Keyword Research for SEO – The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Very often as a marketer, I hear a proper keyword is a key to getting more traffic to the site.

I cannot deny, how important keyword research for a website is.

Keywords and Keyword Research is one of the basic things in SEO that one should learn about.

As a beginner, Keyword Research can be challenging as you hear about it a lot and it can be confusing to start with.

This post aims at clearing all the doubts about Keyword Research for Beginners.

What is Keyword Research?

In simple words, keyword research is the process of finding specific keywords that will drive traffic to your website.

Keyword research helps to identify the phrases, words, and questionnaires that the searchers are searching on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Duckduckgo, etc.

For a business and a blog, when you know about the keywords, people are searching for, you can create content that can help them find the answers. Hence, it brings tons of targeted traffic for free, and in return, your sales and income increase as well.

However, an organic search result may take a long time before you get into the first page of the search engine. Thus, businesses opt for Pay Per Click ad Platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and so on to drive quick traffic to the websites.

Let me explain with a simple example:

Let’s assume, I want to invest in stock and I am looking for the best stock to buy, I will use “best stock to buy” in Google to find an answer.

Google has a very smart search bar, it will give me options on what other queries can lead me to the best answer. Depending on the query I will either stick to my own keyword phrase or I will choose the one Google auto-suggested me.

Search engine records how many times the queries have been asked across the globe. The search engine shows the most popular query according to the location and number of times it has been asked in a specific time frame.

As a business and a content creator, you have to understand these keywords people are searching for and write a solution to their queries which will help the people discover your content and the solution you provided.

Keyword research is a part of On-Page SEO which in itself is a big ocean of SEO, and Keyword research is a part of it.

How to Perform Keyword Research in SEO?

There are various Keyword Research tools, where you can perform your Keyword Research.

In this post, I will take you through the Semrush Keyword Research tool. From the above example, I was looking for the best stock to buy.

The Semrush tool tells me which other keywords people are searching on search engines.

Semrush Keyword Research Tool

Let’s talk about what is happening in the picture with its definition.

1. Keyword: As we have already discussed, Keyword are search terms to get answers on search engine. In the example, the phrase is the target or focus keyword.
2. Volume: It tells you how many people are searching for that specific keyword in a month.

• Best stock to buy now has 165,000 searches in a month
• Best stocks to buy righ now has 27,100 searches in a month

3. Trend: The trend section helps you know the popularity of the keyword whether the trend is going up or down.

4. Keyword Difficulty: This is a part where you decide is going to be easy or difficult to rank a website on a targeted keyword.

There are many other options in the tool that lets you determine backlinks, give you SEO audit reports, check domain authority, and many more.

In short, Keyword research is an important part of search engine optimization that helps you make a data-driven decision for your business.

Importance of Keyword Research

There are various ways a query can be asked. We never know how someone will phrase a query. Keyword research helps you find the right keyword that matches your business and brings targeted organic traffic to your blog or website.

1. It helps you understand what your targeted audience are looking for.
2. It helps you find out what other queries the users are looking for and not answered.
3. High engagement rates with targeted traffic.
4. You will know about the trends in the market.
5. It gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors and will also help you gain good amount of backlinks.
6. For businesses a good keyword research mean spending less on Google Ads, Bing Ads and other platforms.
7. For bloggers, this also means substantial growth in ad revenue and for businesses a growth in their organic traffic and sales.

Types of Keywords

Depending on the user, they can search for the same keywords in different manners. Beginners in stock will search differently while a professional investor searches for different terms.

There are three types of Keywords:

1. One word Keyword: As the title suggest, the one word keyword means a keyword with only one word. For example: “dog”, “apple”, “nike” and so on. These are the type of keywords that are hard to rank.
2. Two word Keyword: The keyword has two words when the user makes a search. For example: “nike shoes”, “school bags” and so on.
3. Long tail Keyword: The keyword consist of more than three word or phrase. For example: how to questions, where, what, etc questions.

PS: One-word and two-word keywords are also known as short-tail keywords.

There are 4 types of Keywords based on the intent of the user:

1. Commercial Keywords
2. Transactional Keywords
3. Informational Keywords
4. Navigational Keywords

In Semrush, their Intent section will tell you what kind of keyword it is.

Tools for Keyword Research

1. You will need either free or paid keyword research tool.
2. Make a list of basic keyword or list of competitive keywords.
3. Use those basic keyword ideas to create a list of optimizable keyword.
4. In excel, clean the keywords that do not match with your content.
5. Depending on the kind of content you create, you will need a website, ebook, video platform and so on.
6. Measuring tools for Keywords.

How to do Keyword Research

1. Competitor Research

We will identify two are three websites ranking on the keyword. It doesn’t take a lot of time to figure this out. A quick Google search can get you the search engine ranking. Do this with every shortlisted keyword from your excel sheet and figure out the top two or three websites on each keyword and learn what they are doing.

On the Semrush Dashboard, type the domain name of your competitors one by one and head towards organic search results to find out the keyword, SERP position, and so on. This will give you a detailed report on what keywords are working for them and which is profitable.

2. Finding Keyword Gaps

There are various keywords that many businesses may not have used or you never used thinking it won’t bring any traffic. However, there is always such keyword that is not used the most and you can use them to gain added traffic to your website.

3. Use of Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are the obvious keywords for any website if you sell office bags, it becomes your seed keywords. Now using your seed keyword you can find out many other keywords which are short and long-tail keywords. Use the Semrush Keyword Magic tool to find the keywords perfect for your business. Enter your keyword, primary country you are targeting and you will find keywords based on your seed keyword. There are three types of keywords you can find, exact match, broad match, phrase match, which I have already discussed in this post.

There are several other keyword research tools you can use, Semrush is my primary keyword research tool hence I used it as an example. Let me know what other keyword research tools do you use.