name vague terms, while long-tail keywords are around 3–5 words and offer more detail.

The keywords you came up with in step one might be short and generic, like “bike shops.” But there could be thousands of businesses across the country trying to rank for that exact keyword.

As a local business, you’re probably not going to rank in the top 10.

Instead, you want to find longer, more-specific keywords that indicate whether a user is specifically looking for the parts you offer or a bike shop in your area. Instead of “bike shop,” you could try “bike shop in Harrisburg, PA” to narrow the search intent.

4. Use a keyword research tool

While you can rely on suggested searches from Google, this approach can take a significant amount of time. That’s why we often recommend using a keyword research tool like KeywordsFX . This step will expand your keywords based on user search trends and data.

When you type a keyword into KeywordsFX, you’ll get an alphabetized list of all the variations that users commonly search in Google.

If you type in “bike rack,” one of the results is “bike rack for audiq5.” This result means that a lot of users out there have searched for that exact phrase in Google in the past. It also means that if you sell a bike rack compatible with this specific car, you might want to target this keyword.

Depending on the keyword that you entered, you could get an overwhelming list of suggestions. Take note of the ones most relevant to your business. You can repeat this process for every keyword on your original list to branch out your keyword options.

5. Choose the best keywords to use

Now that you have a wide range of keywords to choose from, it’s time to pick the ones you intend to target. You should consider several factors when making your choice, including:

You can find out more about how to choose the right keywords later on this page. Once you’ve made your choices, it’s time to start adding to those keywords to your content.

6. Integrate keywords throughout your site

Adding keywords to your website is an essential step to your research. If you have quality keywords but don’t know how to integrate them, all your time and energy will go to waste.

Here are some tips for making sure Google and searchers can get the most of your keywords:

• Focus on one target keyword and 3–5 supporting keywords that highlight your page topic.
• Add the target to the page title, title tag, and meta description.
• Use the target or main keyword within the first 100 words of your page.
• Don’t add an outgoing link with your keyword anchor text.
• Aim to use each keyword two times naturally.

Our keyword density tool makes it easy to see where your keywords are and if you need to add or remove some.

7. Organize your keyword hierarchy

Once you have your list of keywords, you can determine how you want to incorporate them on your site. Connecting keywords and showing their relationship can better serve Google and your users.

If you found keywords that you already have pages for, add the keyword to your title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, and other important HMTL elements, as well as the body copy on each of these pages.

Throughout the keyword research process, you might have found a few keywords that you don’t yet have content to support. Instead of adding these keywords to random pages, use this as an opportunity to create more content for your site and more pages that will help your customers.

From there, you can build internal links to show how your keywords relate. For example, if you have a parent page on bike parts, you might link to other pages on bike racks, wheels, chains, and more.

Be sure to avoid keyword stuffing , or adding keywords where they’re not relevant or necessary. All the content on your site should be written with your users in mind to inform potential customers.

8. Make keyword research continuous

As you optimize your site, continue to do keyword research as much as you need. Over time, this process will help you identify even more keywords that are helpful to your customers. It  will also keep your keywords relevant to changing search volume and trends.

Even though the keyword “bike rack for 2024 Subaru Forester,” might be really valuable right now, there will be a newer model five years from now that users are searching for.

When choosing which keywords to use, it’s important to make sure you’re identifying the best options for your business. To do that, you’ll want to consider three main elements:

Let’s investigate each one below:

1. Relevance

Relevance describes the applicability of your keyword to the user’s intent — what the user’s goal is behind a search. Your content and keywords will rank well if they answer the user’s intent.

Google doesn’t want to give its searchers results that don’t solve their input. So, the algorithm uses your keywords to understand your site as relevant (or not) and post it in the results.

Using keyword clustering can help you organize the keywords you select by intent and keep your content relevant.

2. Authority

Google ranks sources that it deems authoritative higher than others. They want to only give the best results to users, and that includes finding websites with established domains and reputations.

So, how can you prove your authority?

