Complete Keyword Research Guide

We like to tell our clients that keywords are the “seeds” of SEO.

Alone they are nothing but potential, but given the right amount of sun, water and light, they can grow into something special – where they help your website soar. 

In the same way, adding a keyword to your website and leaving it is unlikely to achieve much. Sure, you might rank for it on Google, but not in a way that garners traffic. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of Google? In fact, research has shown that 75% of users don’t even scroll past the first page. 

But if you add the right keyword, in the right piece of optimised content, and point the correct links to it? You can rank your business on the first page for a high volume keyword that’s going to result in more converting traffic.

This is why organic keyword research is the foundation of SEO.

After all, if you’re writing about things nobody is searching for, you aren’t going to get any traffic – even if you create the best page ever..

As a result, mastering keyword research, and understanding what the associated data truly means about what people are looking for, is the single most important skill you can gain as an online marketer, online business or content creator. In our experience we feel if you get this wrong at the start, everything else is going to fall flat. It’s why we’ve written this article, so people can see how to properly complete keyword research for themselves. We’ve had clients come to us who have simply not understood the process and wasted months trying to either:

• Rank for the right keywords in the wrong way, or,

• Rank for wrong keywords the right way

So, when businesses and people do this, they either end up ranking high on google for keywords that don’t convert, or not ranking for anything at all.

The consequences of doing it wrong are simply too big. Pick the wrong keywords, and most of your time and effort has been wasted.

You’ll be glad to know, then, that it isn’t as complicated as it first seems. When we break it down for clients they’re usually relieved. But, businesses we’ve spoken to are often in need of an all encompassing guide to give them a hand at the start of the process.

This guide will tell you everything you need to know. You might want to grab a coffee first.

Let’s start with the basics:

Basic Guide to Keyword Research

If you’re completely new to the concept of keyword research for SEO, this might be the most important section to get your head around.

If you’re already an experienced SEO looking for more advanced tips, you might want to skip this section entirely.

First, the obvious question:

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a task during which online business owners, content creators, and online marketers discover valuable search terms that their target customers type into search engines such as Google – especially those related to services, business or products.

For example, if you own a tiling business in Cardiff, “tile shop cardiff” would be a relevant keyword for your business. Just like Cardiff seo agency, or SEO agency Cardiff would be a valuable keyword to rank for, for us.

If somebody is typing those words into Google, you can be fairly sure your business will be of interest to them, and that they are a potential customer of yours.

By including a relevant keyword on your website, you’re telling Google that you’re what this person is looking for, which can result in you showing up in those search results.

Without doing this, that searcher may never find out you exist.

As a result, any online business needs to find any and all relevant keywords to their business, and build their online content around these keywords.

This can maximise the probability the right people will find you at little to no cost (depending on keyword difficulty).

Failure to do so will mean you’re missing such opportunities – and your competitors likely won’t be.

It’s that simple!

Why is Keyword Research Important for Online Businesses?

As already detailed, keywords are how potential customers or viewers of your website will find you.

If you publish a blog post on a topic that nobody is searching for, you’ll get no views, regardless of how good it is.

This is actually the normal scenario – over 91% of all pages on the internet receive zero traffic from Google.

Of those that do, only 0.21% receive over 1,000 visits.

Keyword research allows you to:

1. Ensure there is search demand for a piece of content or a new service page before you create it

2. Find out how many people are searching for that type of content, and exactly how they phrase their searches

3. Include those phrases in the exact same format and sequence in your content,in order to hopefully get a reliable and consistent stream of relevant traffic.

How Does Content Marketing Fit In?

If you’ve been in business or marketing for a while, you might be surprised by just how much things have changed.

There was a time when traditional marketing was the main route to increase your business – with strategies like billboards, magazine adverts, radio ads etc.

And it is true that skills from back then, such as copywriting, are still incredibly useful in the modern day.

The simple fact, however, is that as time goes on, the average person becomes more and more aware of just how untrustworthy these traditional marketing formats can be.

Most people are very aware that you will say your business is the best around, so they want to learn what others say about you, as this is assumed to be more honest or reliable.

After all, what would you find more trustworthy – a page of reviews about an automobile written by people who have owned it, or an advertisement for the car in the middle page of your newspaper, paid for by the company itself? Well – the answer is obvious, and Google realizes that too. 

Luckily, keyword research and content marketing allows us to reach people in a much more believable, useful, and effective way.

