In the quest for matching up the immense competition of today’s digital marketing world, we are pretty anxious about the content, backlinks, and social signals. But one vital thing that often goes out of our mind is the fundamental criteria of SEO – Keyword Research! As all of you may already be aware of the fact that the Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO, it’s fair enough to say that there’s no SEO if there’s no keyword!

Such importance of keywords also bumps up the importance of keyword research. And if we broaden our viewpoint, we’d definitely find the keyword research acting as the modern-day market research. In this article, we are going to elaborate on how to do the keyword research in a way that has never been done before.

CONTEXT

• How to Do Keyword Research
• Find the Niche Topic
  • Importance of Niche Topic
  • How to Find Niche Topic
    • Buyer Persona
    • Forums
    • Wikipedia Contents
• Fill Niche Topic Buckets with Keywords
  • Head Keywords
  • Body Keywords
  • Long Tail Keywords
• Conduct Research on Google Keyword Planner or GKP
  • Access Google Keyword Planner
  • Use the Google Keyword Planner
    • Find New Keywords
      • Words
      • Phrases
      • URL Related to Your Business
    • Get Search Volume and Forecasts
  • Keywords Results Page
    • Locations
    • Language
    • Search Networks
  • Filtration
    • Keyword Text
    • Competition
    • Ad Impression Share
    • Top of Page Bid
    • Exclude Keywords in My Account
    • Exclude Keywords in My Plan
    • Organic Impression Share
    • Organic Average Position
  • Keyword Selection
  • Knowing the Exact Search Volume
  • Google Keyword Planner Trick
• Find Long Tail Keywords
  • Searches Related To
  • com
  • Forums
  • UberSuggest
  • AnswerThePublic
    • Question-based
    • Preposition-based
    • Comparison-based
    • Alphabetical Keywords
    • Related Keywords
  • Google Search Console
    • Old Version
    • New Version
  • Google Trends
  • Quora
  • io
• Commercial Intent of Keywords
  • Keyword Classes of Commercial Intent
    • Tire Kicker Keywords
    • Informational Keywords
    • Product Keywords
    • Buy Now Keywords
  • How to Get Objective Information on Commercial Intent
    • AdWords Top of Page Bid
    • AdWords Competition
• Keyword Competition
  • Install Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
  • Page Authority
  • Referring Domains
    • How to Use MozBar
    • How to Use Ahrefs
  • Domain Authority and Brand Value
  • Link Profile
  • On-Page SEO
  • Low-Competition Results
  • Content Quality
• SEO Content – Outcome of Romance between Keyword and Content
  • Length of the Content Matters
  • Work on Your Title Tags – A Lot
  • Keyword Relevancy
  • User Experience
    • Use short sentences at first
    • Use Multimedia
    • Header Tags for Subheadings
  • Topic-Based Optimization
    • Diversify Anchor Text
    • Co-Citation
• Conclusion

How to Do Keyword Research

When you do an effective keyword research, not only you enjoy a better result in ranking and search engine traffic but you also start knowing your consumers better than your competitors. However, most of the companies repeat a wrong keyword research process which is lethal for nurturing a fruitful result. Below is the process followed by most web development or digital marketing companies.

1. Outline some keywords that can be searched by the potential customers.
2. Put those keywords in GKP (Google Keyword Planner).
3. Select a keyword based on guesswork!

As you can see, everything of the above process is based on a guesswork! And you really cannot rely on guesses when you are researching the foundation of your SEO process i.e. keywords! So, we are going to describe how to strategically find the exact keywords for your business! With the help of the best keywords, you will see your site skyrocketing to the top of Google SERP and you are going to enjoy a great number of leads, traffic, and sales.

1. Find the Niche Topic

There’s one thing that stays between you and successful keyword research – niche topics.

Once you get a fair idea about the niche topics in your industry, you can explore the unexplored keywords that your competitors may have no idea of! Thus, prior to firing up any tool or fiddling with the titles, you should always recognize the niche topics of your industry.

