SEO STRICTLY FOR NEWBIES part 2; KEYWORD RESEARCH

In this post, you will learn how to do keyword research for your website and it is a great way to increase your traffic, and if you are looking to do affiliate marketing or sell your visual for physical products, then this will work for conversions as well.

This is the second installment to the SEO for beginner’s series, so if you are wanting to do better on your website you could subscribe to our Newsletter so that you will be notified of our new posts immediately they are released.

So let’s get into it.

INTRODUCTION

So first let’s talk about what is Keyword research. All it is just basically making sure that your site has the keywords that people are looking for when they are on a search engine like Google and you just want to make sure that you have what they are looking for.

Now that you know that there are keywords and that you should have them on your website, there is another step that you want to make sure that you have.

Okay, so most keywords are broken down into four basic user intent and this helps for you to know which kind of user intent keywords to put on your site.

It’s really powerful once you get to know and understand this process and there are four main ones.

Keyword Intent;

• Navigational: Mainly for branded websites that are already known and people are just typing in the brand name because they want to go to that brand’s site. For instance; when you want to go over to Netflix, you will just simply type in Netflix in the search bar and proceed to the site. You can do that with everything Facebook even Google. So that’s navigational and unless you are a branded site, you are probably not going to see much of that.

• Transactional: These are keywords that people know when they want to purchase something and they are putting those keywords right into the search bar, this is like if you know the exact model number for a camera that you want to buy and you are typing it in just because you want to go to a shopping cart or an eCommerce site and you are just doing that with google to get you there. If you have a blog or a small business website or a niche or authority site, you are probably not going to be doing much of the transactional simply because you are probably not selling your item. It will become important later when you do sell your item. So you do keep that in mind.

• Informational: This is the majority of what we all have keywords on, this is creating a solution for the problems that the reads have, this is answering questions that they have. The majority of searches that are done online nowadays fall into the informational category and this is because if you can answer these questions or if you can solve these problems that people are typing those keywords on, then you are naturally going to increase awesome traffic. The informational searches are great because it is telling people how to find a solution to what they are looking for, they are not as great if you are wanting to do affiliate marketing or if you are wanting to sell your items, the informational searchers do not have that mindset to purchase something, they simply have the mindset to fix something and this is where the next category comes in.

• Investigational: Let’s say you are redoing your kitchen and you are just wondering how to redo your cabinet, they are all this information on what to do, but you are just wondering how to get that done, you don’t yet know what to buy, you are not in that mind frame yet, later on, though you will know that to redo your cabinet you may need to get paint or you may need to get scrapers, whatever the list is you know that finally, you might want to start searching for that. So then you just have to do ‘best paint for kitchen cabinet’ and that is the investigational part because they are looking for products or services or things that will help them do what it is that they are trying to do. Most of these are done with modifiers and are all indications that people have a buyer’s intent and are looking for something to buy, are looking for the best tool or the best product to help them in their journey.

The two big categories that you want to focus on are informational and investigational for your blog.

The next thing we want to do is to go ahead and do some keyword research.

KEYWORD RESEARCH (inaction)

Now, the first thing you want to do is brainstorm. You should know the content about your topic better than anyone, so go ahead and write down all of the things that you think people are going to be searching for, for your topic, but this is where keyword research is helpful.

A lot of times you know your content better than anyone else, so you have probably forgotten a ton of information or a ton of questions that people might ask, simply because you have been doing it a long time and this is also the power of keyword research.

So now let’s cover three methods that you can use to do keyword research;

THE FREE METHOD

First, open up a new browser and head up to ‘KEYWORDS EVERYWHERE’. Keywords Everywhere is an extension for chrome or Firefox, so you can install it from their website. And once you do you will get a little icon ‘K’ with a circle on it in your browser and I will show you what this does.

You can then go to google and type in a keyword, let’s say Plates and you will see the search appear and you will also see below the search bar;

• The estimated monthly volume of searches

• CPC: if you are doing Google AdWords

• Competition: how competitive the keyword is

Over to the right, you will also see related keywords, this almost like related keywords research, or if someone types this in, they will typically type this item in as well and you can see the volume and the CPC and the competitiveness of that.