While somebody may choose not to read your sales page, aware of what it’s trying to do, they are much more likely to read a useful guide on a related topic.

By producing such content, and including the right keywords, you can make your target audience find you, visit your website, and consider you an authority all at the same time. 

Now add a call-to-action at the end to encourage some readers to become customers, and do this for all relevant topics? And you just might never need a traditional ad ever again!

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what keyword research is, why it matters and how to make use of it, it’s time to move onto the next section – how to actually find keyword ideas that work for you.

How to Find Keyword Ideas

In order to effectively conduct keyword research, you need two things.

1. An understanding of how keywords work, and a tool for analysing them (such as AHRefs or SEMRush – more on this shortly)

2. An understanding of your industry, it’s expectations and what potential customers are looking for

When looking for keywords, the key things to look at are relevance, intent, demand, and competition.

Relevance is crucial because choosing an irrelevant keyword will achieve nothing. For example, if customers are searching “teeth whitening kit with LED light” in Google, and you sell a teeth whitening kit that doesn’t come with a light, this keyword is irrelevant to you. You can add it to your site and rank for it, sure. But anybody typing that keyword is specifically looking for a kit with an LED light, which means they have a very low chance of being converted to a sale on your product. This keyword could have 10,000 monthly search volume, and you could be ranked 1st for it, but you’d still be unlikely to make many, if any, sales from it. Do the same thing for “teeth whitening kit”, though, and you’re flying.

Intent is related to relevance but is more about what the searcher is expecting to see. For example if somebody types “cheap laptops” in Google, you can assume they’re looking to buy a laptop, making this a high priority keyword for IT hardware companies.

But somebody typing “laptop repair” is likely looking for a service rather than a product. 

And you certainly wouldn’t want to try to sell a high end, highly priced laptop under a keyword starting with “cheap”. 

Therefore, just targeting any laptop related keyword isn’t necessarily going to work – it has to match closely with what you’re offering, and also show the correct intent.

Demand relates to the search volume of the term in question. This tells you how many people look for this phrase each month and therefore whether the product, topic or service are in high demand. For example if you’re looking to launch a new product but only 10 people search for it per month, there is likely almost no way to get a significant amount of sales. However, if you need 100 customers per month to succeed, and 10,000 people per month are looking for that type of product, then you know the demand is comfortably available.

Competition refers to how many websites are already ranked for this term, and how high quality they are. Launching into a low competition niche with few or no established competitors is going to be a lot easier, and allow you to rank more quickly, compared to launching into a saturated market.

So – here’s how you can effectively find keyword ideas. 

1. Think up seed keywords

Seed keywords are the most basic keywords you will use as a starting point in your research.

While you won’t be able to think up every potential keyword (that’s why we need to do research in the first place), you can likely think up some of the simplest, most obvious ones.

Most keyword research tools such as AHrefs ask you to enter a seed keyword, and then provide you with a list of all of the related keywords they’re able to find.SEMrush call this their magic tool – where you put an initial keyword in and they’ll give you a list of relevant ones that you can sort by volume, intent, or difficulty.

Coming up with seed keywords is super easy – they are the shortest keywords in your niche, usually made up of one or two words (but it could be three at a push).

For example, if you’re selling a clean water machine with a filter, you wouldn’t type that whole name out as a seed keyword – that is a longer tail keyword (more on these later).

In this case, your seed keyword would likely simply be “water machine” as it’s the simplest and shortest thing a person could type when looking for your product.

Other relevant seed keywords could be “water filter”, or “clean water machine”.

Don’t spend too much time on your seed keywords, as this is just step 1 of the process. However, it’s worth writing a short list so you have something to attack.

2. Find Related Keywords with a Software Tool

Next, you will need to find a Keyword Research tool. One of the most popular and highly regarded is AHrefs and its Keyword Explorer. This, alongside SEMrush, are our recommendations for the best keyword research tools out there. You can even check them out for free to get your bearings before parting with cash. 

There are dozens more available though, including Google’s own Keyword Planner. Most people in the SEO sphere will have a favourite, but for this initial stage they’re all on a par.

Once you’ve decided on a keyword research tool you like, and have signed in, all you need to do is enter your seed keywords into the tool. 

You will be given a list of related keywords, along with related data such as monthly search volume and amount of competitors:

Most tools will also list commonly asked questions related to your keyword:

All you need to do is go through the list, removing any that aren’t relevant to your product, service or website – any that don’t have the right intent, don’t have enough demand to be targeted, or any that you consider too competitive to be worthwhile.

