Keyword research is a MUST when it comes to search engine optimization. It should be the first step you take when considering what topics to write about. This is because you want to be sure when you’re writing your content, you’re writing it for an audience that exists. If you don’t have anyone searching the content you’re planning to write for, why even write that content?
How Do We Perform Keyword Research At New Hill Marketing?
There’s a lot that goes into performing keyword research, so we’re going to try to make this as simple and easy to follow as possible.
Understand What You WANT To Rank For
The first step is to understand what you want to be ranking for, and what your audience is looking for. For example, if you’re a cat shelter looking to increase your SEO, you first have to ask, “What do I hope to gain by increasing my SEO?”. The answer to this is typically going to be you want to increase the number of adoptions from your shelter.
Understand How People Search
Now that you understand your goal: Increase adoptions; you want to look at what people are going to search that’s going to help you reach that goal.
What we like to do here is start off my looking at your Google Search Console. This should always be setup while setting up your Google Analytics account for your website because it gives you more information on what search terms people are using to find your site. If you have Google Search Console setup, then your keyword research is going to be a little easier. If it’s not setup, don’t worry! We’ll explain more ways to get this information.
In Google Search Console, go to “Performance” and you will see the queries (aka keywords) people searched, and your website showed up. This is a good baseline to understand where you’re already showing up for in searches.
If you don’t have Google Search Console, you can use a tool like keyword explorer from Moz to get this data as well, just put your domain into the keyword explorer and see what keywords are showing up. The downside of this is you usually have to pay to get this information, but if you sign up for a free trial from Moz and use this tool, you can just cancel it afterwards. In the meantime though, you should look into setting up your Google Search Console.
What Do We Do With These Keywords?
Take the list of keywords you’re showing up for, and put them in a google spreadsheet (or excel or numbers, just any spreadsheet). Then, take 15 to 20 minutes to come up with different variations of those words. Try to think of as many different ways the words can be combined that’s relevant to your website.
For example, a local cat shelter may rank for words like “adoption near me”, “cat adoption”. Some variations they could come up with these could be: “where to go for cat adoption”, “cat adoption in city name”, ect. Be sure to include long-tail keywords as well, these are keywords that are typically longer than 4 words and are more specific, such as “where to find a no-kill cat shelter near me” compared to “no-kill shelter”. These keywords will have a lower search volume, but will typically have a higher search intent, meaning the person searching with these words are more likely to be ready to buy.
If you’re having a hard time thinking of other keywords, take some of the ones you have already and put them into Google, scroll to the bottom of the results and find “Searches related to xyz” and you’ll be able to find keywords that are similar to the ones you already show up for. Also, don’t be afraid to go off of your list, if you know there are other words you want to rank for, include those along with variations as well. We want this list to be big because in the next step we’re going to be qualifying the keywords.
Qualify Keywords
Now that you have your list, you’re going to want to find out the search volume in order to qualify the keywords. I like using searchvolume.io because it’s quick, free, and easy. Just take your list of keywords and copy them into the text section, and submit to get the results. Then you can easily export the ones that have search volume, and focus on those. Of course the higher the search volume the better the keyword, but you don’t want to immediately discredit keywords with search volume of just 10.
In our opinion, if a keyword has any search volume, it’s worth eventually looking into. It may not be the first keyword we end up choosing, but it could be one that we use in our strategy down the line.
Get Creative With Topics
Take the keywords with the highest search volume, and start coming up with topics that are going to answer the questions your searchers are asking. Using my example of the cat shelter from above, you might have the keyword “Cat Shelter” that you want to rank for. You can organically think of topics that can show up for that keyword, but at the same time you should take that keyword and put it into Google and see what else shows up. What’s missing? Are all the results the same, if so how can you stand out against them, how are you going to offer better content than them in order to beat their ranking?
Do this for most of your keywords, and you’re going to start compiling a list of topics you can start writing for in order to help your SEO. We like to place these in a content calendar in order to stick to a good and consistent posting schedule, but find what’s going to work best for you. Now you know what you should be writing for and get right into writing!
You should be doing keyword research consistently, and you should also be checking your rankings consistently. If you’re having a hard time increasing your rankings, or finding it hard to continuously work on your SEO you may want to consider hiring an SEO specialist, like New Hill Marketing. Contact us today and we can get a full SEO plan for you.