This keyword research for beginners with free tools is a guide to show how even a beginner with zero knowledge can start with keyword research without spending a penny.
Keyword research should be the key priority for any blogger or any online marketing campaign if You are planning any online business.
If you are good at keyword research, you have done almost half of your work.
After learning in detail about setting up a new blog – start a brand new blog from scratch, we take you to the most important aspect of your blogging journey i.e., keyword research.
This guide will teach you an in-depth process of researching keywords for your marketing goals such as getting more Pageviews, capturing leads, or generating sales for your products or services.
This Guide Will cover everything about keyword research You need to know as a beginner-
What is keyword research?
Before we understand what is keyword research, let us clarify what basically is a keyword? – The keyword mainly refers to words or phrases that a user is typing on the search engines in order to search their queries on the internet.
So a user types any keyword he/she wants to search and as a result, they are provided with the list of websites that are most relevant to the users’ queries.
The keyword is a bridge that connects users (queries) and websites (solutions).
Keyword Research on the other hand is necessary for the business owners or bloggers who try to find out what the user is trying to search on the internet and create content around those queries.
Keyword researched-based contents are helpful for the content creators to solve the user’s queries and at the same time to bring visitors to their optimized website.
Why Do You Need keyword research?
Earlier it was very easy for anyone to stuff keywords and rank your website on the top of the Search engine result page(SERP).
But as Google improved its algorithm and found how it is being misused and many legit websites being over ranked by these techniques of keyword stuffing.
Since then Google has improved a lot and is now holding a monopoly in the search engine market.
The main objective of keyword research is
- To find out what people are searching, how many people are interested in similar topics, their demographics, and much more.
- Formulating your content around the topics which users are interested in, not only writing what you want to write.
- Using these keywords as business opportunities for your business or also by monetizing your websites through affiliate marketing since you have target visitors now.
Therefore, no matter whether you are a blogger, an affiliate marketer, or a business owner, if you have a website your priority should be to mine out those keywords and create content around that.
Don’t worry if you are a beginner we’ll take you to the process of performing keyword research from scratch.
Types of keyword people usually search.
There are mainly 3 categories under which almost most of the keywords lie
- Informational keyword – (Awareness stage)
These types of keywords are usually searched with the intention of finding information about certain products or services or it can be also about gaining knowledge about a person, place, or certain events.
In Marketing, it is said a person goes through the AIDA phase before he makes a buying decision.
AIDA is Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.
which explains firstly you aware people about your products then create interest and desire in them for your products or services before they go and take action by buying from you.
So informational keywords are targeted to provide information about users’ queries.
Some of the phrases of informational keywords start with:
- What is/are
- How can I
- Best ways
- Guide to
- How to
- Which is/are
Here is one example of an informational keyword:
- Navigational keyword – (Consideration stage)
These types of keywords are usually searched by the people who are already aware of the company or brand and want to go to that specific address or webpage.
Here users are aware of the product or services and trying to reach a specific webpage or address.
They type navigational keywords like the companies or brands’ names with their products or services offerings to go to their desired destination.
Remember that under informational keywords, users don’t know which webpage they need to go to, rather they search and try to find the best results for their queries.
Some of the phrases of navigational keywords are:
- [Products] near me
- [Company Name]
- [Product Name]
- Service Name
- Price of [Product/Service]
- Reviews/Testimonials
Example of a navigational keyword:
- Transactional Keyword – (Conversion stage)
This stage is most important for any business as this is what brings money to their account. Transactional keywords are most specific and buying centric.
People are done with researching the products or services, Now they are more prompt to take actions – pull out their credit cards from their wallets.
They use transactional keywords to go to the desired webpage and make purchases and hence it is the last stage of the buyer journey.
Phrases of the transactional keywords are:
- Buy
- Purchase
- Discount
- Coupons
- Apply
How does a transactional keyword look?
Here you see the keyword – buy Fastrack fitness band with consumer behavior of more likely to buy the product.
Factors to keep in mind while performing keyword research.
- Search Intent
Now that you have understood the types of keywords, it is important to consider the search intent of the users before creating content for the keywords.
You should filter your researched keywords among those three categories and then try to write the fittest content around that to profit from the targeted traffic.
Understanding the intent of the keywords will let you create content that will be most relevant to users and thereby google will reward you with a higher ranking.
- Keyword difficulty
Keyword difficulty is a metric that tells you how difficult it is to rank for specific keywords. Different tools use different algorithms to figure out the difficulty of a keyword.
