Keyword research, step 1: Find out what matters most to you

… That's the million-dollar question.

As with everything else in life, you need to work out where your focus should be. What is most important for you to become more visible for?

More often than not, the most obvious questions for working this out are: “What do you make the most money from?” and “what do you want to sell more of?”.

Once you've worked that out, you can get started on your keyword research. Now you have your “goal”.

You know that this is the area of your business where you want to focus on getting more sales-generating conversions.

Keyword research, step 2: Get clear on who you're optimising your website for

You can't do targeted marketing if you don't know who you're talking to.

For that reason, you of course need to look into who your potential customers actually are.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to gain better insight into your target audience.

Among other things, you can:

Dig into data from your website and your social media

In Google Analytics, you can gain far greater insight into which content your visitors interact with on your site and which pages drive the most traffic.

If you run Facebook ads, Facebook Insights can also help you learn more about which content your target audience responds to, and about your target audience's demographics.

Talk to your current and potential customers
To really understand your target audience in depth, you can interview both your sales department and your existing customers.

You can also turn to questionnaires and reach more people in less time.

The most important thing is to try to understand what your customers' challenges, needs and questions are, how they interact with your business, and which content they respond positively to.

To visualise your potential customers' needs, challenges and questions even better, you can have a go at creating personas.

Hubspot are brilliant at that, so take my advice and geek out on it here.

Keyword research, step 3: Get an overview of what people google

You now have a clear picture of which business areas matter to you and who your target audience is. Now you can really get started on your keyword research.

Before you get impatient, though, remember that keyword research is not a linear process.

You find lots of keywords, analyse their potential, swap some out, prioritise and find new ones.

But you have to start your detective work somewhere, and you can do that by making a long list of potential keywords.

Some tools to get you started:
Ahrefs (not free),
https://answerthepublic.com (free),
https://moz.com/explorer (free),
Google Keyword Planner (free, but you need a Google Ads account) + a pinch of common sense, a dash of logic and plenty of empathy.

Let Google brainstorm keywords related to your business

To start with, you can log in to Google Keyword Planner and let Google “brainstorm”. It's very simple.

You just enter a few words related to your business, and you get a long list of keyword ideas, their average number of monthly searches and the competition.

Download the list of suggestions, and now turn your attention to your competitors ↓

Check what your biggest competitors are found for

It's always smart to look over your competitors' shoulders for inspiration. In Ahrefs, you can check what your biggest competitors are found for that you aren't.

They won't necessarily be keywords that make sense for your business, but it's a good way to learn more about what people actually google, and to uncover any gaps in your own online presence.

Use Ahrefs' “content gap” feature by entering the domains of three competitors and your own ↓

Add the words you think have potential to your keyword list, and now build on your list by…

… Looking into what you're found for right now

All optimisation work should naturally be based on where things stand right now. That's why you need to look into what your website currently ranks for. Look at both what it ranks well for and what it ranks embarrassingly badly for.

For example, you can use site explorer in Ahrefs or Google Search Console.

With insight into what it ranks well for, you can dig into the data in Google Analytics and see whether the good rankings actually translate into healthy visitor numbers and valuable conversions.

If they do, you know that keywords like these are important to you, and you can start hunting for related keywords.

You can also add the keywords you rank poorly for to your list of potential keywords, and then look into whether there's potential in them.

How, you ask? Keep reading, I promise I'll get to it ↓

Map your potential customers' journey

So far, so good. You now have a long list of keywords, which most likely contains both good and bad. But the list can be better and more targeted.

It's time to zoom in on the questions and challenges your personas may have throughout their entire buying process, also known as the customer journey.

Why is that a good idea, you ask?
Because most people don't just wake up one morning and think “I need to buy a ventilation system” and then google “buy ventilation system” without first having noticed a problem in their everyday life that they didn't know the solution to.

The customer journey is the key to understanding the thought processes your target audience goes through, from when they've just started to notice their pain point and don't yet know the solution, to when they know what they want to buy, where and why.

At each stage of the customer journey, the searcher has different intentions and needs.

The words they type into Google are therefore also different.

And if you want to optimise your website so that you're not just found when your potential customers need you and your expertise, but you also convert your visitors, you need to deliver content created around the stages of the customer journey.

In short: keyword research based on your target audience's customer journey is how you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

A bit too busy? Get a free SEO analysis from me or a colleague.

Find keywords for the awareness stage

Typically, the decision-making process starts in the “awareness stage”.

Here, the person googling discovers that he has a challenge or a problem, but he's unsure about the scope and significance of the problem, and doesn't know the solution to it.

The searches the person googling makes here are called informational keywords. He's looking for information, has only just started researching, and is therefore far from ready to buy anything at all.

But even though he's nowhere near getting his card out, it's still a hugely important stage for a business to be found in.

This is exactly where you as a business have the opportunity to plant a seed in your target audience's mind that you know a great deal about the subject.

You're the expert. And you're even helpful and share your knowledge through landing pages, blog posts, infographics or videos.

Find keywords for the awareness stage by asking these questions:

What challenges does your business solve?
What is the outcome your business delivers at its best?
And what words does your target audience usually use about their problems and the desired outcome?

