In this complete guide of keyword research for SEO, you’ll learn about:
- Basics of keyword research
- Finding low-competitive keywords
- Fundamentals of search intent
- Validating the right keywords for content
- SEO tools, and more
The best part?
I’ll show you the step-by-step process that helped me grow DigitalGYD to over 42,000 organic visitors per month.
Let’s jump right into it.
Quick navigation
- What is Keyword Research?
- Importance of keyword research for SEO
- Types of Keywords
- Types of Keyword Research
- Keyword research elements
- How To Come Up With Keyword Ideas
- How to Validate Keywords
- How to Analyze Keywords Manually (My Favorite)
- Keyword Research Tools
- Conclusion
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is a way of finding search terms used by people in search engines like Google, Bing, etc. For SEO folks, keyword research also helps in finding keywords that are easy to rank and drive massive traffic to the site.
In short, keyword research is the first step of SEO that can either break or make your content effort.
Importance of keyword research for SEO
The fact is: not every keyword is a good fit for your site even if it has a good enough search volume. Factors other than search volume that plays a major role in finding the right keywords are:
- Keyword difficulty
- Backlink-profile of top ranking pages
- User intent
- Content depth, etc.
So, without conducting in-depth keyword research, it is hard to find the keywords that will rank higher in the search engine.
Now that we know why keyword research is important for SEO, let’s understand different types of keywords.
Types of Keywords
There are basically many types of keywords, but we’ll be focusing on the three most used types in the industry:
- Short tail keywords
- Long-tail keywords
- LSI keywords
What is Short-Tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords or sometimes called head keywords are terms that refer to broad and generic topics. Usually, these keywords have high search volume and are difficult to rank for because of high competition.
For example, “running shoes” is an example of a short-tail keyword.
Here is why:
- It refers to a generic topic (running shoes itself is a broad category)
- Have high search volume (= 834.3k/month, according to Semrush tool)
- Difficult to rank as well (High authoritative sites are ranking on the first page)
From the SEO perspective, it is a good practice to target short-tail keywords if your site has high authority, a strong link profile, and built a topical relevance on the topic.
In that way, it will be easier and worthwhile chasing these highly competitive keywords.
What is Long-Tail Keywords
long-tail keywords are the terms that refer to very specific topics and have less competition and search volume as well. Generally, these keywords consist of three or more words.
An example of a long-tail keyword is “Best running shoes for men under $100.”
Here are a few reasons why the above example is a long-tail keyword:
- Very specific topic
- Low search volume (= 330/month) as compared to short-tail keywords
- Less competitive, as per the top 10 ranking pages
Since these keywords are low competitive, SEO experts prefer targeting long-tail keywords for a less authoritative and new site even though the search volume is less.
So, the reason why we call these long-tail and short-tail keywords are mainly because of search volume and the number of search queries.
Let me cite an illustration.
But here’s the fact:
There’s no such rule that short-tail keywords are always going to have a higher search volume than long-tail keywords.
For example, the global search volume of “Reduce belly fat” is 27,300/month, whereas the search volume for “how to reduce belly fat” is 1,03,000/month.
In short, don’t just get obsessed about the type of keyword. Instead, look for more data like search volume, user intent, difficulty, etc.
Types of Keyword Research
When it comes to keyword research, we have traditional and competitive types of keyword research. You can use any of them to find loads of awesome keywords for your site, even though they follow different approaches.
Let’s quickly look at them in detail:
Traditional keyword research
Traditional keyword research involves getting different (long tail, easy-to-rank) keyword ideas from a primary keyword, which can also be seen as a “short-tail keyword,” as I mentioned earlier.
You can use your preferred keyword research tool to generate these traditional based keyword ideas.
I’ll be using SemRush for this example as it’s one of the best tools in the industry for this purpose. So I entered “Dog Food” as my primary keyword, and here’s what I found:
Here, you will see our primary keyword’s search volume, CPC, organic clicks, keyword difficulty (more on this later), etc.
Scrolling down the page, you will see a list of keyword suggestions for “Dog Food:”
At this point, you will want to click on the “View All” link under the “Keyword Ideas” section to see the keyword suggestions for your primary keyword.
You can click on any of the keywords to see the Google SERP and other vital information about it so you can decide whether you can rank for it or not.
Traditional keyword research is pretty easy and will always give you more keyword ideas that you need from your seed keyword.
Stealing competitor’s keywords
In SEO, you don’t need to always reinvent the wheel.
Thanks to keyword research tools like Semrush, we can steal our competitors’ keyword and SEO strategy too.
Here’s how to do it.
First, go to the ‘keyword Gap’ section in the Semrush tool. And, then type your domain along with your competitors’ root domains.
Next, you’ll see the vein diagram for keyword overlap.
This chart gives you an overview of the mutual keywords that you and your competitor both are ranking for.
This is helpful to visualize the search dominance of your keywords.
Now, go to the detailed report for keyword overlap which will show you the list of keyword opportunities with ranking positions of each competitor.