Of course, you probably want to remove branded keywords too. An example, in our first screenshot above, is “brita water filter”. Anyone searching that keyword is looking to buy a specific brand and is therefore unlikely to be interested in your product. Therefore targeting this will mostly be a waste of time and effort. You may win some sales from it if your product is highly comparable to the one being searched for, but in the vast majority of cases these branded keywords (from competitors) can be ignored in the first instance.

Now you have your initial keywords, and a comprehensive list of other related keywords from high demand all the way down to the lowest demand ones. This is perfect as it’ll give us a range of options to target later. For example, we might choose to target the lowest competition keyword first to gain a quick ranking and visibility. Longer term our goal will likely be to rank for the highest searched term and all other relevant ones, as this is what will put our product in front of the highest number of potentially interested people.

3. Take Proven Keywords from Competitors

Now that you’ve chosen your seed keywords, and used a tool to expand your list into a wider range of relevant keywords, you should have a decent list to work from.

However, one important strategy that remains is to learn what our competitors are already ranking for and making sales from.

Luckily, most keyword research tools allow you to enter a competitor’s website to see what they’re already ranked for.

In AHrefs, this tool is the “Site Explorer”

If you’re using SEMrush – just put any website into the bar and you’ll be able to see their estimated traffic, and what they’re ranking for:

All you need to do is enter the URL for a competitor’s website. This will tell you everything you need to know about how they’ve gotten to their current stage, including:

• Keywords they’re organically ranked for
• The pages of their site that are ranked and at what position
• Domain rating
• Amount of backlinks pointing to the site
• The amount of unique domains that make up these backlinks
• Total traffic the site receives
• A graph of how their organic ranks and traffic have changed over time

This is a gold mine because it’ll give you some powerful knowledge including

• What keywords in your niche have real buyer intent and turn into genuine sales?
• Which keywords don’t and are best disregarded?
• What keywords are your competitors getting most of their sales from, and how many backlinks did it take to rank them there?
• Who are the biggest authorities in your niche, and how many links would you need to overtake them?

Let’s check Brita in SEMrush as an example and see what they’re ranking for:

Quick overview, showing estimated traffic etc. Further down you’ll see this:

These are their top keywords, sorted by volume – click view details and it’ll take you to the full list of keywords they rank for on Google – letting you know what your competitor is ranking for along with intent.

This is just the start – knowing what your competitors do going forward will be a constant benefit. If you see a competitor make a major change to their site, you can even see whether this has a positive or negative impact on their ranks and traffic.

When you look at your list of keywords you’ve taken from your competitors, you will likely see two main types of keyword:

1. Ones you already had in your list – you’ve just proven these can make genuine sales and are worth targeting.
2. Ones you didn’t know about before – you’ve just discovered whole new opportunities you may never have had otherwise.

You can also get creative when looking for competitors, and shouldn’t just use your seed keywords. If you are looking to sell a herbal supplement product, (let’s say reishi mushroom for example), then searching “reishi mushroom” might just bring up a bunch of eCommerce websites and Amazon. But if you instead search “reishi mushroom manufacturer”, you might find a wide range of specialists who have been focusing their business around this product for a long time.

As you can imagine, combining all of the keywords they have ranked for, along with the ones you’ve already found, will give you some excellent coverage.

4) Look elsewhere, beyond Google

You’ve likely covered the majority of your relevant keywords already.

However, it’s also worth mentioning that many of your competitors may be using the same tools.

 While these tools are an incredible way to find keyword opportunities, there is likely a wide range of different new options appearing all the time. Some of these may not even be acknowledged by these tools yet. Others may currently be in such a period of low seasonality that you basically disregarded them due to low demand, despite this not necessarily always being the case.

You need to think about where your target audience is looking, or spending time.

Options may include:

• Niche industry forums
• Facebook groups
• Subreddits
• Discord
• Quora

By browsing this type of website, you may find questions being asked directly by your audience.

While these keywords may have smaller search volume than the ones you found in your research tool, they are also likely very interesting to your target audience and maybe even about to trend upwards in interest.

What’s potentially even more useful, is that few of your competitors will be targeting them. So even if search demand is low, you can likely rank for them quickly with little work and pick up a little bit of traffic that is both easy and relevant.

By now you likely have a nice big list of relevant keywords you need to target, but how do you go about deciding what to do with them?

Let’s take a look in our next section:

How to Analyse Your Keywords

Now, you need to prioritise your keywords to find out which you should be putting a lot of effort into targeting, and which are less important.