Importance of Niche Topic Research

As we already have mentioned earlier in our article that most of the repeat the same mistake at the very beginning of the keyword research process! They tend to use the Google Keyword Planner without finding the niche topics! This is a huge mistake for which you would have to pay for in the future! We are considering it as a mistake since GKP is great for generating the closely related keyword of the main keyword but not for providing the new keyword ideas.

If we show you an example, it would be easy to understand for you.

Suppose, you are going to create a content about “content marketing.” What are the words that popped into your head? Think first. Here are some words that may have appeared in your head:

• Keyword
• Backlink
• SEO
• Social Media Marketing
• Blog Posting Site
• Business Promotion

While you have got diverse niche topics of your main keyword, GKP would show you only the search terms that are closely related to the keyword you put. Let’s have a look below.

When we searched for content marketing on GKP,

This is the result we got!

What’s frustrating in the keywords generated by GKP is that almost every business is repeating the same process and targeting the same keywords you are aiming at. Therefore, those keywords promptly become nearly impossible to rank for!

Well, we would like to make it clear that we are not advising you to abandon Google Keyword Planner. But don’t fully rely on the GKP to discover the best keywords in your industry. As we’re continuously saying, the best way to do that is by recognizing the niche topics.

Firstly, let us clarify what a niche topic really is! In a nutshell, niche topic is not only a keyword, but it’s also a broad topic where your target market is interested in.

Basically, the niche topic is an amalgamation of multiple niches in your industry which have a good relation to your main niche! For example,

The one who will be interested in ‘Keyword Relevancy in Content Marketing’ may also be interested in the following topics:

• How to do Keyword Research
• What is Keyword Density
• What are the Different Keywords Used in Content
• How to Get Ranked on Google

So, you should have a fair idea of how niche topics work. Now, you may not have a lot of time for brainstorming and you want some strategies to come up with the niche topics.

How to Find Niche Topics

Below are some strategies you can avail in order to find the niche topics for any given industry such as corporate, eCommerce or charity. Being a pioneering SEO company in India, we have gathered some rare but intuitive techniques to find the niche topics.

Buyer Persona

Analyzing your potential buyer persona would be the best thing to convey the niche topics adored by your potential customers. So, the foremost thing you need to do is to come up with the data like

• Age
• Gender
• Estimated earnings
• Interests and passion
• Things that they struggle with
• Things that they want to achieve (professionally and personally)

Once you jot down all these data, you’ll be able to get into the head of your potential customers and tap on the untapped keywords that they use to search.

Forums

Forums are like the gold mines for you during the quest for different niche topics or unique keywords. You have 24/7 access to those forums but finding the forums where your target market stays can be a little difficult. But we a proven method to find the forums with your target market.

Below are some search strings you may use for extracting out the target market.

• “keyword” + “forums”
• “keyword forum”
• “keyword” + “board”
• “keyword” + “forum”

Just see how we have been able to come up with the best niche topics when searched for “Content Marketing” + “Forums.”

• Creative Content Ideas
• Content Marketing Tools
• Business Models for Content Marketing

Once you discover the niche topics related to your industry and website, add them to your list of niche topics.

Wikipedia Contents

Wikipedia is an unexplored gold mine for the niche topics where you can find the overviews on a topic organized in different categories with industry-best curation. Following is the procedure to extract the niche topics from Wikipedia.

• Firstly, type the main keyword and search for the Wikipedia entry for the keyword.

• Have a look at the contents section of the particular page.
• In that index part, you will find various sections that will work perfectly as your niche topic (depending on the keyword).

• Also, you can check the “See Also” section for more niche ideas.

• You can also click on the internal links in order to find the niche topics from the other closely-related articles.

In our case, we have found the following niche topics:

• Content Marketing Metrics
• Inbound Marketing

2. Fill Niche Topic Buckets with Keywords

Since you have identified the tricks to find the niche topics, now is the time to find the best keywords based on the topics. The majority of the individuals in the SEO industry divide keywords into three categories – Head, Body, and Tail (Long-Tail).

