Keyword Research In 4 Simple Steps

Keyword Research

Today I’ve been doing keyword research. I have a new side project which will probably target a lot of different services in a lot of different niches. This means keyword research.

I wrote about avoiding Search Engine Optimisation in my first ever article on this site, “Why SEO Doesn’t Matter for Writers.”

I still stand by that article; Mostly, SEO terminology is used to obfuscate what is a pretty simple thing; writing quality content for a relevant market. I find that SEO experts tend to be people who talk around the topic in order to make their money. It’s similar to how supplement companies always have the next micro-micro-nutrient that’s in their protein powder that’s key to gaining twenty pounds of muscle in two weeks.

Really, fitness = following the basics and progressing slowly.

SEO = following the basics and progressing slowly.

With that in mind, let’s go on to a “basics in mind” keyword research program.

Keyword Research Step One: Step Away From The Computer.

At this point in most keyword research articles you’d be asked to load up Google Keyword Planner to look for some keywords.

This is the opposite of what you should do when you start your keyword research, because it’s not organic. Google Keyword Planner will give you a list of related keywords according to its algorithms. What you want is related words regarding your market according to a human.

So come off the computer and sit with a pen and paper. Mindmap, brainstorm, write some bullet points – it doesn’t matter what method you use. Write all the related terms down.

There are only two problems with this approach:

• If you don’t know what your site is going to be about.
• If you don’t know anything about your target market.

If you’re in the first camp, it’s probably because you “want to start a business” or you’re into something vague like “lifestyle design.” If this is the case, you won’t know what’s going to go on your website.

The answer to this is not keyword research. You aren’t ready to build a site if you don’t know what it’s going to be about. (Don’t worry, nearly everyone who has started a website or business has been at this stage before.) Instead, take a step back, think about your hobbies, read some books and get an idea of something you wouldn’t mind writing about for years to come. Then come back to this article.

If you’re in the second camp, then you need to read some books. You are not going to have a successful website if you simply have an idea to write about Product X without knowing anything about it. Go away, do some reading and come back to this article after you know about the target market.

Keyword Research Step Two: It’s All About The Vague Figures

Once you have a list of keywords, then you’ll want to see if any of them get traffic, and more importantly, how many of them have good competition.

There’s no point in writing articles about something that nobody cares about. So finding how much traffic your keywords get is important. Here, you can use Google Keyword Planner, or Market Samurai (I use this – you get a free trial and then you can use the Keyword Research part free forever after the trial expires.) There are expensive options and cheap options for keyword research, but it doesn’t matter because of this one fact: They aren’t by any means 100% accurate.

Keyword Planning Tools are ballpark figures. For instance, you might want to sell Product X on your website. If it gets four searches per month, then that’s hardly any traffic. If it gets a million searches a month, it’s in demand. What you want to do in this stage is see which related terms give you more bang-for-your-buck in terms of time spent writing content for them.

For instance, if “Product X for sale” gets 500 searches a month, buy “Buy Product X” gets 2000 searches a month; all other things considered you’ll target the most potential eyeballs.

The second component here is competition.

Obviously, the more profitable search terms tend to have the highest competition. This isn’t always the case though. The Golden Goose is obviously finding a product with high interest, low competition, but there are no secrets there. Just know your target market and jump on new opportunities.

If you have no software, you can search your keyword in quotes on Google. It’ll tell you how many websites mention your term, and give you a general idea of how competitive it is. Just type in various products you own to get a feel for general competitiveness figures.

Keyword Research Step Three: Strategy

SEO isn’t about keyword research. It’s about putting those keywords into use in a decent way.

Anyone, and I mean anyone can produce a hastily-cobbled together piece of automated writing with the keywords stuffed in at every opportunity. Don’t do this. You aren’t fooling a Google Algorithm and even if you do, you’re not fooling a human eyeball and nobody is going to buy your stuff.

You don’t have to write a thousand pages to target a thousand keywords. You can target multiple keywords on any one page – just make sure it makes sense. For instance, “buy goldfish bowl” and “Is Einstein An Alien?” are probably not going to be keywords you target for the same page (or site.)

This stage requires a little thought, but you can easily slot in permutations of the keywords next to each other or in following paragraphs. If you write articles that make sense this happens naturally anyway.

Take an article about copywriting and hitting the right audience for example:

1. “Why you should choose your audience”
2. “How You Should Choose Your Audience”
3. “Where To Find A Great Audience”
4. “What To Tell Your Audience”

There will be keywords that target each of those things that you can put quite naturally into the article. This will do more for your SEO than you could consciously plan with all the metrics in the world.

Keyword Research Step Four: Write

I’ll leave it there for today. There’s actually a lot more I could write about Search Engine Optimisation and keyword research that isn’t overly complicated, so I’ll no doubt return to it at some point.

For now though, here are the four steps:

1. Go off-grid and write various related terms.
2. See how much traffic your terms get. Pick the ones that will actually get people looking at them.
3. Go through those and check for competition. Concentrate on the ones which have a relatively low competition to traffic ratio.
4. Plan on how to use those words in a natural and useful way.

That will get you ahead of nearly all the fly-by-night internet marketers and black-hat guys that spin articles and get outsourced non-native writers to make a hundred articles for ten dollars.