Keyword Research for SEO – The Ultimate Guide For Beginners (2020)

Use the proper keyword and you will get more search engine traffic…

Optimize your website keywords and you will reach your business goals…

How many times have you gotten such pieces in your journey as a business owner or wannabe SEO?

Probably a lot.

That’s because keywords and keyword research are the first things you should learn about when you want to grow your online business using search engine optimization.

I have been in your situation a long back, and I know how fruitful keyword research could be for anyone like you or me.

And hence,

This guide is written for a beginner like you to understand the most fundamental concept of SEO – keyword research.

Even if you never understood what is the purpose of keyword research, and how do you actually do it, this guide will help you understand every aspect of it.

My goal today is to help you learn about:

1. What is Keyword research?
2. What is the importance of Keyword research?
3. How Keyword research could benefit you?
4. How to perform Keyword research?

Let’s start with the basics…

What is Keyword research:

Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that would drive targeted traffic to your business. Mostly, this is done by identifying how your target users are finding a website like yours.

Let me simplify it,

when we are looking for a solution to any of our problems, we use a search engine like “Google” “Duckduckgo” to find an answer to that.

We expect the search engine to give us a solution within the first page of search, which is also known as SERP (Search engine results page).

Keyword research helps us to identify those “phrases”, “words”, “queries”, that the mass is asking using a search engine.

As a business or even a blog, when we know what kind of queries users (mass) are asking via search engines, we can optimize or create new pages, helping users to find the answer, and use that traffic to grow our business.

Alternatively, using the same keywords (queries) you can also run PPC ads on platform like Google ads or Facebook ads, to drive traffic to yours or your client websites.

In technical words;

The purpose of Keyword research is to find those “topic”, “ideas” and assign a business value to it, which is commonly used by your target audience. Another way to look at Keyword research is: It helps you to discover those questions and queries which your target customers are asking on the web, and gives you the advantage to speak the language your customer will understand.

Let us understand this with an example:

A simple example is, let’s say a recently became father wants to buy a stroller for his kid. He uses this query “Best baby stroller” in Google search, to find the best brand. Something like this…

Since Google search is smart, it auto-populates a lot of frequently used queries to help the father ask the right question.

Now, depending on the father location, and his understanding, he will stick with his query, or perhaps pick one that is suggested by Google.

Now, search engine keeps a log of how many times these queries are being asked by millions of users around the globe.

The process of keyword research shows the most popular query, along with geo-location, and the number of times these queries has been asked within a specific time (ex: 30 days).

Now, as a business owner, these stats would help you understand which of these queries, you should answer on your website, and in turn, it will help users to discover your website, and the solution.

The solution ultimately helps owners to drive more targeted traffic from search engines, which converts into direct sales, ad sales or even as an affiliate sales.

Well, this is how a keyword research helps.

With a little preparation, you could drive significant traffic to your blog or business and hence make most out of your hard work.

The process of optimizing your keyword for search engine is called “On Page SEO“.

That’s a topic for advanced users, but today we dwell deep into the keyword research.

Performing keyword research, help you experience the business in a record time. Since, you are using data with your emotions, it would help you maximize your work.

Let’s understand this with an example…

Earlier I talked about a father looking to buy a “Stroller” for his son. Now, lets assume you are a business who is into selling baby stroller. (You could be anyone, and replace baby stroller with your product).

By using keyword research tools, we could find data like which keyword “Also known as queries, question, search term” a parent is using on a search engine to find a solution.

The following result is from a tool called “SEMRush“, that shows similar queries with a lot of data as shown below:

Let’s try to understand what’s happening in this image. (Even if you don’t understand 100%, don’t worry as this is normal for a beginner.)

