How to do keyword research for a new website? Tutorial for beginners

Good keyword research not only helps in your SEO and PPC but also helps you find the right topics for your niche that attract traffic.

While Google always keeps the digital marketers on toes with algorithm updates rolling out, one after the other, one thing that has consistently stayed intact is the need to do keyword research.

What do you mean by keyword research?

Keyword research is a process of analyzing and finding the best-suited search terms that people enter in the search engines related to your business. Keyword research plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PPC and other marketing strategies.

Keyword research helps to unveil the queries that your audience is searching, their popularity, ranking difficulty etc. There is essentially no cookie-cutter formula for doing keyword research that addresses all your woes. It is definitely not a rocket science that is tough to understand but a purely data-driven approach that needs a good analyzing ability.

You have to do proper keyword research and look out for what suits your website the best.

What is the objective of keyword research?

Keyword research is the basis of every online marketing campaign. The main goal is to identify what the target audience is searching on the search engines and what it will take to rank for the shortlisted keywords/phrases.

Without keywords you cannot:

effectively optimize your website
perform impressive link building
develop content for your audience

So, how to do keyword research for a brand new website? Let’s get started.

Start by setting up a spreadsheet to record and analyze data. Record the keywords along with their number of monthly searches (local and global both), keyword difficulty, approximate CPC etc.

Step 1: Generate Keyword Ideas using seed keywords

A seed keyword is a broad term related to your website or niche. The first thing that you need to do is to find relevant words and phrases for the business or website. This can easily be achieved by a simple brainstorming session. Watch out for the services, products and main focus of the business.

For example, if your niche is about “skincare”, then the seed keywords could be:

Dermatologist, dermatologists, dermatology clinic, skin care, skin specialist, skin specialists, skin treatment, skin treatments etc.

Jot down all the relevant keywords in your spreadsheet.

Next, you need a keyword research tool to expand on these ideas.

Step 2: Keyword Research Tool

There are many free and paid research tools available on the internet. You can use:

Free tools:

Google auto complete
Google Related searches feature
Google Adwords
Keywords everywhere
UberSuggest
Lsigraph

Paid Tools for better and effective analysis:

Moz
Ahrefs
SEMRush

Add the best suited keywords to your list based on relevancy, search volume, keyword difficulty, Cost per click (CPC), competition, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty etc.

What are the various SEO metrics?

Keyword Search Volume: Number of times per month, the given keyword has been searched in that country.
Return rate: It tells how often the same person searches the given keyword in a month.
Click through Rate (CPC): It is the average cost of the click for Ad for your targeted keyword.
Keyword Difficulty (KD): It tells how difficult it is to rank for the given keyword against your competitors. It is totally based on backlinks or number of referring domains to that website.
SEO Difficulty: Approximate competition in organic search.
Paid Difficulty: Approximate competition in paid search

Check for more keyword variations and pick the ones which you want to strive for.

If you are on a low budget or fixed budget, it is recommended that you optimize your budget for low competition and low CPC keywords. Also, don’t forget to discover long-tail keywords that could actually bring a lot of traffic to your website.

Pro Tip: If a keyword doesn’t match with the search intent, don’t bother working on it. Just leave it.

Step3: Group keywords according to priorities

Till now you have prepared a rough draft of all relevant keywords in your spreadsheet. It’s time to analyze them and finalize the best one as per your marketing strategy. Now group them according to your priorities. The keywords can be grouped as:

Low competition keywords

Apply various filters on your keyword research tools and find the ones that are suited best. Here you create content and use multiple variants of keywords on one page.

Link-bait worthy keywords

Tailoring content around these keywords would help you build the authority of your website and rank your pages.

Money terms

These keywords are focused on transactional intent and are essentially your core revenue drivers.

Pro Tip: For a commercial website selling either product or services, go with keywords having commercial intent (such as Buy, best, top, comparison etc) based on the current ranking website. If you have a blog or other informational website, then go with keywords that have informational intent.

Well, this was all about keyword research for a brand new website. Now it’s your turn – which is your favorite keyword research tool?

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