Many sites do this by creating quality, informative content that helps users and earns backlinks. It also helps to understand the weight that expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) has on your rankings.

If there are other industry leaders out there (like the New York Times or Mayo Clinic), it might be harder to rank. However, you can also look to these sources for inspiration for how to improve your authority.

Keyword volume is measured by monthly search volume (MSV), which determines how many times one keyword gets searched in a month. You might rank for keywords, but if they have a low MSV, you are less likely to reach people.

You want to find keywords with a good search volume to answer people’s queries. SEO.com can help here by sharing search volume data, plus the keyword’s estimated difficulty.

Bonus: Cost-per-click (CPC)

The three metrics already listed are all you’ll need if you’re using keywords for SEO. If you’re researching keywords to target with your paid search ads, though, you’ll also want to consider cost-per-click (CPC).

CPC is data pulled in from Google Ads or Google Ads that represents how many advertisers are trying to place ads for that keyword. The higher the CPC, the more difficult it will be for your business to rank for that keyword.

The ideal keyword will have a high MSV, but a low CPC. These numbers mean that lots of users are searching for this information, but not a lot of websites are trying to rank for it.

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As we noted earlier, it’s a good idea to use a keyword research tool when you’re looking for new keywords to use. But which tool should you use? There are lots of different options out there, and you may be wondering which ones are the most useful.

Here are four of the best keyword research tools out there:

• Google Keyword Planner

Read on to learn more about each one.

1. KeywordsFX

KeywordsFX has three big advantages: It’s simple, it’s efficient, and it’s free. To use this tool, all you have to do is plug in a keyword. The tool will then return a long list of related keywords that you can use. These keywords are divided into regular keywords, questions, and modifiers.

This tool is the way to go if you want something that’s quick and easy to use, especially since it doesn’t cost you anything to use it. You also don’t have to download an app or create an account. All you do is visit a webpage.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from KeywordsFX is Ahrefs . Ahrefs is good for a lot of SEO tasks, but one of the things it’s best at is helping you identify related keywords. Using its Keywords Explorer tool, you can generate a lot of different keyword options.

And Ahrefs doesn’t stop at just recommending keywords. It also lets you view advanced data about the search volume for those keywords and how difficult it is to rank for them, among other things. That advanced data is why access to this tool only comes with an Ahrefs subscription.

Semrush’s Keyword Magic tool strikes a sort of middle ground between KeywordsFX and Ahrefs. It’s a bit more advanced than KeywordsFX, and it requires you to create a Semrush account in order to access it. At the same time, it’s a lot less advanced than Semrush, and it’s also free.

In terms of how it works, it uses pretty much the same process as the other tools on this list. Just plug in a keyword, get a list of related keywords, and then refine the results from there.

4. Google Keyword Planner

Sometimes, it’s best to get your information straight from the source. So when it comes to ranking in Google, what better source of keywords than Google itself?

That’s what you get with Google Keyword Planner , a free tool you can use to conduct your keyword research. You do have to sign in via your Google account to use it, but that’s basically the only hoop you have to jump through.

To use the tool, you have two options. You can plug in a keyword and get related keywords, like in the other tools listed here. Alternatively, you can plug in your website URL and get keyword recommendations based on your site content.

Use our proprietary keyword research tool, KeywordsFX , to help you find high-quality keywords for content and PPC campaigns. Identify Top Keywords for Free

Streamline keyword research for SEO with SEO.com

You’ve learned the basics about how to find SEO keywords and implement them on your site. If you’re ready to get started researching keywords, try SEO.com for free today to start finding new opportunities for your site!

Table of Contents

• What is Keyword Research?
• Why is Keyword Research Important?
• How to Research and Incorporate Keywords
• How to Choose the Best Keywords
• Best Keyword Research Tools for Your Business
• Streamline Keyword Research for SEO with SEO.com

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Gemma 2 is now available to researchers and developers

Jun 27, 2024

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Gemma 2 offers best-in-class performance, runs at incredible speed across different hardware and easily integrates with other AI tools.

