How To Do keyword Research For SEO For Free

Whenever you are going to write a content, you need to do keyword research. If you are not familiar yet about keyword research, it is a method to find and research certain search terms that people write into the search engine.

The reason why people do keywords research is to get a better result and could rank in the search engines.

The first thing you need to do is choose your niche keyword and expand on it to find similar keywords.

Why is it important to do keyword research

Just like why you need to do SEO in your marketing strategy, keyword research is a method to optimize your content, so your content can win and rank in the search engines.

If you avoid keyword research, you might end up competing with other contents that have a better authority in search engines.

And what worst is, you create contents with similar keywords that might end up competing against each other.

Well, it is a good practice for your content strategy to find a low competition keyword with the high search volume. It will easily make your content rank in the short amount of time.

With keywords research, you’ll get many information you need such as:

• What keywords do people type in the search engines?
• How many people are searching for certain keywords?
• What kind of information do they need in those keywords?

What are the types of keywords

If you have done keywords research before, you must know there are 2 types of keywords.

• Short tail keywords: are the most commonly searched keywords in the search engines, but it’s not specific and does not contain any detail since it only contains fewer words like “ buy phones”.
• Long tail keywords: are the keywords the have more specific detail and have longer word counts. Due to the longer words, it gets less traffic than short tail keywords, but gets higher conversion due to the low competition.

Why you should after long tail keywords?

It must be really nice to rank #1 in search engines for the keyword “phone”, isn’t it?

Well, it is wonderful since people are looking and writing that word (phone) in search engines that reached 5,000–50,000 volumes a month.

But the fact that you need to know short tail keywords like “phone” is ambiguous. People that are writing those words have several intentions, which means they could be disappointed with your website whose goals don’t match with your audience’s intent.

That’s why a long tail keyword is a solution for you, since it’s longer words that could specify your intent, and match your audience’s goal.

What are the keyword research tools

There are many keyword research tools that are available and you can use. Some of them are free, and some of them are paid.

But in this article, I won’t mention all the research keyword research tools or go deep telling you the pros and cons of each tool since you can find many of them on the internet, so I just mention the popular one amongst the SEO professionals.

SEMrush is a SEO software tool that is commonly used for research by the SEO professionals and practitioners. It also helps you to audit your website, so you will know which part of your website that needed to be improved.

2. MOZ

Overall Moz and SEMrush are similar, it helps you to audit your website, keywords management, and web page optimization. It’s paid software that is billed monthly and annually, you can check the details on their website.

3. Ahref

For SEO professionals must be familiar with this tool, it helps you alot by auditing your website, in-depth SERP analysis, keyword management,etc. There are many features that help you optimize your website.

4. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is owned by Neil Patel who is known worldwide as an SEO professional. Basically, Ubersuggest is similar to the tools that we have mentioned above, it helps you for auditing your website, keyword management, in-depth SERP analysis, etc.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google ads keyword planner has historically been the most common tool for keyword research. It’s free, but it does restrict search volume data by lumping keywords together into large search volume range buckets.

6. Google Trends

Google trends is also a helpful tool that helps you find fluctual keywords such as “ cool costume for Christmas” will peak in the weeks before Christmas.

7. Keyword Everywhere

Keyword everywhere is a plugin that can work on chrome and firefox that you can install easily. This tool is super handy that can help you find many keyword ideas including long tail keywords. It is a free tool, but also has premium features.

Is there any other way to do a keyword research?

There is another way to do keyword research manually, and sometimes I prefer to do this method when I search for long tail keywords and it’s free.

If you have your short tail keyword based on your niche, you can type that keyword into the search engines, and you’ll find many long tail keyword ideas.

This method is manually but it works!

The keywords that search engines suggest (I used Google, since it’s a common search engine used worldwide) means that people are also looking for those terms.

And what is surprising is, even if you are using keyword research tools I mentioned above, the search volume is not 100% valid, it is way higher to 1,000–10,000 searches per month.

Conclusion

Even though I use manual methods for long tail keyword research, I didn’t mean that any keyword research tools are useless. I also use the keyword research tools I mentioned above to audit my site, SERP analysis, and of course, keyword research for more ideas.

The reason I choose the manual method is because it is relevant, and people are searching those terms.

Sometimes when we are using keyword research tools, we are focusing on search volumes, while in fact, there are lots of people who are writing those terms on search engines and it is higher than we expected.

Hopefully, this article brings you benefits, and if you need to discuss about digital marketing, feel free to contact me, I’m glad to hear from you!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.