Keyword research has remained a constant in a rapidly changing search landscape. If you’re an inbound marketer looking to optimize your website, understanding how to do keyword research is a must.
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In this post, we’ll define what keyword research is, why it’s important, how to conduct your research for your SEO strategy, and how to choose the right keywords for your website.
Table of Contents
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research helps you find your SEO sweet spot — the overlap of keywords that aren’t too hard to rank for and keywords that you can confidently produce excellent content on. It also identifies the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.
I talked to HubSpot Growth Manager Amal Kalepp, who says that keyword research “determines who your competitors are and which area of the search landscape you can rank for. Doing keyword research and understanding where your blog or website sweet spot is — that’s what gives you rankability.”
Insights from actual search terms can inform your content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.
Your Purranormal Detective Agency may have the best ghost-detecting kittens in the business, but if nobody’s searching for “cat paranormal detective” (they aren’t; I checked), you aren’t going to have much luck — or traffic — if you base your content strategy on that keyword.
People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online, so if your content successfully gets in front of your audience, you stand to gain more traffic.
Therefore, you should be targeting those searches with content that features those keywords in a meaningful way.
Additionally, inbound methodology focuses less on creating content around what we want to tell people. Instead, we should be creating content around what people want to discover.
In other words, our audience is coming to us for helpful content that provides the answers they’re looking for. And it all begins with keyword research.
Benefits of Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research has many benefits, the most popular being:
Marketing Trend Insight
Conducting effective keyword research can provide insights into current marketing trends and help you center your content on relevant topics and keywords your audience is looking for.
Traffic Growth
When you identify the best-fitting keywords for the content you publish, the higher you’ll rank in search engine results — and the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.
Customer Acquisition
If your content meets the needs of your users, adding a strong call-to-action will lead them into the buyer journey from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.
By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.
For instance, the Purranormal Detective Agency would do better to produce excellent content on the broader topic of paranormal investigators, which has a monthly search volume (MSV) of 800.
Keywords vs. Topics
“Search intent” is something I frequently hear about from HubSpot SEOs. That’s because the reason a user types in a particular keyword matters — a lot.
Our content has to solve users’ problems. If you found your way to this article via the search term “SEO keyword strategy,” we have to anticipate your questions on this topic. And then answer them.
SEO is evolving at breakneck speed, but keyword research is still foundational to search intent. It tells you what topics people care about and how popular those topics actually are among your audience.
The operative term here is “topics,” plural. By researching keywords with a high volume of monthly searches, you can identify and sort your content into topics or buckets that you’ll use to create content.
Then you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.
Elements of Keyword Research
There are three main elements to conducting keyword research.
1. Relevance
Google ranks content for relevance.
This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers’ needs.
In addition, your content must be the best resource for the query — Google won’t rank your content as highly if it doesn’t provide better value than its competitors.
If you’re starting an SEO business specializing in small businesses, you might assume that “SEO tips for small businesses” would be the most relevant keyword. But take a look at the Ahrefs keyword research dashboard:
“SEO tips for small businesses” has an MSV of 300 and a high keyword difficulty. Its parent topic, “small business SEO,” has an MSV of 2,500 and a very high keyword difficulty.
2. Authority
Google provides more weight to sources it deems authoritative.
You can become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, informative content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks.
Both HubSpot.com and the HubSpot Blog are well-established sites, and we work hard to make sure we provide the content our readers are searching for. As a result, the root domain and subdomain have very high domain authority:
If you’re not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword’s SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can’t compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking.
3. Volume
You might rank on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, you won’t see any traffic. It's like setting up a shop in a ghost town.
Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.
Compare Ahrefs’ results for “cat detective agency” versus “paranormal investigator”:
Even though kitten detectives are your business’ differentiating factor, absolutely not a single soul is trying to locate a cat who can sniff out their resident poltergeist.
“Paranormal investigators” isn’t a wildly popular search term, but it gets significantly more volume than “cat detective agency,” so it’s a much better keyword to try to rank for.
Kalepp says that one of the common mistakes people make is assuming that a higher MSV is better. “‘Instagram marketing’ might seem like the best choice to rank for because it has millions of searches,” she says. “But it makes it much more difficult to rank for that.”
“You might have better luck with something like ‘Instagram marketing for small businesses’ — and then that can be your niche.”
She says that you could get “a lot more traffic ranking for a keyword that has a lower MSV and lower competition” than one with a high MSV.
I’m going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting.
That way, you’ll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you care about.
Step 1. Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
To kick this off, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets.
You’ll come up with about five to 10 topic buckets you think are essential to your business, and then you’ll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.