Head Keywords

The head keywords are generally the single-word keywords which usually have a skyrocketing amount of competition and search volume. These are also called generic keywords such as “Content” or “Marketing.” Since the keywords cover a great range of topics such as a web search for “content” may convey that the user is looking for “creative content” or “SEO content.” Due to the long range of variations, the head keywords have less conversion.

Body Keywords

The body keywords are the keywords that contain 3-4 phrases and also enjoy a decent search volume (2000 searches per month at a minimum). The body keywords are more specific than the head keywords such as “Content Optimization” or “SEO content.” Despite having lower competition than the head keywords, these keywords can still be quite competitive.

Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are the 4+ word phrases that are usually very much specific. These keywords have the least competition and search volume. Despite having a low search volume individually, the long tail keywords can cumulatively create a great impact. Examples of the long tail keywords can be – “How to Write SEO Content” or “Top Content Optimization Tricks 2018.” Ranking with these keywords is easier than the others.

Conclusion

We would recommend you to optimize your contents with the body keywords. Since those don’t have an insane competition like the head keywords, ranking with these keywords would not be much difficult. On top of all, if optimized with the body keywords correctly, the content will generate the related long tail keywords automatically. Now, focusing solely on the long tail keywords will not be a great option since you will require many contents to rank in order to have a remarkable result.

3. Conduct Research on Google Keyword Planner or GKP

If you don’t have the objective data, there’s no way of doing the keyword research effectively. Without the informed decision, you will always be in the dark where the probability of ranking at the top with the relevant keywords is very less!

Fortunately for us, the SEO experts have come up with the best tools which would cater us the information regarding the keyword selection. Those tools help us understand every aspect of a particular keyword which lets us take an informed decision.

While there are many paid tools available in the market that provide us with the best information, there’s also a tool that comes free yet offers the most precise details among all the other tools. The tool we are talking about is Google Keyword Planner (GKP).

However, the tool focuses on Google AdWords which is why there would be various metrics like ‘Keyword Bidding’ that have no use for organic optimization. We will explain the method by which you can bring the best SEO value out of GKP.

First Step: Access Google Keyword Planner

The first step is to access the Google Keyword Planner since it is the most reliable and viable free keyword research tool. In order to access it, make sure that you have a Google AdWords account. If you don’t have one, create your account on Google AdWords.

The next step is to log in to your GKP account using this URL – https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home. Click on the wrench icon located at the top in the toolbar section. After clicking on the wrench icon, select the ‘Keyword Planner’ under the Planning section.

Now, you will find two options – (a) Find new keywords, (b) Get search volume and forecasts. These two options are enough for coming up with the best keywords relating to your niche. Now, we will show you how to do the keyword research using GKP.

Second Step: Use the Tool

In this step, we are going to describe the two main tools available in the Google Keyword Planner. Using these two tools, you would be able to come up with a list of the best keywords for your website.

Find New Keywords

This option is great for finding new keywords, as suggested by the name itself. You can put words, phrases, or URL related to your business over here and come up with a great range of keywords.

However, the result or value you obtain from this tool will largely depend on the information you enter. So, type strategically in this field. We are going to guide you how to use the three options effectively.

Words

Here, you can type the single words which would describe your business. For example, if we try to describe Intlum, we may pen down “Website Designer” or “Website Developer” or “Coder.” In this way, you would be able to discover the keywords in Google’s internal database for different industries which could have been missed in the other couple of options.

Phrases

This is the very option where you get the closely related keywords after putting down the Seed Keywords! As per our recommendation, you should enter 1-3 key phrases here focusing on different niche markets. For instance, if you are running a website development company, you may enter the following key phrases –

• Trending PHP frameworks
• Affordable Website Design

URL Related to Your Business

Despite its primary use for the AdWords, you will be able to come up with some of the most awesome keyword ideas with this option. If you want to see the potential keywords of your top competitors, enter their URLs one at a time and search.

After you have entered the information (one or all), click on the Get Started button to open the Keywords Results Page.

Get Search Volume and Forecasts

Well, simply said, this tool would not help you much create new keyword ideas. However, this tool will be a great help for you when you already have a list of keywords decided and want to know their search volume and other metrics. Copy your list of keywords and paste it on the given field. Now, click on the “Get Started” button to check their search volume.

