You, a content marketing ninja, are able to wield immense SEO reach with your content in ways most SEOs (*cough* like myself) can only dream of.
BUT, you’re not leveraging keyword research to your advantage!
The fact that you can discover how many people per month are searching for something, what words they're using, and what questions they're asking still blows my mind!
Keyword research doesn’t have to be a marathon bender. A brisk 30-minute walk can provide incredible insights — insights that connect you with a wider audience on a deeper level.
Why keyword research is essential [Case Study]
My previous company, Pryde Marketing, was not founded on out-of-this-world high-quality content. It was founded on leveraging online data strategically for private medical practices.
When we were hired to do keyword research for an MRI company, we discovered that hundreds of people a month were searching “open vs closed mri” but no one was providing any good answers, content, or photos for these searchers.
We decided to create an "Open Vs. Closed MRI" page for our client that, to our surprise, continues to see over double the traffic of the homepage. Plus, it's brought in over 50k+ unique visitors.
We were not successful because we thought of this content idea.
We were successful because we listened to the keyword data.
5 keyword research hacks in under 30 minutes
Example client: Hunter & Company (Wedding & Event Planning)
Objective: Write better content for their website and assist with digital marketing efforts.
#1: Blog category keyword research
Having five to ten data-driven blog categories can help you rank for popular topics, allow readers to find more relevant content, and help to organize your blog.
Evaluate top industry websites (10 mins)
Identify the most common navigation items and blog categories on leading industry sites.
Advanced search operators (3 mins)
While exploring top websites, you can use advanced Google operators to dig deeper.
Example: Bride.com has topic pages like /topic/wedding-beauty. To view all of Bride.com’s topics search this: site:brides.com/topic
Google Suggest (10 mins)
Google "wedding" and don’t hit enter!
Instead, make note of the drop-down search suggestions. You can also search "wedding a" [don’t hit enter], "wedding b" [don’t hit enter], all the way through to z to get the most popular and/or trending wedding-related searches.
Now that we have aggregated keywords from the above tactics, we have a solid list:
wedding venues, wedding photographers, wedding dj, wedding beauty, wedding videographers, wedding bands, wedding budget, wedding invitations, wedding registry, wedding colors, wedding decorations, wedding party, wedding ideas, wedding cakes, wedding centerpieces, wedding hairstyles, wedding bouquets, engagement rings, wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses, mother of the bride dresses, wedding rings, flower girl dresses, wedding accessories, wedding jewelry, wedding tuxedos, wedding registry, wedding ceremony, wedding reception, wedding cake, wedding food, wedding favors, wedding flowers
Keep up the pace — we can’t stop here!
Next, let’s determine which categories are most popular by average monthly Google searches.
There are two primary tools to view average monthly search volume (AKA to know how many times a query like “wedding flowers” are searched per month): Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer. (Check out GKP vs. MKE to learn more.)
Google Keyword Planner (5 mins)
Step 1: Paste your saved keyword list into the box under “Enter one or more of the following” and click “Get Ideas”:
Step 2: Evaluate and save search volume data while being mindful of the large search data ranges and limited data:
Note: Google will occasionally change your keywords to something different; “wedding videographers” was changed to “wedding videos” in this case. It’s important to be mindful of this as you’re deciding on the exact category names.
You should also explore the keywords below your immediate keyword search section. Sort by average monthly searches (highest to lowest) to make sure you aren’t missing any other big category items.
Moz Keyword Explorer (5 mins)
Step 1: Create a new list.
Step 2: Paste your keyword list into the “Enter Keywords” box:
Step 3: Take a quick water break, because KWE will take a minute to gather data. Once the data is in view, sort by and evaluate average monthly search volume:
Woohoo! We reached the finish line with two minutes to spare.
To finalize our blog categories, we need to ask ourselves two things: Which topics are the most popular and the most relevant to a wedding planner site?
With that in mind, you’ve chosen six of the most popular wedding topics and have nested several sub-categories within “Wedding Decorations” — brilliant!
- Wedding Dresses
- Wedding Invitations
- Wedding Photography
- Wedding Cakes
- Wedding Venues
- Wedding Decorations
- Wedding Flowers
- Wedding Colors
- Wedding Centerpieces
- Wedding Venues
#2: FAQ keyword research
Answering the most commonly searched-for questions about your product/service will provide value to your readers and solidify you as an industry expert.
Here’s how to gather the most commonly asked questions on a topic:
AnswerThePublic.com (10 mins)
Search for your product/service.
How cool is this snazzy question wheel?! While the visuals are fun, it’s easier to gather the questions by clicking the top-right yellow “export to csv” button and deleting non-relevant questions in a .csv or Google Sheet.
