keyword research spreadsheet

Keyword Research Template

• SEO Templates

Streamline and organize your keyword research with this free template (available in Excel and Google Sheets). Whether you’re starting a new SEO project, want to improve your site’s search traffic, or are looking for target keywords for a new piece of content, this template will help you do keyword research quickly and effectively.

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Why Use a Keyword Research Template?

Like pretty much everything in SEO, keyword research is more complicated than ever. Back in the day, everyone used the old Google Keyword Tool. Today? There are a million different tool options. Plus, you’ve more techniques for finding keywords coming out every week.

This template brings together all those different approaches into one place. So instead of bouncing around between a thousand tabs, losing track of where you are in the process…

You can just go through this template. Simple. Step-by-step.

When you’re done, you’ll have a BIG list of keywords. Plus all the metrics to help you pick which to target.

What’s included?

Here’s what’s included in this keyword research template:

• How to evaluate keywords: The 5 metrics to use to determine whether a keyword is worth pursuing.
• Where to find keyword ideas: Out-of-the-box sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Exploding Topics .
• Plus 4 other tried-and-true methods for finding keywords: Some that you’ll probably be familiar with. And others you may have never heard of.

How to use this template

• Brainstorm some “seed” ideas to get started. Specific keyword phrases (“best link building tools”) are fine. But you can also start with broader topics (“link building”. (Tip: Studies show that the late afternoon is the best time for brainstorming)
• Download the Keyword Research Template on this page, make a copy, and fill in the “seed ideas” section
• Go through each of the keyword sources on the template to expand your list of keywords. (Tip: If you aren’t sure how to use a keyword source, see our Definitive Guide to Keyword Research .) You can insert additional keywords if you need more room
• Fill in the metrics section of the template
• Choose your target keyword
• Optimize your page based on your chosen keyword

How to Choose a Target Keyword

In SEO there’s nothing more important than choosing the right keyword. This template makes it easy to create a large list of keywords to choose from. And to add the metrics you’ll need to evaluate them.

But at the end of that process, you’ll still have to pick one. Here’s how to do that:

• Use a tool like Google Keyword Planner , Ahrefs or SEMrush to find the metrics you’ll need. (They can also help you find additional keyword ideas.) Then, make your decision based on the following factors.
• Search volume . In general, the more searches a keyword gets each month, the better. (Because it means you can get more traffic)
• Keyword difficulty . Most SEO tools (like Ahrefs and SEMrush) include keyword difficulty scores: The lower the difficulty, the easier it is to rank for. But if you don’t have access to a paid tool, the free MozBar browser extension can help. Install the extension, then search Google for the keyword you’re interested in. Look at the PA and DA scores of the top-ranking sites. The higher their scores, the harder they’ll be to compete against.
• CPC (cost per click). This is the best way to know how much commercial intent a keyword has. Advertisers won’t pay more per click than what that traffic is worth to them. So a higher average CPC means the keyword is more valuable.
• Relevance to your business. It’s true that valuable keywords have higher CPCs. But that doesn’t always mean they’re valuable to YOU. There’s no clear number associated with this “metric”. It’s more of a gut-check: Are your potential customers likely to search for this keyword? If so, great. If not, go with a difference keyword (even if all of the other metrics check out).
• Trend in search volume. I love to target keywords that are growing fast. In fact, I’d much rather target a medium-volume keyword that’s getting more searches each month than a huge one that’s declining. Ahrefs and SEMrush will both show you this info, but you can also find it in Google Trends .
• Want more free SEO templates? See our full list here .

Here Are The Templates One More Time…

Keyword Research Templates

Last Updated on October 31, 2022 by Jake Sheridan

Using Google Sheets and keyword research for SEO go hand in hand.

I actually like keyword research. Picking the right terms and watching them jump up the rankings. #SAD

What I don’t like is finding them. It takes too long and there’s too much clicking and copy and pasting involved. Do what I do: supercharge your keyword research (and rank tracking) with these free keyword analysis templates.