I believe this competitiveness deals with the CPC, so it is not something that we will deal with, our main concern is looking at volume as well as just looking at the other keywords that it shows.

But this is powerful because, then you can start to get an idea of what people are looking for in your topic, and the beauty of this is that you can export this to a CSV, where you can open it up into Google sheets or Excel so that you can start creating on your content editor or your blog editor where you decide which keywords you are going to write about next or which topic you are going to write about next.

So you scroll down, then you scroll down further at the bottom of the search-related to plates that Google docs and you see even more (keywords) down there.

So that is a really powerful way to start building up your keyword list of things that you can write about.

Now, one of the other things that you can do in addition to the Keywords Everywhere tool is going to ‘Answer the Public’.

This is a free keyword tool called Answer the Public and it allows you to again type in a seed keyword and it will go out and bring back information.

So we will go with plates again, and what I like about this is that it brings in a lot of questions and that is that it brings in a lot of questions and that is perfect for your website to do informational keyword research, so you are bringing in the topics easily.

This is great for when you want to grow your website. Just answer all these questions that people are asking that you probably didn’t even remember that they would have an issue with.

It will give you this visualization that you see, but if you don’t want to be moving your head around you can click on the data part and one of the great things is that it will bring it all back under the different categories that they asked, but the Keywords Everywhere is also pulling in the data and showing you the information at the right corner as well.

So what you can do with this is sort by highest if you want to list the highest volume keywords first or some people will do the lowest first because they are thinking that it is probably less competitive (not many people are writing about the keyword) and this is super powerful as well.

Just go through and see all the questions that people are asking and you can go down and also do prepositions (those are huge as well) and it just gets you excited about the topic and you realize that there is so much that you can write about to help the uses on their journey of let’s say buying plates or whatever your website is about.

So again you can go to the header of the site and download the CSV to open it up in Google sheets or excel so that you can create a content flow of what is the next topic to write about.

So that’s a really quick and easy way to do keyword research and get started on your site to write the content that you know people are searching for.

THE PAID METHOD

If you want to take it a step further or do a little more digging, then the next two methods will be for you.

These are paid tools that you can use and it will allow you to do keyword research on your site.

Now, these tools do so much more than just keyword research, but for some people just starting, it might not be feasible because they are paid.

The good thing with both of these ‘SEMRUSH and ATRUST’ is that they do have a trial period that you can do, which is free or very low cost and you can get up and running and do quite a bit of research for your website in that trial period.

So I’m going to show you SEMRUSH, I guess they have changed it now where you have to sign in or create an account before you can even do anything.

So once you’ve logged in, then you have this whole dashboard area. What we can do here is simply put in our keyword click search and it will go out and it will bring back several keywords that are associated with this.

So scrolling through, we get the volume, you can also see the competition for paid search and if you scroll down you will see the competition for paid search and if you scroll down you will see the phrase match keywords, these are all the other keywords that are associated with this keyword, which is great.

You can click on questions to concentrate on the questions that are being asked, and under it, you can see their particular KD score (keyword difficulty score) on how difficult it might be for you to rank in the results.

On the right, you can see the amount (results) of different sites, having the keyword in their article.

And just as with Answer the Public, you can come up to the right top corner and expand all of your keywords. And that’s an easy way to get a whole bunch of keywords associated with your topic.

You will want to do this for multiple topics on your site and just find the best keywords that you want to answer these questions or write this topic for your audience.

In addition to the questions are, if you scroll down you can also see that there are also grouping some of these keywords and this is a super way to categorize your topics based on these keywords as well.

Now there is also a modifier for best and that is super for investigational where you may write something about your ‘best plates’ or ‘best places for social events’ you know, all that stuff.

If you can write about these items and share your experience, then that will help them make a decision and should also give you affiliate commissions as well.

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So that will be all on keyword research. In the next post, I will about on-page SEO and how it helps you improve your website’s traffic.