Moz Keyword Explorer (10 mins)
Step 1: Search and filter “display keyword suggestions” by “are questions”:
Step 2: Add relevant questions to a new keyword list:
Step 3: Add relevant AnswerThePublic questions to list:
Research done!
I wouldn’t worry about evaluating search volume too closely for FAQs because questions are typically more long-tail (meaning they have lower search volume and are usually easier to rank for). In multitudes, these can be very valuable to your site.
Now you can start adding your newly discovered FAQs to an FAQ page (while trying to avoid duplicate types of questions):
#3: Competitive content research
Evaluate your competitor’s 10 most popular pages on SimilarWeb (5 mins)
This uncovers the specific type of content your audience is interested in. Here are the 10 most popular pages for One Fine Day Events:
Evaluate each of the top pages & gather 3 key takeaways (20 mins)
- The most popular “Gallery” page confirms that images are extremely popular in the wedding and event space. Maintaining an optimized gallery and incorporating more images into on-page content should be a top digital marketing priority.
- Interestingly, the “Preferred Vendors” page is a Category page! It's something we should consider implementing on Hunter & Co. It would also be a great link building opportunity (to get vendors to link back to Hunter & Co)... but I digress.
- Testimonials should also be a top priority and live off the primary navigation.
Pro tip: Use Google Trends to evaluate seasonal searches and prepare competitive content months before it spikes:
#4: Expand your keyword reach
Expanding your page’s topical content will expand your digital SEO reach. This is why you’ll see definitive guides like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO ranking so well, and for such a wide range of keywords (~1,665!).
Download MozBar (Chrome add-on) (1 minute)
Step 1: Activate MozBar. Enter in your primary keyword and click “optimize.”
Step 2: Click “On-Page Content Suggestions”:
Step 3: View the 23+ content integration ideas for your webpage:
Decide which topics you want to integrate (5 mins)
You never want to force non-relevant content onto a page for SEO reasons. Instead, look through the topics and think about which would provide value to your readers.
Then, devise a plan to naturally integrate those topics into the page’s content.
Topic integrations for the Hunter & Co. homepage:
- Wedding Planning Checklist (create a checklist page that’s linked to from homepage)
- Wedding Vendors (confirms our popular page strategy! Add a page link from the homepage)
- Wedding Venues
- Couples
#5: Keep up with Google
We are seeing a big rise in "no-click" Google searches.
No-click searches occur when individuals search for something and find their answer, without ever having to click on a search result.
Example: If you search “Denver weather,” Google will show you an 8-day weather forecast for Denver. Most searchers are satisfied with that and leave, resulting in a no-click Google search.
Image from State of Searcher Behavior Revealed
No-click searches are rising because Google continues to provide searchers answers within search features such as featured snippets (answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, knowledge graphs, weather forecasts, etc.
Know which search features show up most often for your keywords (5 mins)
Knowing which search features occur most frequently for your product/service-related searches can help you to steal search features by optimizing for them. Keep in mind that if you're ranking on page one or two of a desired featured snippet search, you're better positioned to steal that featured snippet than if you were on page 3+.
Remember our FAQs about “wedding planning” above? Twenty-four of 28 questions found in Moz Keyword Explorer have featured snippets (answer boxes) in their search results:
RealSimple currently has a large featured snippet for “wedding checklist”:
Looking more closely into that page, you’ll notice RealSimple’s <html> check-box markup and definitive style content.
Brainstorm a better (and more useful) wedding checklist (10 mins)
- Hire a freelance developer to create a beautiful, printable wedding checklist calendar that, once a reader enters their wedding date, populates with scheduled to-dos.
- Create an IFTTT (If This Then That) recipe to schedule Google Calendar To-Do Reminders based on the user’s wedding date.
- Provide a more detailed and more beautiful wedding checklist.
Now, my content marketing ninjas, go forth and tap gloves with a wider audience! Your content deserves it!
Great post, Britney,
Another route I like to go down when it comes to keyword research is to quickly dive into Search Console and looking for impressions for queries that contain:
This would be a nice supplement to the insights extracted from Answer The Public.
On top of that, I'll also spend some time looking in Search Console for pages that gain a high number of impressions but a lower than average CTR - i.e. where there could potentially be a mismatch between content and user intent; Cyrus Shepard wrote a fantastic blog post about this last year.
Fantastic read, as always!
Brilliant ideas Craig!!! Really appreciate you sharing these. This is precisely why I always say, "Some of the best content on the Moz blog is in the comments!".
Heard a brilliant idea by Dan Shure on his Experts On The Wire Podcast recently regarding writing about topics you're not familiar with:
1. Find the wikipedia page on the primary topic.
2. Enter that url into Visio Spark Keyword Density Checker.
3. Evaluate the relevant, often used keywords to jump start your keyword research/content creation.
Also, I thought I'd heard about 99% of keyword research tactics. But Dan's got a bunch of other genius keyword research ideas on his podcast here.