Google Sheets Keyword Research Templates

Checkout these Google Sheets Keywords Templates:

Keyword Gap Analysis

Grab the sheet

Quick Win Keyword Finder

Search Volume Estimator [for adult keywords]

Keyword-Level Data

Bulk Search Volume Checker

GooberSuggest Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Cannibalization Finder

Keyword Cannibalization Checker

Keyword Ranking Difficulty & Opportunity Finder

Bulk Free Keyword Position Checker

Keyword research tool [google autocomplete api].

Keyword Rank Checker

Google ‘Q&A’ Extraction

Keyword Traffic Estimator

Quick Keyword Classifier

Automated Keyword Research Tool

Google Search Console Rank Tracker

Keyword Tracking Sheet (Sistrix API)

Keyword Research Spreadsheets for Marketers & SEOs 🔥

Think I’ve missed a Google Sheets Keywords Template? Or maybe you’ve built something yourself that isn’t on the list? Just let me know and I’ll add it.

‼️ I did not make these templates, I only collected them & presented them here. The creators are the ones linked to. Again, I do not own (or claim to) any of these sheets. ‼️

Don’t forget to go check out the other Google Sheets Templates →

Keyword Research Template

Free Resource

Eliminate confusion and redundancy from your keyword research process with this easy-to-use template.

Unlock opportunity for your keyword strategy.

Stay organized. Keyword research can generate a lot of data, and it can be difficult to keep track of everything. A spreadsheet template provides a structured way to organize keyword data, making it easier to analyze and draw insight from. 

Save time. Conducting keyword research can be a time-consuming process, especially if you are manually collecting and organizing data. This template produces a pre-designed structure that can help streamline the process. 

Collaborate. If you are working with a team on a keyword research project, a spreadsheet template can make it easier to work together and share information. Everyone can work from the same spreadsheet, and updates can be tracked and combined with ease.

Analyze. This template can facilitate analysis of your keyword data. By organizing your data in a structured way, you can use functions like sorting and filtering to identify trends and insights more easily.

Customize. This template is designed to be fully customizable so that you can easily adapt it to the unique needs of your business. 

Discover growth for your keyword ranking strategy.

Keyword research is a crucial component of any successful SEO strategy. By identifying and targeting the right keywords, businesses can improve their visibility and attract more organic traffic to their website. 

Once businesses have identified their target keywords, they can incorporate them into their website content, meta description, and titles to optimize their site for search engines. However, it’s important to avoid “keyword stuffing”, or using a high volume of keywords in an unnatural way, as this can actually harm a website’s search rankings.

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Absolutely.

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Keyword Research Spreadsheet

• January 19, 2024
• read 11 mins

Ultimate Keyword Research Spreadsheet for SEO Success

Embarking on the journey of search engine optimization, one quickly realizes that the heart of a robust SEO strategy lies in keyword research.

A well-organized keyword research spreadsheet becomes a vital tool, allowing for a systematic approach to identifying and tracking the terms that are essential for driving traffic and conversion.

Through meticulous research and analysis, digital marketers can fine-tune their focus, ensuring that every piece of content is a step towards heightened visibility and revenue generation.

Keep reading to learn how to craft a spreadsheet that not only organizes keywords but becomes the bedrock of your digital marketing success.

Key Takeaways

• A Well-Structured Keyword Research Spreadsheet Is Vital for SEO Planning and Strategy
• Automating Updates and Integrating With SEO Tools Enhances the Effectiveness of Keyword Research
• SEO Campaigns Informed by Fresh, Comprehensive Data Ensure Relevancy and Competitiveness
• Prioritizing High-Opportunity Keywords Aligns Content With User Intent and Business Goals
• On-Page SEO Strategies Are More Effective When Informed by Detailed Keyword Research Data

Crafting the Perfect SEO Keyword Spreadsheet

Embarking on the journey of keyword research heralds the onset of a strategic pursuit where meticulous organization meets data-driven insights.

