Step by Step Guide to Keyword Research for SEO

A Step By Step guide to Keyword Research

Hello Readers,
Whether you want to rank your website on the first page of Google or Bing or Yahoo or any other search engine. You can’t start your SEO without Keyword research.
Keyword study is my favorite topic and I enjoy doing keyword research for SEO. Becuase Keywords are the very important for SEO success.
In this ultimate keyword research tutorial, I will be sharing many untold secrets about keyword research, keyword research tips and tricks and various tools you can use for keyword study.
Here is list of topics to be covered in this Tutorial

• What is Keyword Research?
• Why is Keyword research important for SEO?
• What are different types of keywords?
• List of Keyword Research tools
• Keyword Research Process
• Keyword Research Mistakes

Let’s start..

Purpose of this tutorial is to help you find most relevant keywords for your SEO project and improve your ranking to get targeted traffic.

Why should we do Keyword Research?

1. Identify what people are searching about your topics
2. Understand potential search volume of keywords
3. Find relevant and alternate search keywords
4. Get more keywords ideas for creating content

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of doing research about what search queries are used by your target audience and identifying right keywords for your website. Keyword Research is the first step of SEO process.
You can’t start your SEO project without knowing right keyword for your website.
Keyword research is like market research, it’s about trying to know what your customers are looking for, what topics are in demand and what your visitors will search to get your website.
Let’s try to understand this topic in detail.

What is Keyword and what is Search Query?

A search query is what visitor will enter in Google to find results.
For example, if a visitor is looking for hotels which are near Mumbai Airport, he will search for Hotels Near Mumbai Airport
he will search for Hotels Near Mumbai Airport
Hotels Near Mumbai Airport
Cheap Hotels in Mumbai near Airport
Best Hotels in Mumbai Near Andheri
So, visitor may use search query to get results

What is Keyword?

A keyword is important “word” in a search query.
Here important word is hotels near Mumbai and hotels in Mumbai
By doing keyword research we can make a list of various search queries and keywords people search in Google

Different Types of Keywords and Keyword Strategy

There are mainly 3 types of Keywords

1. Generic Keywords or Short Tail Keywords
2. Long Tail Keywords or More Specific Keywords

What is generic Keywords or Short Tail Keywords?
Short Tail keywords of generic keywords are single words or may be up to 3 words.
Examples of Generic Keywords (Short Tail Keywords)

• Digital Camera
• Cheap Laptop
• Mobile Phone
• Cheap Hotels
• Car Loan

Short Tail keywords are difficult to rank, short tail keyword search volume is high and competition is also high.

What is long Tail Keyword?

Long Tail Keywords are a group of more than 3 keywords. Long Tail keywords are more specific, you may not get huge traffic from long tail keywords but you will get more relevant traffic using long tail keywords.  Long Tail keywords are used when you face competition for short tail keywors.

Examples of Long Tail Keywords

1. Best laptop for gaming with 8GB RAM
2. Budget hotels near Mumbai airport
3. How to apply for Passport online in India

If you see above keywords, they are more meaningful and you can understand the intention of a person who is searching.

Image from SEOPRESSOR

Here is a Keyword research Process

1. Identify the most relevant keyword for your website
2. Make a list of possible search queries using various keyword research tools and software
3. Identify keywords which are more relevant and important for your business or a website
4. Group Similar Keywords together and make your website structure.
5. Once you have identified keywords and created website structure, start your content plan.
6. Decide on your landing pages and start on-page optimization.

Keyword research process is simple but it looks complex, you must practice keyword research and align your keyword research with your target audience needs and what kind of visitors you want to attract to your website. 

My Keyword Research Process

Depending on a project, I decide which process to use.

Understand target audience and their needs

I always start with the target audience for my website and their problems, what they will search then I make a list of 5 to 10 short tail (Root keywords) to start my keyword research campaign.
I use those root keywords as a base keyword and use keywordtoo.io to create a list of related keywords for my SEO campaign.
Keyword tool.io is free Keyword research tool which can be used to find related keywords. Keyword tool.io can generate upto 700 keywords from Google Autocomplete in just few seconds.

After getting list of keywords, I copy selected keywords to my Google Sheet for filtering.
If you are using free version of keyword tools.io, you won’t be able to see search volume. You must subscribe to their paid plan for get more details about keywords.
At this stage, I would not suggest you to subscribe for paid plan. You can start with free plan now.
I have prepared a list of Keyword Research Tools, you can compare various tools and decide which one is best for your specific requirements.