Thanks again for your great contribution to this post!
-B
Oooof!
That's a pretty hefty knowledge bomb you've just passed my way; I will definitely be including some of those other methods in my content lectures and workshops next semester :)
Always glad to be part of the Moz community!
Craig
Thank you For this Craig this is great to know. I shall pass it on to the team!
When I trained as a journalist, every article always had to answer Who, What, Why, When, and How... And that's still paying off now!
How By only optimizing search query impressions for Max CTR we drive more traffic.
I think I am going to learn more about this
I agree regarding Cyrus Shepard's post. I've been using the search console results to adjust my meta titles and meta descriptions ever since reading it. It resulted in significantly improved CTR and traffic.
Thank you very much for this post, what you comment on Google I will use it for my next strategy when it comes to writing. Hopefully it will increase traffic to the web.
A greeting!
Great step-by-step process on keyword research, one of the best writeups I have seen done on keyword research. Thank you Britney.
For those who also use SEMrush: The Ultimate Keyword Research Checklist
I love when a post comes with a lot of actionables and some tricks in between. This article is going to be very handy!
In my case, when researching for keywords I have a recurrent problem: my content is related to email marketing but in Spanish, and all the keyword suggestion tools get confused by the mix of an english term with the spanish language. So I get a lot of weird english suggestions, and I'm sure most of them aren't made by a spanish person. That means I've to ditch most of the suggestions.
Anyway, I guess the rest of the spanish suggestions are what I am looking for, so it's OK. However, do you know an specific tool to avoid that problem or an specific method?
Thank you!
Great question Angel!
I've reached out to my Twitter friends for answer: https://twitter.com/BritneyMuller/status/890241527...
Stay tuned.. :)
That was so nice! Thank you very much!
Have you tried keywordtool.io? It works really well!
My personal fav : https://keywordshitter.com/
This is awesome!
Wow! I love this. Great step by step and new ideas as well.
This is a very detailed blog on how to get keyword ideas. Thank you for this i didn't realise that you could get all of these tools.
I counted more than 30 minutes xD This is great information and the best way to make the first study about a niche or area. In just half an hour (or less) we can know about how possible and hard can be compete in a niche, so we can continue studying about it or pass to another one.
Clear and step by step content = very effective and useful.
Thanks Britney, Craig and Joseph for your input!
There are so many options out there...
I think, Britney, you did a great job at wrapping up some of the bests (Keep It Stupid Simple, right?)
Cheers,
Thank you so much Fanny!
Check out this genius keyword research hack that was shared on Twitter in response to this post: https://twitter.com/thefke/status/8905521810736005...
SO SMART RIGHT?!
Love how much I learn from all of you brilliant people!
Britney, this is a brilliant one!
You've covered almost all tactics that can be considered for keyword research. Also, for blog category keyword research, I suggest using BuzzSumo as well because we can get an idea about what blog topics are the most shared ones on the social media.
And, you've reminded about the old-age "site:" command to the people only dependent on the various keyword research tools. Well, this is the actual detailed process to get the rankings for the long tail as well as short tail highly competitive keywords.
Britney, you won't believe, most SEOs still consider filling a long list of keywords in the meta keywords tag in the websites and their blogs. So, looking into their source code can also be the quickest mode of finding the keywords, our competitors are targeting.
What are your thoughts?
Interesting! The meta keywords tag is a very outdated SEO tactic, but I suppose you could use it to determine what keywords your competitors are after. Thanks Himani!
Yeah, absolutely!
Excellent post Britney!
I think it is fundamental to do a keyword analysis before writing any post, category or product description.
Surely we will find ideas that we do not even think of for this topic.
You have to do it if or if a keyword analysis
A greeting.
Very useful suggestions for conducting keyword research. I would like to suggest some more: Reddit and Quora, (these will you an idea of the type of questions people ask) , Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon (product searches.
For additional keyword suggestions, we can use keywordtool.io, ubersuggest, keyword shitter, soolve.
And then Buzzsumo for finding the most shared content for the researched topic
Great points! I've heard of people putting their Reddit or Quora category/topic page into SEMRush and looking at the top pages for those. Brilliant!
This is not lazy marketers aproach its actualy the best way to do keyword research. if every marketer the beginners do it regularly they can bring in an enormous result in their content marketing efforts.
You had me at "lazy." :)
I think combining answerthepublic with the keyword planner will be a homerun for us. Just when I thought I was out of topics. Is there a point when the content development is done and a lazy writer can just relax?
Thanks for an awesome article!
I really like the first part about dissecting top name sites navigation to determine main categories to target. Something I really have never thought of but will use in the future. Another quick tip was the Google suggest as it literally provides massive quick keywords to start your research with by just simply applying the first main term.