But on average, you should understand the more the keyword difficulty is, the harder it is to rank.
As a beginner, you should not target highly competitive keywords rather try to create content around less competitive keywords as it will increase your chances for ranking and bring some initial traffic.
- Competition
As discussed in the earlier points, the more the keyword difficulty is the more competitive it is and hard for newbies to rank till you build your authority in your niche.
As building authority takes time, try to find less competitive keywords in the initial days, and work around to build trust in your niche and gain backlinks.
The more the competition, it is harder to rank.
- Search volume
This tells you whether it is worth working on specific keywords. Since there can be more search volume there will be chances of competition also.
You should target those keywords which are relevant to your niche and not to blindly search high volume keywords, understand the search intent properly.
Understanding search intent will help you to monetize your content in the longer term.
Search volume should not be the only factor to be excited about.
- Keyword ROI
As you understand more deeply how keywords really help your business or blogs grow, you will start mining those keywords which can give you returns in the future.
ROI (Return on Investment) is basically if you are able to rank for some of the transactional keywords it can give you more returns than much of the informational and navigational keywords.
There are many keywords that have less volume but highly profitable, your one of the aims as a business should be to find out those keywords.
We will be understanding each term in detail in our next section.
How to do keyword research practically?
We will be explaining with one of the famous free SEO tools in the industry- Ubersuggest.
Although there are many other paid tools to do keyword research let us focus on understanding with the usage of Ubersuggest, You can anytime go and explore other tools once you have the knowledge.
This is the user interface of the Ubersuggest tool you get once you type Ubersuggest on Gooogle and try to open it.
Let us go with one of the most famous searched keywords- how to lose weight?
This is the interface you must focus on and learn the terminologies from. Let us see what are those numerical terms.
- Search Volume: is the number of times the particular keyword is being searched every month.
- SEO difficulty: This tells how difficult it is rank for the specific keyword. The higher it is, the more competitive the keyword is.
- Paid difficulty: It tells about how much highly people are bidding for this keyword by Running advertisements.
- Cost Per Click: It basically tells you the amount you need to pay for each click if you are running an ad campaign for the particular keyword
Best practices while doing keyword research:
When you are a beginner it is very obvious to get carried away even for the highly competitive keywords.
But also you should know, a new blog or website requires patience and consistency to attract visitors on a regular basis.
Along with that, you should also take care of these following points.
- As a beginner choose the less competitive keywords and create content around the keywords to build some authority in your niche.
- Start building backlinks and collecting Emails from day one. As the saying goes money is in your lists.
- Be consistent when it comes to creating content and implementing SEO.
- Update Yourselves with the latest news of SEO or Google algorithm changes.
- Try to stick to your niche and provide values to gain trust of your readers.
- Be social when it comes to promoting your blogs, share as much as possible.
- Do not fall for black hat SEO to get quicker results, it will destroy your dream of blogging.
- Spend some money on the blogging tools if you want to sustain and accelerate your blogs.
- Discover the best monetization methods for your blog. It is not always Adsense or affiliate marketing best for each blog.
- Understand, connect, and get ideas from your audience also write for them if you want to build credibility in the industry.
Other paid tools to consider While keyword research.
SEMrush: On of the finest and most recommended SEO tools In the industry. Be it keyword research or competitor analysis.
You can check out the SEMrush FREE TRIAL for 7 days by going on the SEMrush website.
Ahref: used by most of the bloggers while doing keyword research or auditing for SEO.
Although the price of this tool is $99 for the basic plan. You can get Ahref for 7 days at $7 and utilize all the features.
Moz Pro: Moz is a well-known brand in the SEO industry. It is all-in-one SEO software, where you can perform various actionable tips to increase your Search Engine Indexing.
They are offering 30 days free- trial. Check out here – Moz Pro Free trial
These 3 tools are some of the well-known tools used by most of the blogging professionals. Even though the pricing is much higher but the returns you get are phenomenal.
If you are a complete beginner and don’t want to spend on the premium tools at the beginning, I recommend you to go with free tools.
Conclusion
A dream does not become reality by magic: it takes sweat, dedication, and hard work.
Since your aim is to build an authoritative website or well-known blog in your niche it requires patience, consistency, and focussed content creation strategy.
Keyword research and content creations are the base or pillar for the success of your blog and therefore you must focus more on these.
Concluding the article:-
1. Try to mine out hidden valued keywords with the search intent.
2. Create depth and valuable content around those keywords.
We will teach you how to create amazing content which users will love to read in our next tutorial.
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Thank You! Happy Blogging.