A Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research for SEO

seo research

In a search world that is changing quickly, keyword research has not changed. It is essential for inbound marketers to know how to conduct keyword research if they want to enhance their websites.

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

What is keyword research?

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 particular purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or wide-ranging marketing. Keyword research can identify queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their position in difficulty, and more.

Why is keyword research crucial for businesses?

Keyword research helps you find your SEO sweet spot — the overlap of keywords that aren’t too hard to rank for and keywords that you can confidently produce high-quality content on. It also tracks the queries that your target community is actually searching on Google.seo research

Keyword research “determines who your competitors are and which area of the search landscape you can rank for,” according to HubSpot Growth Manager Amal Kalepp, with whom I spoke. What provides you rankability is researching keywords and figuring out the sweet spot for your website or blog.seo research

Both your content strategy and your overall marketing plan can benefit from insights gleaned from real search phrases.

Even though your Purranormal investigator Agency has the best ghost-detecting kittens in the industry, if you build your content strategy on the term “cat paranormal detective,” you won’t get any traffic or luck (I checked).

When conducting online research, people utilize keywords to locate solutions; therefore, if your material is effectively seen by your audience, you will see an increase in traffic.

As a result, you ought to target such queries with content that cleverly incorporates those keywords.

Furthermore, the inbound model places less emphasis on producing content that revolves around our message. We ought to be producing material based on what consumers are interested in learning instead.seo research

Put another way, our audience comes to us because we offer relevant content that satisfies their questions. And keyword research is where it all starts.

Benefits of Keyword Research

Conducting keyword searches has many uses, the most popular being

Marketing Trend Insight

By focusing your content on themes and phrases that your audience is interested in, you may gain insights into current marketing trends and improve the effectiveness of your content creation process.seo research

Traffic Growth

The more appropriately chosen keywords you are for the material you provide, the higher you will appear in search engine results and the more visitors you will get to your website.

Customer Acquisition

Including a compelling call-to-action in your content will help users go from the awareness stage to the point of purchase if it fulfills their needs.

It is possible to address the queries that the majority of your audience wants to know the answers to by conducting keyword research for popularity, search volume, and overall purpose.seo research

For example, with a monthly search volume (MSV) of 800, the Purranormal Detective Agency would be better off creating outstanding content on the more general topic of paranormal investigators.

Keywords vs. Topics

I hear HubSpot SEOs talk about “search intent” all the time. This is due to the fact that the reason a user enters a specific keyword affects a great deal.

Users’ difficulties must be resolved by our content. We need to prepare for your queries if you used the search term “SEO keyword strategy” to find this article. and after that respond to them.

Though SEO is changing quickly, keyword research is still essential to understanding search intent. It lets you know what subjects matter to individuals and how well-liked those subjects are in reality with your target audience.

Here, the word “topics,” in the plural, is crucial. You may find and organize your content into categories or buckets that you’ll utilize to produce content by conducting keyword research on terms that receive a lot of monthly searches.seo research

After that, you may choose which keywords to target and search for based on these topics.

Elements of Keyword Research

There are three main elements to conducting keyword research.

1. Relevance

Google uses relevancy to rank content.

This is when search intent becomes relevant. If your content satisfies searchers’ needs, it will only rank for that term.

Additionally, Google will not rank your content as highly if it does not offer higher value than its rivals. Your material must be the finest resource for the query.

You might think that “SEO tips for small businesses” would be the most relevant term if you’re beginning an SEO company that specializes in small enterprises. However, notice this dashboard for Ahrefs keyword research

The MSV of “SEO tips for small businesses” is 300, and the keyword difficulty is high. The parent topic, “small business SEO,” has a very high keyword difficulty score of 2,500 and an MSV of 2,500.seo research

2. Authority

Google gives more credence to websites that it considers reliable.

You may establish yourself as an authoritative source by adding valuable, educational content to your website and promoting it to gain backlinks and social signals.

We put a lot of effort into making sure that HubSpot.com and the HubSpot Blog provide the content that visitors are looking for. The root domain and its subdomain so have extremely high domain authority.seo research

You have less likelihood of ranking if you’re not regarded as an authority in the field or if the SERPs for a term are dominated by authoritative sites (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic) that you can’t compete with.

3. Volume

If no one ever searches for a particular keyword, even if you are on the first page, you will not receive any traffic. It resembles opening a store in a deserted town.

Monthly search volume, or MSV for short, is a metric of volume that counts how many times a keyword is searched monthly across all audiences.

Compare the “paranormal investigator” and “cat detective agency” Ahrefs results

Never mind that your company stands out thanks to its kitten detectives—not a single person is looking for a cat that can identify their own poltergeist.

Although “paranormal investigators” isn’t a very common search term, it receives a lot more traffic than “cat detective agency,” making it a far better keyword to aim for.

Assuming a larger MSV is better is one of the main mistakes individuals make, according to Kalepp. “With millions of searches, ‘Instagram marketing’ might seem like the best option to rank for,” she explains. However, that makes ranking for that much more challenging.

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

Consider the subjects you wish to rank for in terms of general buckets before you begin.

Approximately five to ten topic buckets that you believe are critical to your organization will be generated; later on in the process, you will utilize those topic buckets to assist generate some targeted keywords.

These are presumably the subjects you blog about most frequently if you’re a regular blogger. Alternatively, it’s possible that these are the subjects that salespeople discuss the most.

Consider yourself as your buyer personas. What kinds of searches would members of your target audience make if they wanted to find your business?

Step 2. Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.

It’s time to find some keywords that fit into the topic buckets you want to concentrate on now that you have a few of them.

Because your ideal client is most likely searching for those particular terms, you believe it is crucial to rank for these keyword phrases in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

For example, I would come up with a few keyword phrases I believe people would put in related to the topic “marketing automation” if I were brainstorming ideas for the last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company.

These could consist of:

• AI marketing tools
• marketing automation tools
• how to use marketing automation software
• what is marketing automation?
• how to tell if I need marketing automation software
• lead nurturing
• email marketing automation
• top automation tools

The goal of this phase is to generate a mental list of terms that you believe prospective buyers may use to look for material associated with that specific topic bucket, not to develop your final list of keyword phrases.

Later on, we will refine the lists to ensure that you don’t have too many options.

Remember that Google encrypts more phrases every day, so finding out which keywords already drive traffic to your website is another clever strategy for coming up with keyword suggestions.

Website analytics tools like HubSpot’s Sources report, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console—all of which are accessible through the Traffic Analytics tool—are required to accomplish this.

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

User intent is now one of the most critically important factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google.

That means it’s vital that your web page addresses the problem a searcher wants to deal with rather than simply including the keyword the searcher used.

So, how does this effect your keyword research?

It’s tempting to take keywords at face value, but they can have a lot of different meanings.

Step 4. Research related search terms.

When conducting keyword research, you may have already considered this innovative step. If not, it’s a fantastic method to complete those lists.

Consider the related search terms that show up when you enter a keyword into Google if you’re having trouble coming up with additional keywords that people might be using to get information about a particular subject.

I looked up “AI search grader” on Google, a brand-new HubSpot free product. I can see that people are particularly looking for a free AI search grader at the bottom of the first page.