The difference between the Keywords Results Page of the “Find new keywords” tool and this one is that, here, you are going to see the results of the exact keywords you’ve entered and Google will predict the number of clicks and impressions you are going to receive for the keywords. If you want to see the search volume and competition level of the given keywords, tap on the ‘Historical Metrics’ tab.

Third Step: Keywords Results Page

Now, there are some metrics which will help you find the best keywords for your business once you get to the Keywords Results Page. Right after you land on the Keywords Results Page, you will see the Location, Language, and Search Network options. As you will These metrics will narrow down your keyword research. Below are the breakdowns of the three settings. Please have a look at the explanation to understand how you can use them.

Locations

Simply put, locations denote the target region where you want to marketize your website. You can select a whole country or a particular city or state or any region of the country. You can save multiple locations. In order to edit the locations:

• Hover on the locations and click on the edit button.

• Now, type in your location and select the location from the matches found in the Google database.

• You can keep multiple locations or remove any location by clicking on the cross button under the ‘Targeted Locations’ list.

• Once you are done selecting your target location, hit the “Save” button.

Note: Your current location will be the default location on GKP.

Language

Here, you can select the language of the keywords you want to optimize with. Generally, the language will be set in English but if you want to target another language edit the language and type in the language you would like to optimize your keywords with. For instance, if you want to get ranked in France, set your language as ‘French.’ Also, select ‘France’ as the location.

Search Networks

In this section, you can choose where you want to get your keyword ranked! You can select only ‘Google’ as your search network or ‘Google and search partners.’ Search Partners involve the other search engines and the other Google properties like YouTube or Google Image. In most cases, leaving the Search Networks option as Google is recommended.

Fourth Step: Filtration

In order to come up with the best set of keywords, you need to filter your keywords according to your requirements. GKP will primarily have two filtrations embedded – “Show Broadly related ideas” and “Exclude adult ideas.”

You can change the filter of “Broadly related ideas” to “Closely related ideas” by clicking on the blue text. And you can remove the filtration for “Exclude adult ideas” by clicking on the ‘cross’ icon.

Below are the filtration options you will get on GKP.

• Keyword text
• Competition
• Ad impression share
• Top of page bid (low range)
• Top of page bid (high range)
• Exclude keywords in my account
• Exclude keywords in my plan
• Organic impression share
• Organic average position

You can get the list of Filtration by clicking on the “Add Filter” field.

We are going to explain the procedure of using each of the filtration options for having the best list of keywords to optimize your website ranking.

Keyword Text

Suppose, the main topic of research is “writing” and you just have started providing the ‘creative writing’ services. So, you would always want to have such keyword suggestions that contain the term – ‘Creative.’ In that case, adding the filter of keyword text will work remarkably awesome. Let’s see how you can do it.

1. Select the Keyword Text option from the list of filters.
   
2. You can generate the keywords that either “CONTAIN” or “DOES NOT CONTAIN” the word(s) you entered. Click on the drop-down icon to select one option.
   
3. Type in the ‘word’ on the ‘Value’ field and hit the ‘Apply’ button to apply the filtration.
   

Competition

In the competition field, you can filter the competition level. This tool can be used to narrow down your keywords and show only the keyword results that have ‘Low’, ‘High’ or ‘Medium’ competition.

However, this tool only applies to the AdWords competition, so, our recommendation is to leave this filtration option if you are looking for the keyword competition for organic ranking.

Ad Impression Share

It’s a part of Google AdWords. So, none of our business if we are talking about organic SEO or keyword research.

Top of Page Bid

This is the payment estimate for your ad to appear at the top of Google SERP for a particular keyword of your choice. You will find two different choices in this filtering tool – high range and low range.

We would suggest you use the “Low Range” option for the sake of filtering out the keywords without any commercial intent. For your kind information, the keywords without commercial intent would generally have low competition and greater chances to rank. But optimizing your website with those keywords would result in no revenue since those keywords are not commercially intended. So, you will get more visitors but none of them will convert!

Exclude Keywords in My Account

Self-explanatory, we believe! Here, you can exclude the keywords which already exist in your account.