As marketers usher in a plan to elevate their brand’s digital presence, the creation of a comprehensive and SEO-infused keyword research spreadsheet becomes a cornerstone of their roadmap.

This initial step involves a discerning selection of spreadsheet software that integrates seamlessly with the workflow, laying a foundation for a structured worksheet environment.

Therein, specialists meticulously define data categories, ensuring each column delineates a clear and actionable attribute of the keywords to be researched.

It’s in this blueprinting phase that the architecture for a successful SEO campaign is conceived, merging the nuances of search engine dynamics with the precision of data analytics.

Selecting Your Spreadsheet Software

Embracing the digital age requires selecting a spreadsheet application that is both robust and user-friendly. A tool such as Microsoft Excel stands out for its advanced functionalities and familiarity to many, acting as a reliable companion in the realm of keyword organization.

In their search for optimization and collaboration, digital marketers often turn to Google Workspace Marketplace, which offers versatile sharing and editing capabilities crucial for team-based projects. A spreadsheet tool selected from this platform can integrate smoothly with other SEO tools, nurturing an ecosystem where data can be updated and shared in real time.

Setting Up Your Worksheet Structure

Marketers understand that the effective structuring of a keyword research spreadsheet serves as the backbone of SEO planning. This stage encompasses the distribution of categories that reflect the strategic intent of the campaign:

Within this framework, the focus is on establishing parameters for prioritization, such as search volume and keyword relevance, which will be pivotal in guiding content creation and optimization efforts. By optimizing URLs for SEO within the spreadsheet, it’s possible to anticipate the synergy between on-page elements and targeted keyword groups, setting the stage for natural text optimization.

Defining Your Data Categories

At the heart of a keyword research spreadsheet lies the critical task of categorizing data: the seed keywords, the long-tail variations, search volumes, competition levels, and potential revenue impacts each get their spotlight. It is this methodical categorization that empowers marketers to dissect and discover keywords , transforming raw data into actionable insights.

When identifying keywords, specialists not only analyze the terms but also absorb the narrative through content marketing lenses to master SEO-friendly blogging . Columns identifying searcher intent, current ranking positions, and associated landing pages mark the sheet, enabling a clear vision of how each keyword will weave into the broader tapestry of search engine optimization and content strategy.

Essential Data Points to Track in Your Spreadsheet

In an ever-evolving digital landscape, the power of a meticulously crafted keyword research spreadsheet is undeniable, serving as a navigational compass for SEO strategists.

By incorporating essential data points such as keyword difficulty and cost-per-click values, the strategist can gauge the competitive terrain and allocate resources wisely.

Delving deeper, categorizing by search intent allows one to align keywords with user expectations, a crucial factor in driving targeted traffic.

Moreover, vigilantly tracking ranking progress provides invaluable feedback, indicating the efficacy of optimization efforts and guiding subsequent strategies.

These essential practices coalesce to form the backbone of a winning SEO campaign in today’s highly competitive online marketplace.

Monitoring Keyword Difficulty and CPC

Assessing keyword difficulty arms marketers with the knowledge of how challenging it will be to rank for specific terms within search engine results pages (SERPs). This metric, often quantified by sophisticated algorithms, provides an estimate of the effort and resources necessary to compete for visibility in organic search results.

The cost-per-click (CPC) value is another vital metric that sheds light on the potential financial implications of targeting particular keywords in paid search campaigns. By balancing the difficulty and the CPC, SEO professionals navigate the economic landscape, decision-driving for content creation that maximizes both rankings and budget efficiency:

• Keyword difficulty scoring illuminates the competitive landscape for ranking.
• CPC analysis helps to pinpoint opportunities for cost-effective paid search strategies.
• Combined insights inform a more strategic allocation of marketing resources.

