Marketing

A Complete Keyword Research Guide: Step-By-Step

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A Complete Keyword Research Guide: Step-By-Step

Choquer Creative has put together this walk-through . This comprehensive guide will show you how to search for keywords and what to look for when using a keyword research tool. Take a look back at our earlier blog posts to gain an understanding of the basics when it comes to SEO and keyword research. 

Performing Keyword Research 

Choose Your Keyword Research Tool 

There are lots of third-party keyword research tools to choose from, at Choquer Creative, SEMrush is one of our personal favourites. Non of these tools are 100% accurate, they all use different methodologies to analyzing keywords. Once you have chosen your tool, you can begin the keyword finding process.  

Keyword Research Guide

Enter A Broad Keyword 

Start your search off by typing in a broad keyword, you can narrow this down if you can and you know the specifics of your content. So let’s give you an example. You are looking for rock climbing lessons in your area, but let's make this first search even broader and just type in “how to rock climb”.

Keyword Research Guide

Understand What You’re Looking At

Notice that there is a location drop-down in the top left corner, allowing you to customize the data. If you are absolutely sure that your business won’t be in more than one country, you can set this to your country or city of choice. Be mindful that setting your location to a specific city may not give you very much accurate data.

The CPC data shows us that people are paying $0.81 per click for this keyword. This gives you a general idea but is not something we will pay much attention to at this time. 

The important value we need to look at is the keyword difficulty. For this keyword, the difficulty is estimated at 48% which means that it is possible to rank for it although Choquer Creative recommends aiming for something less than or equal to 40% to really be able to gain some authority over the SEO keyword

You can then see keyword variations that with implementation, can boost your rankings for the primary keyword. The questions section is nice because you can see the kinds of questions users are typing into their search engine and you can create content to answer such queries. The related keywords are where you can find your secondary and accessory keywords. The trend data reflects an interest in the keyword over a long period of time. 

The SERP Analysis

If you scroll down you can see what is called the SERP analysis. This shows you the top 100 Google results when your keyword is searched and the main metrics of the URLs that are ranking for your same keyword. You can then use this information to get an idea of how to outrank your competitors.  

Keyword Research Guide

The Page AS refers to page authority score, a metric used to measure the URL’s overall quality and influence on SEO. It is based on the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic search traffic and other data. 

Referring Domains is the total number of referring domains that have at least one link pointing to a given URL. Backlinks are the total number of backlinks leading to a given URL. Only referring domains and backlinks seen in the last few months are taken into account.

Search Traffic is the amount of estimated organic traffic driven to a given URL with the analyzed keyword over a specific period of time and URL keywords are the number of keywords for which a given URL is ranking in search results. 

Choosing Your Keywords

Next, you should check out the related keyword section and start compiling your list of keywords. SEMrush has a keyword manager feature where you can create a list of keywords.

You can then jump from your related keywords to find even more keywords. You can look back at our previous posts about keyword research that dives deeper into selecting SEO keywords

Conclusion 

If keyword research still seems a little too daunting, Choquer Creative has you covered. We are a SaaS SEO agency specializing in website packages for small businesses and businesses of any size. Understanding SEO keyword research is the first step in the process, so check out our other blog posts that provide easy-to-understand guides and SEO tips. If you don’t want to perform your own keyword research and find the keywords you can compete for, we have in-house SaaS SEO experts that are experienced in digital marketing that can help you increase your leadership growth.

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