Keyword research from an SEO perspective is simply the process of finding golden easy to rank for keywords, it is considered to be the first step of doing any kind of business online, whether be it an affiliate business, or an ecommerce business, or even a digital marketing business.
Doing business online would require the business owner to have a website or a platform to publish his/her products/work in, so logically speaking keyword research would be an essential part of it, because you will have to know if the market has potential or not, if the market has buyers or information seekers, if the market has high volume of demand or low volume of demand and so on, thus making a bad or a wrong keyword research can mean the early death of any online business.
The keyword research procces differs according to many factors:
- According to the type of market.
- According to the type of business.
- According to the type of marketing campaign.
The market has a great influence on the keyword research process, for example doing keyword research for products market would not be the same as doing keyword research for services market, a product market would require you to find “buying intent” keywords such as “best 5 X” or “top 5 X” or “X reviews”, a services market would require you to find more like informational keywords such as “how to fix your water pipe” or “how to cook X recipe ” and so on.
The type of business on the other hand is another great key player in the keyword research process, for example doing keyword research for an ecommerce website would not be the same as doing keyword research for a blogging business, an ecommerce website would require looking for specific ecommerce keywords while blogs dont require any special types of keywords according to the niche of the blog.
The type of marketing campaign also determines how your keyword research should be done, for example a business that is based on SEO for driving traffic would require intensive in-depth keyword research, unlike an online business that is highly based on social networks as a source of traffic.
To give a more close view of the point that I am trying to make, let's give a practical example by saying that I am having an affiliate website in the house improvement niche, I would write down a list of general broad keywords that I like to call “seed keywords” as illustrated below:
- Power Saws
- Water Softeners
- Routers
- Power Planers
- Ceiling Fans
I could easily find these general keywords by going to the sub-categories under house improvement category of Amazon and Ebay.
Next step I would go to keyword research tools such as Ubersuggest and type in those general keywords to come up with a list of related keywords along with their search volumes.
Next step would be to filter results to only include keywords that have the following 3 words “best, top, review” to finally end up with a list that looks like this one:
Next step would be to put the keyword list on keyword difficulty tools such as KWfinder, and look for keywords that have at least 500 searches per month, and less than 50 score of difficulty as illustrated below:
After filtering down the list, you will end up with a bunch of golden keywords that are easy to rank and profitable at the same time.
Note: you should always stay away from “e-commerce keywords” even if Kwfinder is showing a weak score.“e-commerce keywords” are basically keywords that Google rank e-commerce websites only for, you can identify those by checking the top 10 results of Google or directly on Kwfinder, if most of the results are e-commerce websites such as Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, Bestbuy and so on; just ditch them.
Here is the final results after trying the above steps:
- “Best Water Softener” with 6000 searches and 36 score of difficulty.
- “Best Water Softener System” with 1000 searches and 36 score of difficulty.
- “Best Water Softener Salt” with 1000 searches and 38 score of difficulty.
- “Best Cordless Screwdriver” with 700 searches and 37 score of difficulty.
- “Best Wood Planer” with 400 searches and 39 score of difficulty.
- “Best Hammer Drill” with 800 searches and 40 score of difficulty.
Hope this little tutorial help everyone looking to know what is keywords research.