If you’re a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they’re the topics that come up the most in sales conversations.
Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas. What types of topics would your target audience search that you’d want your business to get found for?
HubSpot, for example, might have general topic buckets like:
- “SEO” (201K)
- “blogging” (60.5K)
- “CRM software” (49.5K)
- “social media marketing” (405K)
- “email marketing” (22.2K)
- “lead generation” (18.1K)
- “inbound marketing” (8.1K)
- “marketing analytics” (6.6K)
- “marketing automation” (6.6K)
- “AI marketing” (4.4K)
The number in parentheses is the MSV, according to Ahrefs.
That data allows you to gauge how important these topics are to your audience and how many different sub-topics you need to create content on to be successful with that keyword.
To learn more about these sub-topics, we move on to step two.
Step 2. Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it’s time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets.
These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.
For instance, if I took that last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company — “marketing automation” — I’d brainstorm some keyword phrases I think people would type in related to that topic.
Those might include:
- AI marketing tools
- marketing automation tools
- how to use marketing automation software
- what is marketing automation?
- how to tell if I need marketing automation software
- lead nurturing
- email marketing automation
- top automation tools
The point of this step isn’t to come up with your final list of keyword phrases; you just want a brain dump of phrases you think potential customers might use to search for content related to that particular topic bucket.
We’ll narrow the lists down later so you don’t have something too unwieldy.
Keep in mind that Google is encrypting more keywords every day, so another smart way to generate keyword ideas is to determine which keywords already bring users to your website.
To do this, you’ll need website analytics software like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or HubSpot’s Sources report, which are available in the Traffic Analytics tool.
Get started with HubSpot's free Traffic Analytics Tool.
Drill down into your website’s traffic sources and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people use to arrive at your site.
Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have.
Remember, if you’re having trouble brainstorming with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues in sales or service. Ask them what types of terms their prospects or customers have questions about.
Those are often great starting points for keyword research.
Here at HubSpot, we use the Search Insights Report. This template is designed to help you do the same and bucket your keywords into topic clusters, analyze MSV, and inform your editorial calendar and strategy.
Featured Resource: Search Insights Report Template
Step 3. Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze accordingly.
User intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google.
That means it’s vital that your web page addresses the problem a searcher wants to solve rather than simply including the keyword the searcher used.
So, how does this affect your keyword research?
It’s tempting to take keywords at face value, but they can have many different meanings.
And because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra careful about how you interpret the keywords you target.
Let’s say you’re researching the keyword “how to start a blog” for an article you want to create. “Blog” can mean a blog post or the blog website itself, and the searcher’s intent behind that keyword will influence the direction of your article.
Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post? Or do they want to know how to launch a website domain for a new blog?
If your content strategy only targets people interested in the latter, you’ll need to determine the keyword’s intent before using it.
To verify a user’s intent, it’s a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself and see what types of results come up.
I did a quick search for “how to start a blog,” and it looks like most users are searching for info on how to start a website with a blog, not an individual blog post:
Make sure the type of content Google is displaying relates to your intention for the keyword.
Step 4. Research related search terms.
This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it’s a great way to fill out those lists.
If you’re struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug a keyword into Google.
I searched Google for “AI search grader,” a new free product from HubSpot. At the bottom of the first page, I can see that users are also searching specifically for a free AI search grader.
These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Want a bonus? Type in some of those related search terms and look at their related search terms. Looking at the related search terms for “AI search grader free,” I can see that people are also searching for the best AI search grader.
Step 5. Use keyword research tools to your advantage.
Keyword research and SEO tools can help you brainstorm more keyword ideas based on exact-match keywords and phrase-match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point.
Some of the most popular ones include:
1. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Some of the best SEO reports and keyword research I’ve seen have come from SEO experts using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
Their webmaster tools offer plenty of detail into any verified domains you own if you’re looking for an overview of backlinks and organic keywords.
2. SE Ranking
I found SE Ranking was not quite as user-friendly to dive into as some of the other options.
When I typed in my keyword “keyword research,” I was prompted to set up a free seven-day trial, and it immediately asked for the domain I wanted to track.
While it gave me some good intro data, I had to do some digging to get to the keyword research and keyword suggestion tools. However, when I found them, the resulting data was comprehensive and gave me lots of great ideas.
It’s free and doesn’t require setting up an account.
3. SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool
Semrush is one of the most comprehensive SEO companies out there, so I wasn’t surprised to find that their keyword magic tool was comprehensive as well.
