6 Ways to do Keyword Research Like a Pro

By Joydeep Bhattacharya. in Internet. Updated on July 13, 2022.

Keyword research is perhaps the oldest trick among all SEO best practices. Well, it should be, because these small pieces of information give you the most solid insight about your users, their trends and demands.

However today, many SEO marketers have started taking keyword research for granted, probably because these days, you cannot win users for your website ‘just’ through basic keyword research. You have to go deeper into knowing everything users are searching and search engines are indexing.

Why Keyword Research is still important?

The scenario of keyword research may have changed, but it hasn’t totally lost its importance. Following are some reasons why keyword research is still vital for online marketers:

Keyword research helps you to identify and optimize the content for your target audience.
Gives you solid insight into consumer decision making process.
Proper research lets you determine your first and second priority keywords.
You’re able to set micro and macro goals after finalizing your keywords.
You can focus your page’s content on a single topic, and it also becomes easy to figure out new topics.
You can decide your budget on a particular keyword depending upon the traffic and conversions it receives.

Ways to do effective Keyword Research

Let us now move on to the ways through which I personally generate tons of new keyword ideas, and which almost always turn out pretty useful.

1. Twitter and Reddit trends

Twitter and Reddit are the kind of source that never run out of information. On these websites you can easily find topics that receive a lot of user engagement.

Just login to your Twitter account and look at the left side where you will able to see the top Twitter trends of the moment.

You can also customize the top trends as per your targeted location. Simply click on “change”, enter your desired location and Twitter will display the top tweets of that location with in seconds.

Similarly, you can check out Reddit, and choose among “hot”, “new”, “rising” or “controversial” tabs to disover the trending reddits.

Other than that, you can click on “My Subreddits” and go directly to the categories that match your target audience. This way, you will be able to find new long tail phrases and questions that can be entered as new keywords in your marketing strategy.

You can jot down all the keyword/topic ideas and create pages focused around those topics.

2. Identify keywords with high CPC

Keywords with high CPC generate the maximum conversions, and so optimizing your website for such keywords is like hitting a jackpot . High CPC tells you that advertisers are willing to pay more for their ads to display for this keyword.

You can take the help of Google Adwords for identifying keywords that have the low search volume but high Cost Per Click (CPC) .

3. Set up Site Search

Site search enables you to get data about the search terms that the users enter when they search something on your website. For E-commerce stores, this can be a valuable piece of data. You can easily find out the words that people enter when they are trying to find the exact product of their choice.

Once you have the data, you can easily create specific pages or optimize your overall site in order to increase the number of conversions.

In order to set up site search, follow the steps below:

Sign in to your Analytics account.
Navigate to a view in which you want to set up Site Search.
Click “View Settings”.
Under “Site Search Settings”, set “Site Search Tracking” to ON.
In the “Query Parameter” field, enter the word or words that designate an internal query parameter, such as “term, search, query”. Sometimes the word is just a letter, such as “s” or “q”.
Click “Save Changes”, and you are done.

In order to see the site search data:

Sign in to your Analytics account .
Navigate to your desired account, property, and view .
Select the “Reporting” tab.
Select Behaviour & Site Search.

4. Dig up Q&A sites

Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo are great choices to find long tail question-based search queries. You can find unlimited number of actual questions that user ask for before they select a particular product.

Here are a few tips that will help you:

Browse Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and other forums to find questions people are frequently asking
Create blog posts that answers the questions
Keep it simple and go in depth with your answers to capture more long tail search traffic. Also use images and videos and make your content the most comprehensive resource available on the Internet for that topic.
Promote the article on Q&A sites, forums, and social media

5. Extract keywords from competitors’ pages

Page Comparison is a free and easy tool that compares two or more pages. It is a great on page analyzer that not only compares the presence of keywords but also lets you analyze other crucial on page elements like the title tag and the H1 tag.

For example, I compare the content of the top 2 sites that are ranking for the keyword “buy shoes online”. The first site is Amazon and the second one is Jabong. I use the Page Comparison Tool to compare the content of the top 2 ranked webpages and extract the keywords out of it.

6. Focus on Broad Topic Ideas

While researching keywords, I recommend you to think creatively and prepare a list of all the broad keyword ideas as they have a greater search volume.

For example, if I am selling luxury wallpapers then a straight keyword choice like “luxury wallpapers” has a search volume of 1K-10K while a broader keyword like “home decorating ideas” has a whopping search volume of 1M-10M.

By using broader keywords with wide scope, I can prepare a list of broad keyword terms in order to target lots of traffic.

A final look

Keyword research remains to be one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. If done inaccurately, it can hamper the success of the entire marketing campaign. Utilizing the above strategies can help you identify proper keywords that can be beneficial for getting more traffic and conversions.