1. Keyword: This is the query users are asking to find the best baby stroller. When doing SEO, this is the phrase that we “target”, so we often call this as “target keyword” or “Focus keyword”.
2. Volume: This tells you roughly how many people are searching for that particular keyword in a given month. This is a very important metric as even if you assume a search term will be popular, search data will tell you otherwise. In the above example, you can see two similar keywords which have a considerable difference in monthly search volume:
   • Best rated baby stroller: 140 searches/month
   • Best rated baby stroller 2019: 30 searches/month
3. Trend: This one helps you to see if the keyword trend is going up (more people are searching) or going down (fewer people are searching). For example, iPhone 11 Pro could be a popular term in 2019-2020, but as a new iPhone is released, this term will lose value. You will understand this in-depth, as we move ahead in our keyword research guide.
4. Keyword difficulty: This is an important metric that helps you understand, how difficult or easy it is going to be rank for a target keyword on the first page of Google. These tools, compare all the existing ranking pages for things like “On page SEO”, “Backlink profile”, “domain authority” and a few others, to rank such queries. The lower the rank is, easier it would be to rank for.

Like this, there are many matrices you will be getting when you start with Keyword research.

Im nutshell, Keyword research helps you to make data driven decision. In case if you not aware, data is the new oil.

Before we move ahead,

Do read my earlier guide on difference between SEO keywords and queries, it will help you create a better mindset for keyword research.

Moving ahead, lets look at the benefits of keyword resarch.

What are the Importance of Keyword research:

Not all keywords are equal, and lets try to quantify this. The process of Keyword research could help your business (Blog, ecommerce, service or any other) in the following ways:

1. Keyword research helps you understand the language used by your target audience on a search engine. We typically use Google search as a base, since its the biggest search engine.
2. It helps you discover untapped queries, that could directly help you get paid customers from organic searches such as Google search, Baidu and others.
3. Engaged audience: The audience that you will be receiving is already hot (ready to buy), and you will get high engagement in the form of comments, sharing or even as a sale.
4. Market and customer trend: Periodically, performing Keyword research will help you to understand in which direction the market and customers are heading.
5. Competitive advantage: Incorporating keywords and SEO before your competitors, will give you a solid advantage. If done right, in a less crowded niche, it could help you earn a lot of backlinks as a first mover advantage.
6. Reduce PPC Cost: Keywords SEO will help you drive those traffic for free, which a business, usually pay for in the form of PPC. Such organic ranking could significantly reduce your business digital marketing cost.
7. More Ad revenue: Marketers and bloggers who rely on income from Google AdSense or Media.net, they could use the Keyword research to find high CPC keywords and thus increase their ad revenue significantly, with the same effort.

There are many more advantages of Keyword research, the above few are the prime one.

Here is a less known fact about Keyword research:

A lot of people mistake keyword research as the process of finding only high volume keywords, which is not the fact.

The task of you as an SEO is to remove those keywords which are not going to benefit your business in any way. Moreover, after finding profitable keywords, you will also learn how do you prioritize them for maximum benefits in shorter span.

Now, I’m not going into details of how you should target it, but if you are curious, you should read these two guides:

The good thing about Keyword research skills is, once you put this into practice, it just keeps getting better.

Now, its time to get into the technicality of KW research.

Types of Keywords based on the users intent:

Moving ahead with our previous example “Baby stroller”, a parent could ask this question with different intent. For example:

• A parent could ask to understand how to pick a baby stroller.
• A parent just wants to know which one is #1 baby stroller in today’s time.
• A parent is ready to buy best baby stroller right away.
• A doctor could be using this query for his research.

Do you see, how the same query meant different when used for different purpose. This is what is known as search intent.

This brings to the point, Keywords could be sub-divided into different types, based on the users’ intent.

These are the 4 most common type:

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

These 4 types determine, which keyword is directly going to affect your revenue. This is also closely related to content funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU), which is a learning for some other day.

Keyword could also be categorised in a few other ways, such as…

Number of words:

• Short tail Keywords a.k.a Head Keywords: (Ex: Baby stroller)
• Long-tail keywords. (Ex: Best baby stroller in Australia)

Also check out: Long tail keywords finder tools

What do you need for Keyword research?

Here at ShoutDreams, I follow a unique style of researching keywords.

You need the following things for performing Keyword research:

1. A tool (free or paid) for researching keywords
2. A list of Seed Words or a list of SEO competitive domains/businesses. (More on this further)
3. Using seed words to create a list of SEO keywords or using competitive websites to find profitable keywords
4. A document (excel or similar) to capture, and cleanup the keyword.
5. A system to delegate the final keywords for production ( Creating blog articles, eBooks, video content, product page)
6. Measuring the ranking using a keyword rank tracking tool.