AI has the potential to address some of humanity's most pressing problems — but only if everyone has the tools to build with it. That's why earlier this year we introduced Gemma , a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models . We’ve continued to grow the Gemma family with CodeGemma , RecurrentGemma and PaliGemma — each offering unique capabilities for different AI tasks and easily accessible through integrations with partners like Hugging Face, NVIDIA and Ollama.

Now we’re officially releasing Gemma 2 to researchers and developers globally. Available in both 9 billion (9B) and 27 billion (27B) parameter sizes, Gemma 2 is higher-performing and more efficient at inference than the first generation, with significant safety advancements built in. In fact, at 27B, it offers competitive alternatives to models more than twice its size, delivering the kind of performance that was only possible with proprietary models as recently as December. And that’s now achievable on a single NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU or TPU host, significantly reducing deployment costs.

A new open model standard for efficiency and performance

We built Gemma 2 on a redesigned architecture, engineered for both exceptional performance and inference efficiency. Here’s what makes it stand out:

• Outsized performance: At 27B, Gemma 2 delivers the best performance for its size class, and even offers competitive alternatives to models more than twice its size. The 9B Gemma 2 model also delivers class-leading performance, outperforming Llama 3 8B and other open models in its size category. For detailed performance breakdowns, check out the technical report .
• Unmatched efficiency and cost savings: The 27B Gemma 2 model is designed to run inference efficiently at full precision on a single Google Cloud TPU host, NVIDIA A100 80GB Tensor Core GPU , or NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU , significantly reducing costs while maintaining high performance. This allows for more accessible and budget-friendly AI deployments.
• Blazing fast inference across hardware: Gemma 2 is optimized to run at incredible speed across a range of hardware, from powerful gaming laptops and high-end desktops, to cloud-based setups. Try Gemma 2 at full precision in Google AI Studio , unlock local performance with the quantized version with Gemma.cpp on your CPU, or try it on your home computer with an NVIDIA RTX or GeForce RTX via Hugging Face Transformers.

Built for developers and researchers

Gemma 2 is not only more powerful, it's designed to more easily integrate into your workflows:

• Open and accessible: Just like the original Gemma models, Gemma 2 is available under our commercially-friendly Gemma license , giving developers and researchers the ability to share and commercialize their innovations.
• Broad framework compatibility: Easily use Gemma 2 with your preferred tools and workflows thanks to its compatibility with major AI frameworks like Hugging Face Transformers, and JAX, PyTorch and TensorFlow via native Keras 3.0, vLLM, Gemma.cpp , Llama.cpp and Ollama . In addition, Gemma is optimized with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM to run on NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure or as an NVIDIA NIM inference microservice, with optimization for NVIDIA’s NeMo to come. You can fine-tune today with Keras and Hugging Face. We are actively working to enable additional parameter-efficient fine-tuning options.
• Effortless deployment: Starting next month, Google Cloud customers will be able to easily deploy and manage Gemma 2 on Vertex AI .

Explore the new Gemma Cookbook , a collection of practical examples and recipes to guide you through building your own applications and fine-tuning Gemma 2 models for specific tasks. Discover how to easily use Gemma with your tooling of choice, including for common tasks like retrieval-augmented generation.

Responsible AI development

We're committed to providing developers and researchers with the resources they need to build and deploy AI responsibly, including through our Responsible Generative AI Toolkit . The recently open-sourced LLM Comparator helps developers and researchers with in-depth evaluation of language models. Starting today, you can use the companion Python library to run comparative evaluations with your model and data, and visualize the results in the app. Additionally, we’re actively working on open sourcing our text watermarking technology, SynthID , for Gemma models.

When training Gemma 2, we followed our robust internal safety processes, filtering pre-training data and performing rigorous testing and evaluation against a comprehensive set of metrics to identify and mitigate potential biases and risks. We publish our results on a large set of public benchmarks related to safety and representational harms.

