Free keyword research is one of the most influential, valuable and highly profitable activities in the field of search engine marketing. Through research work to find out the demand for keywords in your market, you not only learn in which words and phrases you will concentrate with SEO, but you also learn more about customers as a whole.
It’s not always about getting visits to your website, but about getting the right visits. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be emphasized – with free keyword research you can predict changes in demand, respond to changes in market conditions, and offer the products, services, and content that users are already actively looking for. In the past of marketing, there has never been a barrier so natural to overcome when it comes to an understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually every niche – it would be almost a crime not to take advantage of it.
I’ll give you some reasons why you should find keywords for your articles, within the content strategy of your blog.
Because although I always defend that you must write for the user and not for Google, we must also communicate with him and the keywords are in his language, and they help us explain what our content is about. They help us to get to know our readers better. That is, knowing the trends and how people search for information, we have clues as to how we should refer to our readers to give them what they want. The keywords help us eliminate assumptions about what we think is interesting. For example, I can think that the theme of the mating of a green African giraffe is going to interest everyone and a research of keywords can tell me if I am right or not.
How many keywords worth to your website? If you have an online shoe store, do you generate more sales from visitors looking for “brown shoes” or from visitors looking for “black boots”? The keywords that your visitors type in the search engines are often available to webmasters, and the keyword research tools allow us to find this information. However, these tools can not show us directly how valuable it would be to receive traffic from those hunts. To recognize the value of a keyword we need to understand our web pages, make some assumptions, try and repeat – the classic formula of web marketing.
Is the keyword relevant to the content offered by your website? Will users who come to your site find the likely answer to the question (s) they raise? And will that traffic result in economic reward (or other organizational objectives) directly or indirectly? If the answer to all these questions is a resounding “Yes!”, Then continue.
The first thing you should do is analyze your business, what do you offer? How do you want to be found? What are the most appropriate terms for your sector?
If for example, you have a shoe store some keywords could be:
Before starting to develop a list of keywords we must be clear about our objective, do we want to optimize a specific product or several products? Do we also want to reach people who are looking for information about our product?
Define clearly what goals you want to achieve with your keywords and do not optimize several sections or categories of your website at the same time if your resources for SEO campaigns are limited. In this case, my recommendation is to start first with the product that is providing the most income (or the one that you think most can bring you) currently in your business. This way it will be easier to position yourself and boost the part of your business that presently generates more income, you will consolidate your brand in that product and the future, it will be easier to invest in an SEO campaign for other products or services in your store or business. On-Line.
Keep in your mind the following: it is not the same ‘buy women’s sandals’ that ‘buy mountain boots’ even if the store and the sector are the same, the potential customer has different interests.
Once we have clear what we want to achieve, we can proceed with the keyword research process, and we will have to make a list of keywords.
For this, the most sensible thing is to use external tools, since it will help us to find similar keywords to those we may have in mind. The Google planner is the most popular tool and of course, it’s free. Google’s keyword planner is part of AdWords, and you’ll need a Google AdWords account to use it (it’s also free).
Do not go crazy, do not make an endless list, stay true to your goals previously marked, what do you want to enhance? What kind product or service do you want to optimize with these keywords?
Make a list of maximum 30-35 keywords. Do not worry if in some you have doubts, then we will categorize them, and some will be rejected.
Let’s use the following keywords as an example in the Google, keyword planner:
It will show us several groups of results, but two of them will be of special importance for this case in particular:
As you can see, we have discovered new keywords, and they are still relevant to the service or product that we want to optimize. In addition to simply finding new keywords, this tool also helps us to obtain information about what each click (approximately) of each term would cost us in the event that we would like to carry out an SEM campaign.
We can also see the search volumes of the keywords that interest us, in this case, we get exciting data from the group of keywords ‘Sandals women,’ and we see how searches for these terms are triggered in the summer season, while in the rest of the year the consultations are minimal.
In this Word Stream article, they explain what the long-tail keywords and their advantages are. In short, long-tail keywords are terms composed of 3 to 4 words, or more, (key phrases), much more specific and specific than generic keywords.
To be more specific, the search volume of long-tail keywords is usually lower than the most generic keywords. But if we are starting with our SEO optimization and above all, our marketing budget is limited.
Keep in mind the following: ‘women’s shoes’ is not the same as ‘buying women’s shoes online.’
Once we have our list of keywords for our goals, we must separate them into categories according to the intent of each keyword.
Let’s say we have about 25-35 terms relevant to the product that we want to promote on our website, but not all have to be terms for direct conversion, what does this mean? Someone may be looking for information about that product, but it is not yet in the ‘purchase desire’ phase.
Let’s say that in our list of keywords we have the following terms:
As you can deduce, not all the terms show an immediate need for purchase; the potential customer may still be looking for information about your product and deciding whether it is interesting or not. That is why we must take into account the intention of each term to be used.
This can help you to get ideas when creating content; you can, for example, write an article or record a video about what are the best sandals for women or what will be the trend for this summer. We must learn to take advantage of the intention of each keyword and supply the current need of the potential client.
Not all keywords will have the same value. Depending on the difficulty of the position, to attract potential customers and how relevant it is to your product or service, you will have to grant a lower or higher value:
For this task, the tools mentioned above will help you. Specifically, the new Moz tool, ‘Keyword Explorer’, is quite simple and easy to use.