When writing content I am always asking what is the user looking for and your tip on FAQ research helped in a such a great way by the answerthepublic.com tool. The last and in my opinion you tips on realizing that there is becoming more and more zero clicks with featured snippets answering questions that tactic on how to build a better resource was fantastic.
I know I really just re-iterated what you posted but these particular points stuck out so much, and more so you have helped by reducing time spent. You always have fantastic posts thanks for the contribution.
Agree! Google Suggest is very powerful for understanding popular/trending searches around a specific topic.
Thanks Tim!
I like that many of the tools you (and others) reference are free or offer free trials.
FREE: Google Suggest, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Google Search Console, Answer The Public, Twitter, Quora, Reddit, SEOBook KW Density Checker, IFTTT
FREE TRIAL or FREE WITH LIMITED FUNCTIONALITY OR DATA: Moz Keyword Explorer, Moz Toolbar, Similarweb, BuzzSumo, SEMRush
Exactly! The free SEO Toolbox is essential!
This is great, thank you Donna!
Well done Britney.
Love the concise presentation & clearly actionable tips. Moz SEO is in good hands. :-
Here's a cool new tool in beta that we've been using for question research (in addition to the ones you mentioned above): BloomBerry. It's from BuzzSumo <I'm not affiliated with them>. It searches Quora, Reddit, & other online forums. We've found some interesting and tangential questions with it. It's great if you're looking to broaden the range of questions to answer. We love it. Let me know what you think
-Chris
Thanks Chris!
I LOVE Bloomberry! Shoot, I always forget about it, but BloomBerry is an incredible keyword tool. Really appreciate you adding that here.
Hi Britney - great piece, was really useful after spending days on keyword research really getting nowhere with keyword overload.
The Similar Web competitor popular pages feature is now locked on the free trial now though...you get 'Contact Us' now! Gutted.
Thanks, Jimmi.
Really nice, comprehensive post. I keep trying to explain to clients that a little keyword research goes a long way, and it doesn't have to involve lots of expensive SEO tools - just a mix of some common sense and readily available information for the most part.
Keyword Research results in organic traffic. It is a great post with in-depth details. I spend a lot of time to reseach the keywords to target my audience and understand their needs. I use LongTailPro for doing the KW research. thanks!
Great Article Britne, Well I'm A newbie And didn't know about Keyword Research,I come to know about keywords research through Neil Patel's blog and I have started to read more and more about keyword research and how to do that.
But, Its Your Article that put keyword research to a whole new level, Especially for Newbies Like Me.
Thanks For That
Great post Britney,
I spend 30 minutes only in Google Keyword Planner :/
I have to check my method!
Regards.
We spend days working on it xD 30 minutes is not bad.
Awesome post, Britney. I would also add here couple other sources of keywords information, as in my experience, when you use only one source (Moz Keyword Explorer for example) you can miss some very useful information. That is why for keyword research process I usually recommend use at least two databases (Moz KW Explorer + SemRush) or (MOZ + SemRush + SerpStat). The same is applicable for backlinks analysis. When you combine data from several sources and expand it with informational keywords grabbed from Answer The Public, Keyword Keg or LSI Graph - you can see full picture and make really effective clustering and grouping.
Thanks again for this great post, I definitely like it!
I use Keyword Shitter a lot - does a tonne of lifting in my opinion - ensure you keep a master list of negative filters to reduce the numbers of phrases it generates, but it's been a real gold mine for me...
www.keywordshitter.com
When I'm doing the KW research, I'm using the 80/20 rule. I always find the most important KW's with synonyms and the long tail will build up from the specific words by itself. Saves tons of time.
Britney M.,
Thanks for the keyword research help.
Epic Interactive Media Inc.
Very nice post about keyword research. It would help all the developers and web programmers to take their website heigher. Anyone can ask [link removed by editor] questions here, if you want
That's that we should be doing at our agency. <3
[Link removed by editor.]
Perfect post. I found other posts but your post is most completed and detailed. I need to test keyword planner. I think it's essential
Nice post.. Great way to describe how to get keyword ideas.. These 5 ideas are describe are great.. Google keyword planner tool is the best tool for keyword research..
Great article Britney! it will be very useful to me :)
Great Article for effective keyword research & analysis for your website.
Thank you for this! Sad to say I am one of the lazy ones and this post will definitely be a big help.
Keep on researching!
for me keyword research is essential of every seo and ppc strategy. but at this point I never found an definitive tool for that my question is did some here has some precise tool or method for make keyword research.
Great post with huge amounts of information - also I agree it is important to evaluate findings & gather key takeaways - putting research into action.
Hello Britne, Nice post regarding keyword research, I must admit if we would implement it in real it won't take more than 30 - minute, along with one more thing I would like to add is that follow your top competitor to get better and relevant keywords for your business.