Let's say your business makes its living from speed-optimising websites.

Then searches made by your potential customers in the awareness stage could be:

“slow website”
“slow website check”
“why is my website slow?”
“how do I speed up my website?”
“best way to make a website fast”
“make website fast” or “fast website”.

Find keywords for the consideration stage

In the next stage, the person googling is now aware of his challenge and knows that different solutions exist. It's especially now that the buyer puts on his solution-oriented glasses.

The person googling is actively scouting for a fix, and he now knows that there are businesses that can speed-optimise the website for him.

Keywords at this stage will therefore be much more specific and informed.

To come up with keywords for the consideration stage, you can zoom in on these questions:

Who are your competitors, and what's the difference between their products/services and yours?
What are the pros and cons of your product/service (especially according to your customers)?
What questions do your customers often ask about your product?
What synonyms are there for your product/service, and what words do your customers use for your product's category?

Examples of typical searches:

“Your product name” vs. “your competitor's product name”
“Your product's name/product type/product category” + city
Benefits of “your product's name”
Drawbacks of “your product's name”
Company/brand + product type
Reviews of “product type”
Prices for “product type”

Find keywords for the conversion stage

In the conversion stage, your potential customer will use transactional keywords. These are searches at the end of the buying process, and your potential customer is getting very close to buying your product or ordering your service.

Brainstorm keywords by zooming in on:

Do you have any discounts or subsidy schemes?
What's the quickest way for a customer to get your product into their basket, order your service or book an appointment with you?
Do your customers tend to have specific practical questions just before they buy your product or service?

In the conversion stage, searches are often fairly straightforward. You'll see searches like:

Buy “your product/service”
Order “your product/service”
Book “your product/service”
Discount on “your product/service”
Download “your product/service”
Sale on “your product/service”
Where do I buy “your product/service”

Find keywords for the delight stage

Unfortunately, many people forget the last stage. The delight stage can be overlooked because your customer has now actually become a customer.

But don't you also want a happy customer who feels seen and heard?

That's exactly what your content, and therefore your keywords, should focus on for the final stage.

Think about what questions your customers often have after they've bought your product. Do you have any good advice on how they can get the most out of the product? Or avoid running into problems?

With your long list of keywords, it's now a good idea to sort them all by the stages of the customer journey.

Pop them into a Google Sheet. Then you'll have them ready to weed out when you reach the next (and last, don't worry) step in your analysis: analysing the potential of each individual keyword ↓

Keyword research, step 4: Analyse the keywords' potential

Before you decide which keywords to go after, you need to assess their potential with three important questions:

Is the keyword actually the right match for what you offer?

The most important thing to avoid is choosing keywords based only on the potential for traffic.

It's just as important to choose keywords based on the potential to convert the traffic that comes in. That way, you get relevant traffic.

So the question is: does the search intent match what you offer?

When the searcher types in “plumbing”, for example, it's important for you as a plumber to find out whether the intent behind the search is to book a plumber to carry out a service (such as clearing a blocked drain), or to find a webshop selling plumbing supplies (such as a bath tap or a new water pipe).

A good way to learn more about the intent behind a keyword is to look at the page-one results currently showing for that keyword.

Do they match what you offer?

If they do, it's an indicator that the world's largest search engine has judged that the intent behind the search is to find what you offer = your chosen keyword has potential.

Is there enough to go after?

The next important question is: how many people search for the term each month?

In my view, there's no number of monthly searches that is as such too low or too high to go after, if you have unlimited time in your calendar.

But very few of us have that. So it pays to weigh the monthly number of searches against what a single converting customer on the chosen keyword is worth in hard cash.

The search phrase “How much does a bathroom renovation cost” has (right now) 30 monthly searches in Denmark.

That's not many in the grand scheme of things. But if 1 of these searches turns into a customer who pays to renovate their palace of a bathroom, that one customer can quickly earn back all the SEO work for the keyword.

So don't fixate on search volume. Instead, assess what ranking number 1 for the keyword would give you, considering how much work it takes to get there.

Is it doable?

… And now we come to the less fun (or really fun?) part. Of course, you need to look at the competition for the keyword.

The question here is: how easy is it to dominate your keyword?

Search volume can often give you a rough idea. The more monthly searches, the greater the competition tends to be.

But if you want a more specific answer, you can look at Moz's or Ahrefs' difficulty score, which is based partly on your domain's link profile.

Also remember that you need to judge for yourself whether you can deliver SEO work as good as that of whoever currently ranks highest, because they're the ones you need to beat.

As the icing on the cake, you can look at the potential organic click through rate for the keyword. SEO guru Rand Fishkin has written a really good article on that.

Don't have time for all this?

Okay, okay. Of course I understand that.

But the work pays off! And just like with money, it costs time to save time in the end. A half-finished analysis will only give half-finished results.

Let us give you a free SEO report to help you on your way.

If you don't have the resources to put together a well-thought-out SEO strategy, you're always welcome to drop me an email at seo@amplify.dk or get hold of one of my colleagues at info@amplify.dk.

THANKS for reading!

Choose keyword research over gut feeling