Categorizing by Search Intent

Categorical precision is paramount when aligning search terms with user intention, carving pathways for content that resonates with the target audience. By discerning whether users seek to learn, purchase, or find a specific location, an SEO specialist can tailor content to satisfy those intents, boosting the relevance of webpages in the eyes of both users and search engines.

Implementing these distinctions in a keyword research spreadsheet enables efficient engagement with the evolving landscape of search queries. Accurate search intent categorization transforms a list into a strategic tool, directing focus to high-impact areas that serve actual user needs and drive conversion-oriented traffic.

Tracking Your Ranking Progress

Developing a comprehensive understanding of ranking dynamics plays a fundamental role in gauging the performance of SEO efforts. It necessitates the consistent monitoring of where keywords rank in search results, offering marketers a clear view of their SEO campaign’s impact.

Tracking changes in keyword positioning assists in identifying trends and shifts in search engine preferences, enabling brands to optimize strategies and remain agile in the competitive realm of digital marketing:

Streamlining Keyword Analysis With Custom Formulas

As SEO professionals look to elevate their keyword research endeavors, the integration of custom formulas within a spreadsheet can drastically enhance efficiency and strategic insight.

These formulas serve as the cerebral cortex of the document, processing vast amounts of keyword data to unveil opportunities and forecasts that could otherwise go unnoticed.

By embracing the power of conditional formatting, automating competitor analysis, and calculating the potential ROI for each keyword, marketers can swiftly interpret market dynamics and align their efforts with the overarching goal of maximizing search engine visibility.

Implementing Conditional Formatting for Insights

Conditional formatting serves as a precise sensorial layer within a keyword research spreadsheet, instantly flagging critical data points that require attention. By color-coding rankings, search volumes, or competition levels, the SEO expert quickly discerns areas of opportunity and concern.

Applying conditional formatting paves the way for a visual dashboard of performance data, enabling clear and immediate comprehension of complex metrics. This enhanced view facilitates prompt strategizing and decision-making in the fast-paced realm of search engine optimization.

Automating Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis

Empowering SEO professionals with the ability to swiftly identify gaps in competitor keyword strategies is a game-changer in the realm of digital marketing. Automating competitor keyword gap analysis within a keyword research spreadsheet transcends traditional manual research, allowing for real-time insights into areas where rivals may have overlooked significant opportunities.

The functionality to instantly compare keyword portfolios with those of competitors is pivotal in shaping an aggressive SEO strategy. Employing automation in this aspect ensures a dynamic and responsive action plan, driving a brand’s content to fill those gaps and capture untapped market segments:

• Identify keyword opportunities missed by competitors
• Develop content strategies to target these gaps
• Monitor and adjust as competitor landscapes evolve

Calculating Keyword Value and Potential ROI

In an arena where precision is paramount, calculating keyword value and potential ROI transforms a rudimentary spreadsheet into a strategic asset. By estimating the prospective returns a keyword can yield, informed by metrics such as search demand and conversion rates, SEO strategists obtain a quantifiable glimpse into the keyword’s potential impact on revenue growth.

Determining the ROI of specific keywords facilitates the channeling of efforts towards those with the highest profitability forecasts. This approach not only prioritizes resources effectively but also provides a framework for measuring the success of SEO initiatives against financial objectives, reinforcing the alignment between marketing strategy and business goals.

Integrating SEO Tools With Your Spreadsheet

In the age of search-centric marketing, an expertly curated keyword research spreadsheet is an indispensable tool for navigating the competitive digital landscape.

The confluence of technical prowess and strategic foresight is necessary to turn a simple list of terms into a dynamic SEO blueprint.

Enhancing the functionality of this spreadsheet involves the seamless integration of SEO tools and platforms, such as the incorporation of data from Google Keyword Planner, the ability to tap into SEO software APIs for real-time metrics, and harnessing the utility of Excel and Google Sheets add-ons specifically designed for search engine optimization.