Projects built with Gemma

Our first Gemma launch led to more than 10 million downloads and countless inspiring projects. Navarasa , for instance, used Gemma to create a model rooted in India’s linguistic diversity.

Now, Gemma 2 will help developers get even more ambitious projects off the ground, unlocking new levels of performance and potential in their AI creations. We'll continue to explore new architectures and develop specialized Gemma variants to tackle a wider range of AI tasks and challenges. This includes an upcoming 2.6B parameter Gemma 2 model, designed to further bridge the gap between lightweight accessibility and powerful performance. You can learn more about this upcoming release in the technical report .

Getting started

Gemma 2 is now available in Google AI Studio , so you can test out its full performance capabilities at 27B without hardware requirements. You can also download Gemma 2’s model weights from Kaggle and Hugging Face Models , with Vertex AI Model Garden coming soon.

To enable access for research and development, Gemma 2 is also available free of charge through Kaggle or via a free tier for Colab notebooks. First-time Google Cloud customers may be eligible for $300 in credits . Academic researchers can apply for the Gemma 2 Academic Research Program to receive Google Cloud credits to accelerate their research with Gemma 2. Applications are open now through August 9.

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Search engine marketing: incorporating keywords strategically.

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Managing Partner at Twistlab Marketing .

In a previous article , I shared practical insights into finding the right keywords—a foundational skill for any digital marketer. Now, let’s dive into the next chapter: deploying those keywords strategically. Applying the strategies below will help ensure that your carefully curated keywords don’t just sit idle but actively work to elevate your online presence and attract targeted traffic to your brand.

On-Site Optimization

Start with on-site optimization to promote your website. While on-site optimization has many aspects, let’s zero in on title tags, description tags and written content.

Due to character constraints, focus on one keyword per page. For instance, your “About Us” page may use one keyword while the “Home” page focuses on another. Think of it as being similar to the inverted pyramid style of writing that journalists use for news articles: The title, which I’d recommend keeping under 60 characters, provides the broad keyword that summarizes the page. Then, the description—which should be capped at 155 characters so it doesn’t get cut off in the search engine results pages—elaborates using the same keyword, and the content dives deeper. This approach can not only boost your search results but also create a seamless user experience—because the user will see the keyword they searched for in your title and description, as well as repeatedly in the content, reassuring them that they have found an answer to their search query.

Social Media Integration

Incorporating brand keywords into your social media posts does more than boost temporary rankings for posts—it connects your brand with your audience using their language.

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Tools like Rite Tag can help you discover relevant hashtags, while tools like SpyFu or Answer the Public can help you find common questions related to your brand’s keywords. By addressing what people are already curious about, you can start conversations or craft blog posts that answer their burning questions.

Using keywords in your ads not only boosts their ranking but also helps you gauge keyword effectiveness due to the immediacy of paid results. If certain keywords are generating views, for example, but few clicks, while others have a higher click-through rate (CTR), you can reprioritize your organic efforts accordingly.

Each ad platform has tutorials to help you make the most of your experience. Google, for example, offers its Skillshop platform for free to help you learn several of its products. When working with ads, experiment with various keywords and monitor their performance. Optimize the customer journey so that once they click the ad, they land on a page that aligns with their expectations rather than leaving them disappointed.

Internal Communications

Incorporating relevant keywords into your company’s culture benefits internal communication. Replace similar language in training manuals, presentations and email interactions with targeted keywords. This ensures a natural flow into customer service, product descriptions and PR messaging, helping your brand’s language resonate with external communications.

Think holistically: Applying these tips will connect your brand to your audience, strengthen search engine marketing (SEM), and keep you in tune with the conversations surrounding your products or services. When used consistently, your page will organically rank on search engines, surrounded by listings you’ve created, blog posts that answer common questions, and even local news articles highlighting your brand’s contributions to society. In SEM terms, this helps your brand take up more real estate on search engines, boosting your authority and helping you stand out from the competition.

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