The value of keywords depends on you, to be able to give a realistic value you must base on the difficulty of positioning in that term, the competition and what that term means regarding objectives.
Let’s make an example of the following keywords:
We are nearing the end of our free keyword research; on page optimization.
Once we have our objectives clear, our list of keywords completed and separated into categories according to the intention and value of each term will be the time to decide which page we will optimize on our website.
If we continue with the previous example of ‘women’s sandals’, we must optimize the page of our online store where women’s sandals are found (for example, a category called “Women’s Sandals”)
We are not going to tell you the typical Google keyword tool, Semrush, or anything like that, although they are perfect, we will be a little more original to find our terms.
Are not you tired of reading longtail stuff, bidding price, low competition? and you do not know anything!
This tool does the work for you, the only thing you need to know is to write.
In your search engine, you enter your keyword, and it gives you all the long tail with the lowest competition so that you can directly use it. Nothing to waste time with Google filtering or anything … straight to the point.
Enter your word, country, and language in which you want to look and ready!
Another tool genius, because it not only shows you the keyword in Google, which is very good. It also makes an interesting sea crawling by Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, Yahoo, Youtube.
The negative point of this platform is that it is uglier than hitting a father, but it solves it well for the amount of time it saves you.
Just as Amazon is an excellent source of inspiration to find ideas for writing, using the published books, Udemy, which is an e-learning platform, is also worth it.
Its use to find ideas is easy: Enter your term in the search engine, for example, and I put “Growth Hacking.” In the results, filter by “most relevant.”
You already know that they are the most popular because they have more reviews and have aroused more interest in the public, so this gives you a clue as to why these titles are hooked and that you can take advantage of to write your posts.
If you want to delve deeper into your search, click on any book and read the description. There you will see the keywords you have used and how you have done it.
This tool shows you the results of the Google autocomplete option.
You can search the web, images, etc … you just have to enter your term and language, and that’s it.
You can visualize the results in a list (which is more comfortable) or in a cloud of keywords that is the image that I have put, to vary a bit.
This is also very ugly, but very useful. It is a scraping tool, in which you enter your keyword and places where you want to find it. In this example, I have added the term “Growth Hacking” and I have put it on Facebook and Twitter. In addition to finding keywords, I can see groups in these networks that may interest me. If you use it in forums or in pages of your competition or bloggers who write on the same topic as yours, it will give you the list of phrases of how they use them.
This is a tool similar to Semrush, which allows you to know a little more about the strategy of any competitor.
You enter any URL that interests you in the search engine and shows you the results of organic keywords that you have positioned, Adwords history (if you have it), incoming links, etc.
That on the one hand, but on the other, you can also use it to do your free keyword research.
Among the many data, it provides you with terms related to its associated difficulty, the ads that have most successfully used that word, history, links everything and you take it out of your hands hears!
Brainstorming is the first step to a free keyword research. To do so, we must only open a text editor and write all the ideas that come to mind on the subject we are going to investigate. For our example, we can use concepts such as “trips to San Martin de Los Andes” or “tourism to San Martin de Los Andes.” We can also write ideas about the activities offered by the place, such as “camping in San Martín de Los Andes”.
The information that Wikipedia provides us is useful to get ideas on the topic that interests us. For example, we can search near San Martin and Los Andes and find information about tourist attractions, activities that can be developed, weather, among others. With that information, we return to the text editor and complement the initial list.
When we have our list, we will go to the Google Keyword Planner. We can access this tool through Google Adwords or the search engine. Once there, we click on the Tools tab and select the Keyword Planner option. Then, we open the text file where we have our list of ideas, copy them and paste them into the first box. In Keyword Planner we have the option to segment the search according to the language or location.
We can also use filters that help determine if a keyword is popular or not, based on an average of monthly searches. For our example, we will leave the boxes free and click on the Get ideas button. Then, we click directly on the Ideas tab for keywords. On this page, we will find the ideas we got from the brainstorming and different columns with information. We can know the average monthly searches of a keyword in Google, in the last 12 months. Other columns such as Competition, Suggested Bid, or Percentage of impressions are targeted to campaigns in AdWords.
If we go down a little, we will find the keywords that Keyword Planner suggests according to their relevance. The data will complement the ideas we had previously. Collecting the information in one place is essential. For this, we click on the Download button and choose the CSV option for Excel. Then, we copy the data from the keywords (common keywords) and average monthly searches of the document and paste it into a new Google Spreadsheet file.
Now we move to Keywordtool.io. This tool allows us to do free searches for keywords in Google, YouTube, Bing and even AppStore. We will continue with our example to perform the primary search. For that, we wrote “San Martín de Los Andes,” we selected the google.com option, and to obtain general results, we change the language to Spanish, and finally we click on search.
The search gave us more than 500 keywords that will complement the list of the Keyword Planner. We only have to copy the results and paste them into the spreadsheet that we created in the previous step.
At Quora.com it is possible to find keyword ideas for our searches. This tool is quite useful to make a free keyword research focused on the market in English since much of its content is in this language. However, we can read each content, translate it into Spanish and extract ideas for our keyword search.
Often the SEO is very frustrating and all these 20,000 tools that you have to use to locate keywords and also learn what each term means or use them, to be able to get all the juice. Here I have brought you a selection of tools that are very simple and that above you do not need to create or account or anything.
What tools for free keyword research (other than typical ones) do you know? Have you ever met at a wedding or event with someone who was wearing your dress? What happened? Tell me 🙂