There are multiple factors to look at here, but the first is probably the most obvious:

Search Volume

For many, search volume is the number 1 thing they look for, and for good reason. In the image above, you can see that the volume (amount of people searching for the term) for “best SEO agency” is 3.6k in the USA, and in the UK it’s 480 etc. Those wanting to rank for the term would look at this first to make sure there’s volume.

After all, if you rank a page on your site for a keyword with very low traffic, that page is never going to get a significant amount of traffic from that keyword.

Rank for a keyword with thousands of monthly search volume, on the other hand, and significant traffic is basically a given.

As a result, you should always be looking at search volumes when choosing your keywords, and always keeping in mind which ones are likely to bring a significant audience, and which are not.

Important things to remember about the search volume metrics in most keyword research tools, are:

• They are country specific, so make sure you choose the country for which you think your site is best suited. E.g if you’re running a business in the UK, you need to look at UK keywords. If you’re ranking an English language content site, you can look at English speaking countries like the UK and US. Just be sure to always check the country you’re searching in, so you know the results are relevant.
• They are a running average based on the past 12 months, so a monthly search volume of 6,000 doesn’t necessarily mean 6,000 people have searched the keyword this month.
• Search volume doesn’t equal views, so you won’t get 1,000 views per month by ranking for a keyword with 1,000 searches, even if you’re first. Most first time posts will get 10-12% conversation rates. 20% is good, you may even get up to 30% if you do very well in a low competition keyword. More than this is very unlikely as some people will always look further down.
• It’s the total number of searches, not the amount of individual searchers. So if one single person types the keyword 10 times in a month, that will add 10 to the search volume, not one.

At this stage, you want to filter out any keywords that aren’t worth targeting based on search volume. This can be done simply by removing them from your spreadsheet, or filtering them out of the results in your keyword research tool.

If a keyword is too small to be worth targeting, simply remove it (unless you’re in a specific niche and the keyword is going to be lucrative no matter the volume)

You will likely want to do this with some very large keywords at the beginning, too. This is because a large number of the most successful competitors will be targeting them at all times, making it very difficult, expensive and time consuming to rank for them.

By going for medium sized keywords, you can avoid this competition and still get some decent traffic, which will allow you to build up your site authority and attack the larger keywords effectively at a later date.

You may also see some keywords with zero search volume, and wonder why they exist at all. This just means that somebody has searched them at some point in the past, (possibly once, possibly more), but that the search volume has crashed so much in recent times that the monthly average is zero. 99% of the time you will want to disregard these keywords. However, you may spot one and think, “I think that will trend up in the near future because x is happening.”

These would be worth ranking for, as you can likely do so easily and quickly, and if you’re correct about the demand increasing, you should remain at the top and reap the benefits.

Many keyword research tools also display graphs of trends, so you can see if the demand for your keyword is increasing or decreasing lately, which may be helpful.

Relevance & Searcher Intent

Along with search volume, relevance and searcher intent are the most important thing to look out for when doing keyword research. It can effectively negate even the largest volume search terms.

After all, search volume means nothing without relevance, and relevance needs at least a decent search volume to mean anything.

Let’s say you’re selling a laptop, and doing keyword research for it. But the biggest keyword you’ve found is “laptop with stand” with 100s of thousands, or even millions of monthly searches. 

If your laptop product doesn’t come with a stand, this keyword is completely worthless. Even if you managed to rank first for this keyword somehow, you would be very unlikely to get a significant amount of sales or traffic from it, for the simple fact that you aren’t matching the intent of the searchers.

Now is a good time to cut down your list  further with this in mind – removing any keywords that don’t have perfect relevance to your website.

Also – if a specific keyword is informational in intent, rather than commercial – that means people are looking for information, and not to make a purchase…there’s no point traying to rank a product page for a purely informational search – because people don’t want to buy, only learn. There are of course breaks to this strategy depending on the niche – but in general, especially when starting out, that’s the rule of thumb and we see it work with our clients.

Keyword Difficulty/CPC

Keyword difficulty simply refers to how difficult it’ll be to rank to a high position in this keyword.

While this roughly correlates with the search volume, it’s more directly related to how many competitors are already targeting this keyword, and how effective they are.

This relates to relevance and the existing market, so a keyword with high buyer intent that has been well known for a long time is likely to already be overwhelmed with competition, whereas a relatively unknown or long tail keyword may be super easy to rank for, even if search volumes are the same.

