Are you developing one of your first SEO strategies? Do you want to appear first on Google and increase the visibility of your website? Then, learning how to do a keyword research, step by step, will be essential for the success of your actions on search engines.
But before we start, there are a number of terms we need to know in order to be able to carry out our keyword research successfully. Let’s get started!
What is a keyword research?
In order to carry out a keyword research it is important to be clear about what we mean when we talk about these terms.
Keywords are the main terms by which users will find our website when they search on Google or any other search engine.
So, with this definition we can see the importance of carrying out a keyword study with honors, it will depend on it that our potential customers find our products or services when they make queries on Google!
Why are keywords so important?
Every second of the day there are millions of people around the world searching on Google. So this channel has become one of the main channels to get user traffic to a web page.
Working the right keywords in Google will allow you to appear in the first positions of search engines, and increase web traffic and, consequently, conversions.
But not all keywords will be valid for your website. It is very important to make a good study of keywords and choose the most appropriate for each page of the web.
But not all keywords will be valid for our page. It is very important to make a good study of keywords and choose the most appropriate for each page of the web. For example, if we have a website selling Tió de Nadal and Avets de Nadal in Catalonia, we will be interested in keywords in a specific language, while if the Caga Tió is sold online internationally, perhaps it will be more interesting to have the website in other languages, such as English.
Types of keywords
To start creating a step-by-step keyword research, we have to know how to differentiate why it is better to choose one keyword or another depending on the project and the objectives.
A nivel general, podemos agrupar las palabras claves en 3 categorías principales:
Short tail or generic keywords
When we talk about short tails or generic keywords we refer to keywords composed of one or two terms. So, in general, they tend to be very generic. These types of keywords tend to be words with more searches, but also with more competition and are not very specific.
Middle tail keywords
Middle tail keywords refer to terms composed of two or three words. In general, they are frequently used sets of words, but a bit more specific than generic keywords.
This type of keywords, usually have many searches and high competition, although in some more specific sectors, such as the industrial sector, these keywords can be of special interest, since the competition is lower, and there are many searches.
Long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are composed of three, four or more terms. They are usually keywords with less competition, but also with fewer searches, although, in general, of higher quality, since they are focused on a more specific audience that is clearer about what they need or are looking for – so it is more likely that they end up buying or generating a conversion on the web.
Long tail keywords are closely related to voice searches – which have been booming in recent years – as they are more similar to the language used verbally.
Using this type of keywords can be of special importance for small or medium-sized companies that want to compete against big brands, which, in general, manage to get the best positions for more generic keywords. They are very appropriate, especially when starting to design a keyword strategy.
What keywords are better to choose for my website?
There is no basic rule about what kind of keywords are best for each website, this will always be affected by the language, the sector, the competition and the product or service.
Performing a previous analysis of the online competition will be very useful to design a successful seo keyword strategy.
In general, in order to know what kind of keyword will be better to work on your project, to analyze the competition you should ask yourself: Do they all have an online website? How many years ago? When you enter your products or services in Google, do many websites appear with worked results? Depending on the name of the competitors and the quality, we will have to focus on some keywords or others.
How to do a keyword research step by step?
Now that we have defined what a keyword is and we know which ones may be of more interest to our business, it is time to start searching for them. The following is a step-by-step approach to keyword research:
1. Ask yourself: How do you think our potential customers will look for us?
The first thing we should do when designing a keyword SEO strategy is to ask ourselves how we think our prospects will search for us. If you have a large team, you know people who tend to search for this type of content… ask them how they would search for it in Google and write it down! It’s always important to get several opinions and brainstorm ideas, especially if you don’t know much about the industry.
2. Analysis of search intentions in… Google!
Tenemos la suerte que Google automáticamente ya nos indica una serie de términos relacionados con los conceptos o palabras que buscamos en su buscador. ¡Utilizalo para inspírate! Siempre es de gran ayuda conocer que tipo de palabras relacionadas con tus principales propuestas concuerdan realmente con lo que la gente busca.
3. Check if the terms are trending
Before going to a keyword planner, it is important to know if the keywords we are writing down to work them into our strategy are trending. That is to say, there are more and more people searching with that name or terms.
To do this, you can use Google Trends. This tool indicates the evolution of searches for each word, so you can know if it has an upward or downward trend. It is important to note that it is useful for words with many searches. Those keywords of more specific sectors, it is better to go directly to analyze them in the keyword planner.
4. Let’s go to a keyword planner
It is time to find out if those words that we have been writing down, really have many searches and a lot of competition. To know this, there are several tools that we can use to analyze it, known as keyword planners.
One of the most used (and reliable!) is the Google Ads keyword planner, although in order to access it, it is important to have a previous user and, if possible, a history of ads, since the data provided by the tool will be more accurate. There are also many other options for keyword research.
Keyword planners
- Google Ads Keyword planner (free, pre-registration)
- Ubbersuggest (free and premium version)
- Keyword Difficulty Tool SEMrush (paid)
- Keyword Tool (free and premium version)
- Sistrix (paid)
- Ahrefs (paid)
5. Select the keywords you are most interested in
Once we know the search volume of the keywords and their competition we can decide which keywords will be of more interest to work on each of the pages of the website. It is important that we select only one keyword per page and never repeat them. And very important… Always write it down in a document! This way, we will always have well organized which words we have worked on each page and it will be very useful for our internal linking strategy.
And that’s it! With all this finished, we can say that our keyword research is ready. Although now, we still have a lot of work to do to get these words indexed correctly in search engines so we can increase the visibility of our website.
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