These integrations endow the SEO specialist with the ability to synthesize disparate data sources, fostering a level of resourcefulness and precision that can propel targeted campaigns to new heights.

Linking With Google Keyword Planner

SEO experts advocate strengthening keyword research with the sophisticated utilities offered by Google Keyword Planner. This robust integration permits the import of extensive keyword data directly into a spreadsheet, thereby enriching the worksheet with valuable search engine metrics.

Once linked, the comprehensive insights gained can be pivotal in fine-tuning strategies, allowing marketers to analyze search trends, seasonal fluctuations, and competitor keyword efficacy. The harmonious pairing of the keyword planner with a spreadsheet puts a plethora of analytical capabilities at the strategist’s fingertips, driving campaigns toward measurable success.

Importing Data From SEO Software APIs

The agility of SEO campaigns is greatly enhanced when a keyword research spreadsheet can interface directly with SEO software APIs. This technological cohesion allows for the seamless transfer of real-time data from SEO applications to a spreadsheet, ensuring that keyword strategies are informed by the most current and comprehensive information available.

Consequently, the integration of an API facilitates the efficient capture and organization of a robust dataset including keyword rankings, search volume metrics, backlink profiles, and competitor analysis. This results in an actionable SEO arsenal that can be effectively utilized to tailor and refine the marketing strategy:

Leveraging Excel and Google Sheets Add-Ons

Excel and Google Sheets are not merely containers for data; with the right add-ons, they transform into powerful SEO workhorses. SEO professionals can extend the native capabilities of these applications with add-ons that perform functions like Tracking Search Rankings and Analyzing Backlink Profiles , optimizing workflows and improving data accuracy.

These add-ons facilitate the preparation of keyword research spreadsheets by automating repetitive tasks such as data collection and formatting:

• Automated importing of SEO data reduces manual entry errors and saves valuable time.
• Add-ons enrich spreadsheets with advanced SEO functionalities, enhancing analysis.
• Streamlined integration with other SEO tools brings comprehensive insights directly into the spreadsheet environment.

Maintaining an Up-to-Date Keyword Research Sheet

For SEO professionals, the efficacy of a keyword research spreadsheet rests not only on its creation but also on its steadfast maintenance.

The dynamic digital landscape demands diligence in ensuring that the spreadsheet reflects the current market conditions.

It is imperative to incorporate practices such as scheduling regular data updates, purging keywords that no longer serve their purpose, and continuously validating keyword trends and seasonality.

This constant nurturing confirms that the strategist’s efforts are squarely focused on sustaining the relevance and accuracy of their keyword arsenal, providing an edge in the fiercely competitive race for search engine prominence.

Scheduling Regular Data Updates

Ensuring the relevance and efficacy of a keyword research spreadsheet involves a commitment to timely updates. By implementing a schedule for data refreshment, SEO practitioners maintain the integrity of their insights, keeping them aligned with the latest search engine trends and market conditions.

Meticulous consistency in revisiting and refreshing spreadsheet data distinguishes a strategic SEO approach that is adaptive to the ever-changing digital terrain. Marketers who actively update their spreadsheets avoid the pitfall of basing decisions on outdated information, thereby reinforcing their position at the forefront of search engine relevance:

• Create a routine calendar schedule for updating keyword metrics.
• Automate updates where possible to ensure timely data acquisition.
• Review and revise keyword strategies based on the freshest insights.

Adhering to such a structured routine ensures that strategies remain data-driven and responsive to new opportunities that may arise within the digital marketing arena. SEO professionals who prioritize this diligence secure their content’s competitiveness and search visibility, enhancing their brand’s online authority.

Removing Outdated or Ineffective Keywords

SEO specialists recognize that a keyword research spreadsheet is not a set-and-forget tool; it requires perpetual refinement. Part of this refinement involves the pruning of keywords that are no longer viable or fail to deliver results. With an ever-evolving market and audience preferences, identifying and deleting these obsolete or underperforming keywords helps maintain a lean and potent SEO strategy.