AHrefs actually gives you a metric called Keyword Difficulty (or KD) to help you easily see how competitive a keyword is at a glance. SEMrush does the same thing.

Many other keyword research tools do this too, although the name of the metric may vary.

We recommend targeting difficult keywords immediately if you can. They will likely take a long time, and many backlinks to get a decent rank for, so the sooner you make a start, the better. A lot of people think the opposite is true and go for easier keywords. The reality is that you should be doing both at the same time. Target hard keywords you want to hit, but also target easier ones.

If you don’t have access to a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs, or are using a free one that doesn’t offer such metrics, you can also check the CPC of a keyword to judge its difficulty. This metric is typically more useful for advertisers focusing on PPC, rather than marketers focusing on SEO. However, it does tell you how much those advertisers are willing to pay to get traffic from this keyword, which will give you a good idea of buyer intent and competition.

Now that we’ve covered how to analyse your keywords, you should have removed a bunch of keywords that aren’t relevant enough, or are too competitive, or don’t have enough search volume. The keywords you have left are likely all well worth targeting.

Therefore, the next stage of our guide is focused on explaining how you can use this keyword research to benefit your website.

How to Target Keywords

We will bring you a more focused guide on how to optimise and rank posts for specific keywords too to go into detail on this topic, but there are a few things worth noting now.

Plan Content Pages & Blog Posts Around Keywords

By now you likely have a small, hyper focused list of keywords that are pretty similar in topic.

It would be nice if you could write one detailed piece of content focused around all of them, and rank it for all of them quickly.

But this isn’t always possible, and the reason is that different keywords might suit different pieces of content.

For example a company selling Vitamin C supplements might have the following keywords in the list:

• High quality Vitamin C
• Does Vitamin C make you feel better

The first keyword is clearly a great buyer intent keyword – anyone typing it is likely looking for high quality Vitamin C to buy. Therefore, you should optimise your Vitamin C product page for this keyword and try to rank for it – any traffic you gain from this is highly likely to be interested in purchasing the product.

On the other hand, the second keyword has close to zero buyer intent, and is more a request for information.

Rather than optimising your product page for this keyword, you’d be better off writing a detailed blog post on the benefits and risks (if any) of vitamin C, and including this keyword as a topic there. This would allow you to go into detail answering the question and give the searcher all the info they need (and after reading what you have to say, you may even turn that informational blog post into a sales funnel – and at the worst, it’ll help get your brand out there.)

While not pointing them to the product page may seem counter-productive, this method will rank much easier since you’re discussing the topic in detail and it matches the searcher’s intent. It will result in the searcher spending more time on your page as they read about the topic. This will help improve your site’s authority on the topic, and if the content is well written, it will encourage the reader to see you as an authority on the topic.

All of this will help in potentially bringing them back to purchase your vitamin C supplements another day – or by a well placed call to action in the blog post that links directly to the product page, you may even be able to win that sale today.

The point is, it’s best to answer the searcher’s question, and only then show them the product page when they’re well informed – sending them directly there when they are still unsure is unlikely to result in a sale.

People looking for information are the top of your funnel. People who have the information but are looking for a product that suits their needs are the middle of the funnel. People looking to purchase are at the bottom of the funnel. Each page or content piece should be focused on capturing somebody at the appropriate stage of the funnel, and moving them further along it.

Best Keyword Research Tools

Here are some of the better keyword research tools you can use as a business owner to get started. They’re well rated for beginners and some you can use sparingly for free (or a free trial), but if you want to use the more advanced settings there can be a bit of a learning curve:

• Google Search Console
• AHRefs
• Moz
• WordStream
• SemRush

Each SEO agency, or marketing agency, will have a suite of tools they prefer. The reality is that they all do a lot of the same thing, but some excel more in some ways than others. 

Need Help With This?

We hope this gives you some insight regarding how you approach keyword research and showcase how important it is. If you mess up your keyword research, you could end up taking your business down the wrong path. It’s why it’s something we do with our clients in fine detail. 

That said, all you need is some of the above tools and you can do it yourself.

However, as the #1 SEO agency in Cardiff, serving local and global clients, we undergo keyword research daily and set up whole SEO campaigns based off of our successful forward planning. This integrates with other aspects such as your Google Business Profile, link building, and technical SEO. 

If you need help with this, have any questions you’d like to ask, or want to discuss further marketing or search engine optimisation for your business please contact us here.