Exclude Keywords in My Plan

This one is just like the above point where you can exclude the keywords which are already included in your plan. However, this one is not needed if you are running an AdWords account for a different niche market.

Organic Impression Share

This is the metric that shows how often your website appears on the organic search result for the entered keywords. In order to use this feature, you would require a Google Search Console account and you need to link it to your Google AdWords account.

Organic Average Position

This shows the average position you are going to acquire in Google organic search result for each keyword entered. This option also demands to link your Google AdWords account and Google Search Console account.

So, this is all that is there in the filtering options in Google Keyword Planner. You need to understand the whole thing and apply it accordingly in order to come up with the best list of keywords. However, there’s one thing we would like to mention – be aware of the seasonal keywords.

For instance, the keyword “Christmas Gifts” will have a boatload of search volume during the month of December but may not have that much of search volume during May, June and other months. So, you need to be cautious while doing the keyword research.

Fifth Step: Keyword Selection

Now comes the main part – keyword selection. This is the cornerstone of your website’s or page’s ranking. You need to choose a broad topic that describes your business. The niche topic selection (described above) would come in handy in this particular section.

So, make sure you are not choosing any very broad topic (head keyword) or ‘too narrowed’ one (long tail keyword). Suppose, you are dealing in content marketing and want to publish a blog about the ranking benefits of content marketing, it would be too generic to use “content marketing” as the keyword and “Ranking benefits of content marketing” will be too specific. So, you can take the midway and go for the keyword – “Content Marketing Benefits.” Now, once you have entered the keyword, click on ‘Get Started.’

Note: It is wise to use the “Find New Keywords” tool for having the finest group of new keyword ideas.

Now, as you have got a result, you need to consider some criterion for evaluating the keywords. There would be three main criteria to consider from the lot.

• Search volume is a viable metric to consider since the higher search volume denotes a better keyword.
• Commercial intent is more art than science. It is used to determine the monetary potential of a particular keyword. Simply put, the higher competition and Top of Page Bid refer to a better conversion.
• Organic SEO competition will also play a viable role like the commercial intent. It is the way of understanding the competition of a keyword in the organic search result of Google. You can evaluate your competitors’ websites which are ranking and measure the difficulty level for outranking them. Considering its importance, we have an entire section dedicated to Keyword Competition Analysis.

Sixth Step: Knowing the Exact Search Volume

In general, you will see the search volume of a keyword in an extension like 1K-10K when analyzed on the ‘Find New Keyword’ section in GKP as you can see from the following image. This happens due to the fluctuation in the searches every month.

However, if you want to know the exact search volume of any given keyword, below is the procedure.

• Copy the keyword and paste it on the “Get Search Volume and Forecasts” field in GKP.
• Now, under the ‘Forecasts’ tab, you will find the Impressions column.
• The impression denotes the number of people searching for the keyword every month.

• So, you will get an exact figure for the Search Volume.

Google Keyword Planner Trick

While GKP is, undeniably, an awesome tool to do the keyword research and availed by most of the SEO experts and digital marketing companies, it’s not flawless! We are going to mention the two biggest disadvantages of GKP.

1^st Disadvantage

GKP is known for showing the closely related keyword ideas. So, when you enter a keyword, you will receive some VERY close keyword ideas generated by GKP. In most of the cases, the closely related keyword ideas don’t work effectively since the tool tends to keep the exact words (entered by you) in the generated keyword list.

2^nd Disadvantage

GKP’s popularity is another setback for using this tool for the most effective keyword research. Since almost everyone in the industry makes use of the tool for keyword ideas, you don’t extract any unique keywords which often leads to a great amount of competition!

How to Resolve

Well, we are also going to offer you the tricks to resolve the two downsides of GKP. You can visit any relevant page of your biggest competitor (who is doing well in terms of ranking) and copy-paste the URL of the relevant webpage to the ‘Find New Keywords’ section of GKP.

Once you put the keyword, you will be able to see all the relevant keywords of that page which will help you obtain a broad keyword list which may not have been explored by your competitors. Below are some web pages you may use.

• Services page
• Product category page
• Blog post page
• Press release
• News and stories

In a nutshell, you need to choose the pages that have a fair amount of text in them. Simply put, the pages should rely on the texts a lot.

4. Find Long Tail Keywords

Since you have the idea of how to use Google Keyword Planner effectively and you have come up with a set of keywords as well, you are, perhaps, willing to use those keywords in your content and your website. But we have also mentioned the setbacks of GKP where we have mentioned the fact that the tool portrays the exact same keywords to everyone. So, firstly, you don’t get anything unique and secondly, the competition for those keywords are higher than you can even imagine!

So, what’s the way out? The answer is – long tail keywords. In this segment, we will unveil the lesser known tricks to generate the long tail keywords that will solve the riddle to reach the maximum traffic potential.

a) Searches Related to

If you are looking for ways to get hold of the long tail keyword resources, there’s a gold mine waiting for you to get dug! We are talking about the section you see every time you search something on Google. The section is called – ‘Search Related to…’

Here, you will find the best set of long tail keywords waiting for you to explore. Following is the trick to get the long tail keywords from the section.

• Open Google and type in your target keyword and search. As you can see, we have searched for “web design.”

• Scroll to the bottom of the SERP and explore the results under “Searches related to ‘Your Keyword’.” In our case, it’s showing – “Searches related to Web Design.”

• Now, you need to wisely select the finest long tail keywords according to the relevance. As you can see in the image, we have found one viable long tail keyword – “Web Designing Software.”

Now, you can generate more long tail keyword ideas by searching further with the “related search terms produced on the SERP” which will produce lucrative long tail keywords which will perhaps not appear when you search for “web design” as your seed keyword on GKP.

b) SOOVLE.COM

If you are looking for the long tail keyword suggestions, SOOVLE.COM will be one of the most treasured destinations you may find. Most of the individuals are unaware of this extraordinary tool and it is ready to explore for obtaining wonderful keyword ideas. This free tool generates the keywords ideas from the results of multiple leading platforms like Google Suggest, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Ask.com.

We are also mentioning the procedure to generate long tail keyword ideas from Soovle.

• Visit Soovle and enter a broad keyword in the required filed. We have entered “eCommerce.”

• The tool will automatically generate some of the most relevant suggestions based on the keyword entered. The suggestions can be incredible for using as the long tail keywords. In our case, you can see some of the finest keyword ideas like “eCommerce website builder” or “eCommerce marketing.”

• Also, you can download the list of keyword results in CSV format directly from the website. Look for the download icon at the top left corner of the website.

This tool is particularly useful because it fetches the results from such resources which might have been ignored or overlooked by your competitors!

c) Forums

It is the same process what we have described earlier in this article to find the niche topics. Since there can be no alternative to the platform where a variety of individuals comes, questions, and answers about an array of topics, forums will always be one of our favorites when it comes to generating ideas!

The foremost benefit of forums is you don’t have to brainstorm for the topic’s variety. There are hundreds of individuals already being involved in thousands of diverse threads, discussions, and questions related to your own industry. More importantly, when you know that someone is going through a query, you can get assured that other people are there having the same question.

Once you jot down a list of viable questions, you can start unriddling the puzzles through your website using those questions as the long tail keywords. But you need to know the trick!

• Visit the forums preferred by your target audience.
• If you have no idea of such forums, you can type:
  • “keyword” + “forum”. For instance, “app development” + “forum”
    
    
  • “keyword” + “board”. For instance, “app development” + “board”
    
    
  • “keyword” + “powered by vbulletin”. For instance, “app development” + “powered by vbulletin”
    
    
  • keyword + discussions. For instance, app development + discussions
    
    
• Once you apply this method, there will be loads of forums like Quora or Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers popping up.

The forum categories would be some of the most intriguing keyword suggestions which can add to your list of seed keywords.

Easy enough? Yes, it is!

d) UberSuggest

UberSuggest is an app from Neil Patel which would suggest you a number of long tail keywords more than you can even imagine.

When you google a word, Google will show you a list of suggestions just like the image below.