While you do need to set up an account, it’s free. Then, you can type in your keyword, get a list of similar keywords, and sort based on how specific you need your results to be.
4. Ubersuggest
I’ve been a fan of Ubersuggest for quite some time. You get up to three free searches a day, and it’s so easy to use.
In addition to finding out specific keyword performance, you can find related keywords and do a quick reverse search to find out what your site is already ranking for.
It’s one of the easiest, most comprehensive free options, if you don’t mind the limitations of the free searches.
5. Free Keyword Research Tool
I found Ryrob’s keyword research tool easy to use. When I plugged “keyword research” into the “Explorer” tab as my keyword, it gave me several related keywords that could be solid blog topics.
Then, when I shifted to the “Ideas” tab, it gave me other keyword cluster ideas that are more likely to be specific search terms that I might want to include in future articles on keyword research.
6. Google Keyword Planner
Google’s tools are always gold. They’re free, and it’s always good to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth. Once you sign in with your Google account, you can search for keyword ideas based on the keyword or your website.
7. Keywords Everywhere
Keywords Everywhere comes highly recommended, but it’s not a free tool.
It’s a browser extension and it takes a little more setup than browser-based options. The lowest price tier, “bronze,” is $2.25/month and limits you to 100K keywords annually.
Since it’s a browser extension, every time I do a Google search, I get data about related keywords and similar searches, which gives me lots of ideas for new content.
For the price and the detail, it’s one of my favorite tools.
8. KeywordTool.io
Using KeywordTool.io is exactly what they promise in the headline. When I typed in “keyword research,” I got a list of 502 keyword ideas.
Although I only see search volume, trend, CPC, and competition for the first five, I can see all of the keywords, which provides a solid search starting point.
9. KWFinder
KWFinder is another easy tool. While I quickly found that an account is needed to get started, it’s free and quite easy to dive in. I was able to quickly start finding the top keywords.
10. SearchVolume.io
When I plugged in a handful of keywords into SearchVolume.io, after doing a quick “Are you a human?” check, the monthly search volume immediately popped out.
A quick cross-comparison with other tools showed that the data was consistent with other platforms.
11. Rank Tracker
Rank Tracker by SEO PowerSuite is a solid tool for monitoring SERP data and doing keyword research.
There are a lot of great features, but Rank Tracker works best as a tool to rank relevant keywords, identify keyword gaps, and autocomplete phrases on different search engine tools.
Rank Tracker allows you to see all the phrases a particular domain ranks for, along with search volumes and keyword difficulty.
Their keyword gap tool allows you to determine which keywords competing websites are ranking for that you might be missing out on.
Rank Tracker also integrates with Google Search Console and Keyword Planner, providing a free version for unlimited testing.
Once you have an idea of the keywords that you want to rank for, now it's time to refine your list based on the best ones for your strategy. Here’s how.
Step 1. Use Google Keyword Planner to cut down your keyword list.
In Google’s Keyword Planner, you can get search volume and traffic estimates for keywords you’re considering. Then, take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.
Use the Keyword Planner to flag any terms on your list that have way too little (or way too much) search volume and don’t help you maintain a healthy mix like we talked about above.
But before you delete anything, check out their trend history and projections in Google Trends. You can see whether you should invest in some low-volume terms now so you can reap the benefits later.
Or perhaps you’re just looking at a list of terms that is way too unwieldy, and you have to narrow it down somehow. Google Trends can help you determine which terms are trending upward and are worth more of your focus.
Step 2. Prioritize low-hanging fruit.
That is, prioritize keywords that you have a chance of ranking for based on your website’s authority.
Large companies typically go after high search volume keywords, and since these brands are well established already, Google typically rewards them with authority over many topics.
You can also consider keywords that have little competition. Keywords that don’t already have multiple articles battling for the highest rank can afford you the spot by default — if there’s no one else trying to claim it.
Step 3. Check the monthly search volume (MSV) for keywords you’ve chosen.
You want to write content around what people want to discover, and checking MSV can help you do just that. Monthly search volume is the number of times a search query or keyword is entered into search engines each month.
Here are the results from Ahrefs on “SEO keyword strategy,” which has an MSV of 400:
Tools like searchvolume.io or Google Trends can help you find the most searched keywords for related keyword clusters for free.
Step 4. Factor in SERP features as you choose keywords.
There are several SERP feature snippets that Google will highlight if used correctly.
An easy way to find out about them is to look up keywords and see what the first result looks like.
But for a quick overview of the types of SERP featured snippets, we’ll summarize the more common ones here — you can read about all 22 of them on Google.
