Digital Marketing
BrightonSEO is the place to be for discussing ideas, trends and everything that’s going on in the world of SEO. This year’s conference was held online, and we loved every second. We listened, we learned and here’s what we found out about what tools will help with your keyword research.
In essence, keyword research is about trying to understand your customer. You want to know exactly what their needs and problems are.
Carrying out keyword research will equip you with a list of terms that your customer is searching for and data on how often that term is searched for. With this information, you can then come up with ways to fulfil their needs or provide a solution to their problems.
So whether you’re looking for blog content ideas that will resonate with your target audience, or are optimising your web pages to bring in new traffic, you need to be conducting keyword research to find out exactly what search terms to use.
The art of keyword research is complex and while you might not be an expert by the end of this post, we wanted to share our favourite resources and tools that we learnt at brightonSEO to help you with your own keyword research.
Reviews
Reading reviews is an excellent way to understand exactly what your customers are looking for and what problems they’re experiencing. You’ll get to understand their pain points, directly from them. Analyse what language they use and whether any common themes emerge. Using this in your own copy will match your customers with a solution that you’re providing for them. Searching through Amazon reviews for products similar to your own is a great place to start.
Question sites
Similarly to reading reviews, question sites like Quora are a handy and free resource for audience research. Find out what answers people are looking for around your products. If you find a recurring question, you know that it’s a popular query. You may then want to optimise your website or blog content to answer these questions that people are asking and give them the help that they’re looking for.
Forums
Forums like Reddit are full of golden nuggets to aid your keyword research. Track down a subreddit where your customer is likely to be active and try to find a popular thread. Read through the comments until you find something relevant to what you offer. This will enable you to get inside the mind of your audience and uncover what their honest sentiments are. This gives you a need that you can then fulfil through your content.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Tool
Now let’s talk competitors. Brands in the same space as your own are another resource that you can use to help you with your keyword research. Help, being the key word. You want to take inspiration from your competitors instead of just replicating what they’re doing. Ahrefs has a great Site Explorer Tool that enables you to view which keywords a page is ranking for. SEMrush, Moz and Ubersuggest also have similar alternatives. Plug in a competitor’s page and scan for any potential sources of inspiration.
Scatter graphs
So once you’ve identified your customers’ pain points and found a list of potential keywords, your next step is to validate your research. This will eliminate any keywords that you’re unlikely to rank for. A scatter graph helps you to visualise your research and maps it out in a way that’s easily digestible.
Take your researched keywords, their search volumes and difficulty score and input them into a scatter graph. Your search volumes should fall on the Y axis and the difficulty scores will lie on the X axis. Any keywords with a high amount of search volume but low difficulty will be in the top left section of your graph. These are the keywords that you should focus on as they’re being searched a lot and you have a chance to actually rank for them.
Conditional formatting
We know what you’re thinking, how can conditional formatting help with keyword research? While it might not give you the keyword ideas you’re looking for, it can help you to identify pages on your site that rank for the same keywords. Also known as keyword cannibalisation, this can hurt your site’s SEO. The pages can confuse Google and make it more difficult for your pages to rank.
To remedy this, export the keywords for your pages that share a similar topic into a Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel document. Apply conditional formatting to highlight any keywords that appear across multiple pages. After you’ve identified them, you can take action to remedy this and strengthen your rankings.
Once you’ve got all the resources and tools you need for your keyword research, it’s important to refine your process. That’s where we come in. Get in touch today to find out how we can optimise your SEO strategy.