Once you incorporate keyword research as your business marketing process, it helps you grow organically.

This the exact steps I follow to drive more than 15 million page-views every year and earn close to 1 million USD every year. This website “ShoutMeLoud” is bext example of outcome of Keyword research process.

After 10 years of implementation, I define the steps of Keyword research as:

1. Research
2. Cleanup
3. Execute/Delegate
4. Monitor
5. Optimize

These 5 steps will cover all the aspect of keyword research.

Now, I believe you and me are on the same page, and its time to learn how to do the keyword research.

3 Different ways to do Keyword research:

There are various techniques you could follow for researching SEO Keywords. Let’s look at some of the most popular once, which could be executed by even a newbie.

1. Find a competitor or top site keyword:

This is perhaps the easiest way to find keywords that are already working for an existing website. In this, process, we identify 2-3 websites which are the top in the niche we are targeting. For example: “best Baby stroller”

A quick Google search has shown the results from these top 3 websites. You could repeat the process for your target keyword, and once you have identified the top 3-4 winning websites, head to SEMRush, which is a keyword research tool.

Create a free SEMRush account here

On the SEMRush dashboard, enter the domain name that you identified from Google search and use it to find keywords that the domain is ranking for.

SEMRush will show you all the vital details like:

• Which keyword is driving maximum traffic to the particular website
• The volume, traffic %, KD, Keyword position
• Which page on the website is getting traffic for which keyword

SEMRush also gives you an option to filter keywords based on various factors. If you need a more detailed guide on this, let me know in the comment section below.

And like this, within minutes you have found the Pandora box of profitable keyword for your business.

2. Using Keyword Gap to find easy wins

This is one underutilized Keyword research technique that could help you find keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. This is idle for an existing website to find low hanging fruits.

To understand this method, read my earlier guide on Keyword Gap analysis – Methods and tools.

3. Using Seed words for researching Keywords

This is idle for any new and existing website alike. This is more time consuming than the above two methods, but this will help you discover unique keywords that no one is targeting.

You can use this method by using and Keyword research tools or even a long tail keyword tool.

We will again use SEMRush for a better understanding of this method.

• Head over to SEMRush
• Click on Keyword Magic tool

Enter your seed keyword and select the primary country that you are targeting.

Now, click on Search and within a few seconds, SEMRush will generate a ton of keywords from your seed keyword.

You can filter the keywords based on various parameters such as:

• Exact match will include the exact match of the phrase ‘baby stroller’ with the same words order. So you will get ‘buy baby stroller’, ‘where to buy baby stroller’, ‘buy baby stroller in San Francisco’, etc.
• Broad match will include all forms of the words ‘buy’ and ‘new’ and will suggest variations of the word order. So you will get all keywords from exact match plus ‘‘buy the newest baby stroller’, ‘buy baby stroller new’, ‘buy super-new baby stroller in New York’, etc.
• Phrase Match
• Related Keywords

You can do the same thing using the Google Keyword Planner tool (GKP), which is free. The only downside is, Keyword planner tool by Google is created for PPC and is not super friendly for SEO keyword research. However, for anyone who is running on a shoestring budget, the Keyword planner tool by Google is idle.

Note: In this guide, I used SEMRush, as an example because this is my go to Keyword research tools. However, you could always use similar tools such as KWFinder to achieve the same.

The above steps, will help you to capture the primary keyword. Now, once you have the vital piece of data, you need to do a few things such as:

1. Create the cluster of similar keyword
2. Create a SEO plan like to create new content or product pages, website structure
3. Measuring it, and optimizing it.

I will be talking about keyword clustering, and creating a SEO plan in the upcoming guides.

For now, I hope this guide helped you to understand what is keyword research, and how actually you could do keyword research.

I understand this is an extensive topic, and you might be having a few questions. Do utilize the comment section to ask your questions related to Keyword research.

Also, if you are an experienced SEO, feel free to share your way of performing keyword research by commenting below.