Image Packs
Image packs are search results displayed as a horizontal row of images that appear in an organic position. If there’s an image pack, you should write an image-heavy post to win placement in it.
For instance, here’s the image pack for “cat detective agency”:
AI Overviews
A relatively recent addition to Google’s rich results, AI Overviews provides an AI-written summary for a certain percentage of searches. (That percentage has changed a few times to meet the demand for accuracy.)
Paragraph Snippets
Featured snippets, or paragraph snippets, are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google search results for quick answers to common search queries. I asked Google, “Where do elephants live?” and it returned this featured snippet:
Understanding the searcher’s intent and providing succinct answers can help you win a featured snippet.
List Snippets
List snippets, or listicles, are snippets made for posts outlining steps to do something from start to finish — often for “How To” searches. Writing posts with direct, clear instructions and formatting can assist in winning this placement.
Video Snippets
Video snippets are short videos that Google displays at the top of a SERP in place of text-based featured snippets.
Posting a video on both YouTube and your website can help you win this placement if you’re tagged in the targeted keywords people are searching for.
Step 5. Check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords in each bucket.
Head terms are keyword phrases that are generally shorter and more generic — typically just one to three words in length.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are longer keyword phrases usually containing three or more words.
It’s important to check that you have a mix of head terms and long-tail terms in order to build a well-balanced keyword strategy with long-term goals and short-term wins.
That’s because head terms are generally searched more frequently, making them often (not always, but often) much more competitive and harder to rank for than long-tail terms.
Think about it: Without even looking up search volume or difficulty, which of the following terms do you think would be harder to rank for?
- how to write a great blog post
- blogging
If you answered #2, you’re absolutely right.
But don’t get discouraged. While head terms generally boast the most search volume (meaning greater potential to send you traffic), the traffic you’ll get from “how to write a great blog post” will usually be more desirable.
That’s because someone who’s using a specific query is probably a more qualified searcher for your product or service (presuming you’re in the blogging space) than someone with a more generic search query.
Because long-tail keywords tend to be more specific, it’s usually easier to tell what people who search for those keywords are actually looking for. Someone searching for the head term “blogging,” on the other hand, could be motivated by reasons that aren’t related to your business.
Kalepp says that short-tail keywords “can make it really difficult to rank, especially if you are a newer blog and you don't have that domain authority quite yet.”
She recommends “targeting those long-tail keywords, because a lot of times the competition is lower on them. And it allows you to really develop a niche and allows you to rank.”
So check your keyword lists for a healthy mix of head terms and long-tail keywords. You definitely want some quick wins that long-tail keywords will afford you, but you should also try to chip away at more difficult head terms over the long haul.
Kalepp, who’s worked on both the HubSpot and The Hustle blogs, says that it can be challenging to find the right balance.
When she worked on the HubSpot blog, “there wasn't a lot of fluctuation in what the search volume looked like, but for The Hustle blog, there were constant changes because we were writing about subjects that were really trendy.”
“And so it was imperative for us to strike when it was hot,” she says of The Hustle blog.
Step 6. See how competitors are ranking for these keywords.
Just because your competitor is doing something doesn’t mean you need to. The same goes for keywords. Just because a keyword is important to your competitor doesn’t mean it’s important to you.
However, understanding what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for is a great way to help you give your list of keywords another evaluation.
If your competitor is ranking for certain keywords that are also on your list, it makes sense to work on improving your ranking for those.
Kalepp says she’s a big fan of “doing a competitor analysis and understanding that landscape really well — and then using those same content pillars to build out a content library.”
Don’t ignore the ones your competitors don’t seem to care about — it could be a great opportunity to own market share on other important terms.
Understanding the balance of terms might be a little more difficult. Remember, the goal is to end up with a list of keywords that provides some quick wins but also helps you make progress toward bigger, more challenging SEO goals.
Here’s a quick way to get a sense of the terms that your competitors rank for: Manually search for keywords in an incognito browser and see what positions your competitors are in.
Best Keywords for SEO
Understand that there are no “best” keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic.
The best keywords for your SEO strategy will account for relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on your competition and your ability to produce excellent content on those keywords.
You’re Ready to Build Out Your Content
You now have a list of keywords that will help you focus on the right topics for your business and get you some short-term and long-term gains.
Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every few months — once a quarter is a good benchmark, but some businesses like to do it even more often than that.
As you gain even more authority in the SERPs, you’ll find that you can add more and more keywords to your list.
Kalepp also says to remember that building up a strong SEO strategy takes time. “It takes a long time to see results when you’re first building that strategy out,” she says. “Just understand that it takes time.”
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