Words are really important when it comes to search engines, because honestly everything starts from here. It’s the absolute beginning. If you master the science of finding words which your market is currently searching and typing in the box, then I’d say you’ve got the key that leads towards success.
Keyword is just a fancy way to say problems — yes, I call them problems because market is searching for a possible solution, a product, information or any other thing that works like a first-aid kit to their keyword.
If you know what people are searching for, you get to understand the market conditions and can come up with a solution, product or answers to their questions or queries. I’ll be teaching you how you can find gold keywords by my Juggernaut Method that is as simple as learning English alphabets. Let’s get started.
First things first
Before finding a good keyword, you’ve to understand your own website in a crystal-clear manner because if you don’t, it’ll terribly impact your business in the future because I’ve personally experienced it. So, do not rush during keyword research because this is where you lay the foundations of your brand or business. So, the first thing to understand is the nature of your website — you must know in which niche, industry or category your website falls in. Is it a blog that shares information about computers? Or an eCommerce website for shoes? Once you’ve identified the model of your website, you’ve technically completed first step of keyword research.
List out the Keyword ideas
Now is the time to list out important topics, ideas and relevant things that is directly related to your business or website that the market may be searching for. You’ve to see from the market’s eye and think what they’re thinking. If you’ve a blog that shares latest information about computers and its hardware, then you can search for keywords like these:
how does a CPU work
best 24 inch monitor
what is the difference between RAM & ROM
best motherboard for gaming
Now most of you will ask, “How to find the ideas?”, well, it’s a pretty simple process. There are lots of keyword suggestion tools on the Internet but I recommend using the free Google Keyword Planner tool as it’s easy-to-use and gives you everything you need all in one place. The working of the tool is quite simple, just enter a query in the box and it’ll come up with suggestions along with number of searches.
Value of a Keyword
After you’ve piled up the ideas and topics, it’s now time to determine the value of those keywords. We’re not going to use a keyword which people are not searching, or in which advertisers are not interested at all. From my list, I’m going to pick the third keyword and run it through the Google Keyword Planner:
Bad Keyword
Keywords are classified into 2 broad categories: a bad keyword and a good keyword. I’m gonna show you what a bad keyword looks like.
After the processing, the tool has given us some meaningful results:
Always select the “Keyword ideas” tab because we’re searching for different topics, we’re not here for advertising. So, as you can see only 20 people search for this keyword in a month which is extremely low. We don’t want such types of keywords because it’s almost 0% traffic. Now, let’s search for the same keyword in Google to see what the search engine has to say about it:
The results:
After searching for the keyword, we can see that we’re getting only organic search results which means advertisers aren’t interested at all. That is a clear symbol of a bad keyword. It is not going to bring us any sort kind of traffic due to the volume of searchers and it’s not going to reward us money, so you don’t want that kind of keywords.
Good Keyword
Let’s discuss the characteristics of a good keyword. The two most important metrics are: number of searchers and suggested bid according to Keyword Planner.
As you can see the keyword which I’ve selected is “how to lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks” below. Let’s process it and get the results:
Our keyword has a whopping 12,100 average monthly searches that is excellent. Don’t confuse the “Competition” in Keyword Planner with keyword difficulty, rather it shows the competitiveness of advertisers regarding this keyword. Even though it has low competition in the eyes of advertisers, but they’re still paying, so it’s indeed a rewarding one. This is a great example of a good healthy keyword.
Long-tail Keywords
When it comes to keywords, the most general and broad keyword is of extremely high competition. For example, “shoes” is a general and broad keyword which possibly has hundreds of thousands of searches per month, thus increasing the competition level. You cannot exactly say what people are exactly looking for when they’re searching for “shoes” — they might possibly be looking for some nice images of shoes, or like general information about shoes — there can be lots of variants and options.
The gold lies in the long-tail keywords. They’re just basically more specific keywords which the majority of the Internet searches for. The example I gave for a good keyword was “how to lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks” is also a brilliant example of a long-tail keyword as well. Long-tail keywords are a combination of 3 or more words typed in the search box. Why is it a good technique to use long-tail keywords? Because there is less competition and more volume of searchers.
6 Awesome tools to find Long tail keyword in any niche
Fastest way to find long tail keyword with high CPC
Resources for Keyword research
We’ve a plenty of resources for keyword research. Some of them are:
Google AdWords Keyword Planner – the most recommended beginner tool.
Google Trends – to keep an eye on the trends of a specific topic.
Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence – similar to Google AdWords Keyword Planner, but for Bing search engine.
Keyword Research Tool from Wordtracker – another free useful keyword research tool.
SEMRUSH Keyword tool: Paid but makes it easy to find long-tail keywords.
Summing it up
Keyword research is the most integral part of the complete SEO process. It is where you lay the foundations of your business and can literally make or break your game. Invest good time in searching for valuable keywords. Go for long-tail, less competitive and moderate amount of searches (between 3,000 to 5,000 per month). Make sure you thoroughly research the keyword to clearly understand its difficulty because if you’re trying to rank a keyword on which sites like Microsoft or CNN is already on top, then you’re out of luck.
If you’ve some good resources of keyword research tools then please do share in the comments below! Constructive criticism is more than welcome.
This awesome post is contributed by Muhammad Talha. If you want to submit something original for ShoutMeLoud bloggers community, you should read our submission guidelines.
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A Comprehensive Guide To Keyword Research By Juggernaut Method is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires