How to do keywords research and planning for SEO

Last updated: July 11, 2022

Keyword research is the heart of SEO. It has an important influence on any other SEO task such as finding content topics or page-SEO. Keywords are like the roadmap for your SEO campaign.

They not only show you where to go but also give you a profound insight into the demands and desires of your potential customers. That’s why keyword research should be the first step in any SEO campaign.

In this article, the IT BOOST Australia team provides you with a practical guide for finding high ranking keywords that drive the most traffic to your website.

Know Your Niche

Our first advice is to decide on your niche to get deep knowledge about the topic related to your business. It allows you to understand the needs of the targeted market and employ them to develop a better strategy for keyword planning.

Just creating a blog with posts about everything in the world is not a great idea or better say, it is not enough. It probably would never show up in the top 10 search engine results (SERs)!

Make a List of Topics

People often use the internet to get information, answer questions and solve their problem. To drive high-quality traffic into your website you should think about topics your target market is interested in.

You may ask yourself: “What topics people are searching on the internet that relate to my business?”. After you have answered this question, choose 5-10 important topics that strike you based on what you know about your niche.

For example, say that you run a campaign for a “hiking” website. Some topics that come into mind would be like:

• Best hike android app

• GPS watch with heart rate monitor

• How many calories does hiking burn?

Please note that these topics aren’t keywords themselves. They are common topics that you can use later to generate high ranking keywords.

Turn Your Topics into Long-tail Keywords

As the next step, you should use the topic list to get specific keyword for your website.

Keywords can be divided into three categories: head, body, and the (long) tail.

If your website is brand new you definitely need to focus on long-tail keywords. They are less competitive keyword type in the spectrum and still can bring you tones of organic traffic and generate a good conversion rate.

A typical long-tail keyword usually consists more than 4 phrases. They are search queries with low individual search volume, but with a huge amount of traffic as a group.

How to find Long-tail Keyword

Let’s have a look at some places where you can find long-tail keywords without using a specific tool.

1- Google and YouTube Autocomplete

Start typing each topic into Google and see what terms Google suggests. In this way, you can get a list of high-ranking long-tail keywords directly from Google. You don’t need to be clever to guess that these suggestions are all popular search queries.

Because Google suggests terms based on real searches by people, you could be sure that these are high-quality keywords. You can also find great keywords with YouTube Suggest.

2- Searches Related To

This feature is very similar to Google Suggest and keyword ideas come straight from Google. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will find some related queries related to the current search term.

3- People Also Ask

It is a snippet that pops up when you type a question in Google. You may want to use it to find similar questions related to your topic. It is super-efficient in finding topics for blog posts.

4- Reddit

When people talk a lot about a topic it means that it is hot and in trends. To find keywords related to your niche you can eavesdrop Reddit. Search topics in the Reddit. Then, choose a subreddit that you think your target customers are probably hanging out. Finally, watch carefully topics having the most comments. You can also use free tools such as Keyworddit to scan Reddit for keywords and get their monthly search volume.

5- Wikipedia

Wikipedia a hidden treasure for the keyword research. Though it is overlooked by most SEO experts, it hosts millions of pages mostly written by industry experts. It means that you can use Wikipedia to retrieve brilliant topic-specific keywords.

First, go to Wikipedia home page and type your general topic. This will lead you to the entry for the broad topic. To find keyword ideas look at the content section of the page. You can find some amazing keywords in the subtopics section.

6- Forums

The easiest way to find a forum that is closely related to your business topics is searching the topic along with the keyword “Forum”. This brings you to a forum where most people interested in the topic are sharing ideas.

For example, if your topic is “The Best Dog Food” you should search for “The Best Dog Food Forum” or “The Best Dog Food”+Forum. Once you have landed in the forum see how sections are divides.

This may give you good ideas about the best long-tail keywords for your niche. To dig deeper, you can keep an eye out for threads with a high number of reads or replies.

Keyword Research Tools

Although you can find high-ranked keywords without using any tool, keywords research tools make the whole process much easier. Here we introduce some top keyword research tools:

1- Google Keyword Planner Google Keyword Planner is originally designed to help people to find appropriate keywords for Google Ads but it can be used for general keyword research. Because its data comes straight from Google it is deemed to be the best online free keyword planning tool. It offers very valuable data about keywords such as search volume or CPC.

2- SEMrush

It is the best paid keyword research tool which is highly recommended by most SEO experts. With SEMrush you can easily do keyword research, spy on competitor’s keywords and build robust backlinks. It is a great time-saver for keyword research. Instead of filling the screen with random keywords, it builds a list of exact keywords related to your niche that a site has already ranked for.

3- Ahrefs

Most people refer to Ahrefs as a good link building tool. But what most don’t know is that it has a very nice keyword research tool called “keyword explorer”. With Ahrefs you can get a lot of useful data about each keyword that can help you with choosing the right keywords later.

How to Pick the Best SEO Keywords

Now that you have a list of keywords you should purge the list for the best keywords fitting into your business. Unfortunately, there is no tool that can do it for you automatically. You have to assess each keyword based on a number of factors:

1- Search Volume

This is very intuitive. The more people search for the keyword more visitors you get. But it is not as simple as it seems. One can ask “what is a good search volume?”. The short answer is: It totally depends on your niche!

2- Difficulty

If you run an SEO campaign for a new website and your site has not tones of high-quality backlinks, it is better to aim for long-tail low competition keywords first. Once your website grows in authority you can start developing content for more competitive topics.

3- CPC

The purpose of CPC (cost per click) is to find out how much money people actually spend per link. The higher CPC is, you will earn more from your organic traffic. As a rule of thumb, you should keep keywords that have high search volume and CPC and low difficulty.

We reviewed the best strategies to fulfill the task of keyword research and planning. Use them alongside with the keyword research tools to develop compelling contents around them that bring you a lot of organic web traffic and help you rank on the first page of Google search results.