Periodic evaluation of the keyword research spreadsheet highlights terms that may have dipped in search relevance or those which no longer align with the strategic direction of a brand’s content marketing. By eliminating such keywords from the spreadsheet, SEO professionals ensure that every term used is geared towards current trends, enabling the brand to stay agile and authoritative in the serpentine terrains of search engine results.

Validating Keyword Trends and Seasonality

Intelligent management of a keyword research spreadsheet requires vigilance over shifts in keyword popularity due to seasonal trends or emerging market interests. Acknowledging the ebb and flow of consumer behavior, SEO specialists adapt their strategies by closely monitoring fluctuations in search query frequencies, ensuring their keyword selections are both timely and topically relevant.

Acuity in discerning these patterns allows brands to capitalize on temporary spikes in search interest or to prepare content that aligns with forecasted demands. This proactive analysis ensures that the chosen keywords reflect the relevant narratives that captivate the target audience and fuel engagement throughout the year.

Using Your Keyword Spreadsheet to Drive SEO Strategy

The backbone of a robust SEO strategy is an expertly devised keyword research spreadsheet.

Such a tool not only houses data but also crystallizes the confluence of meticulous research and strategic foresight.

SEO professionals leverage this invaluable resource to prioritize high-opportunity keywords, ensuring that each selected term opens pathways to substantial traffic and conversions.

Aligning keywords with content creation becomes a streamlined process as insights drawn from the spreadsheet inform and inspire compelling narratives tailored to user intent and business objectives.

Meanwhile, on-page SEO strategies gain precision and impact, as the comprehensive data within guides optimization from headlines to meta tags, anchoring on the knowledge that well-informed decisions propel digital presence and drive organic growth.

Prioritizing High-Opportunity Keywords

In the art of search engine optimization, Prioritizing High-Opportunity Keywords is tantamount to navigating towards the most fruitful territories on the digital map. This pursuit involves astutely analyzing search volumes, competition levels, and relevance to the business at hand.

By zeroing in on these select keywords, marketers ensure that SEO campaigns are not only primed for visibility but are also aligned with the probable avenues of user engagement and ultimate conversion:

• Focusing on keywords with high search volume and low competition to capture untapped audiences.
• Aligning business relevance with keyword targeting to improve chances of conversion.
• Strategically integrating high-opportunity keywords into content for maximum SEO impact.

Elevating these keywords within the digital strategy enables a brand to stand out in the vast sea of online content, casting a spotlight on their unique offerings and expertise.

Aligning Keywords With Content Creation

Aligning keywords with content creation is a pivotal exercise in ensuring that the narratives developed resonate deeply with the target audience. By infusing content with strategically selected keywords, SEO professionals architect blueprints that bridge the gap between searcher intent and the brand’s messaging.

The process orbits around embedding these terms naturally within high-quality, informative content to ignite a meaningful connection with readers. Crafting narratives with keyword alignment not only amplifies the relevance of the content but elevates its authority within search engine rankings:

• Embedding high-value keywords in content titles, subtitles, and body to enhance SEO impact.
• Curating content that reflects user search intent, boosting engagement and dwell time.
• Leveraging keyword-driven content to establish brand authority and thought leadership.

Tailoring on-Page SEO With Spreadsheet Insights

Mastering the intricacies of on-page SEO becomes a directed effort when informed by the insights of a finely-honed keyword research spreadsheet. Efficiently designed spreadsheets aid SEO specialists in pinpointing exact locations for keyword placements, ensuring that each title, header, and paragraph is meticulously optimized to maximize search engine visibility and user relevance.

Empowered by spreadsheet analytics, SEO practitioners implement data-backed decisions to enhance meta descriptions and image alt texts. This strategic placement of focus keyphrases elevates a website’s semantic relevance, ultimately fine-tuning its digital fingerprint to align precisely with the algorithms that govern search engine rankings.

The Ultimate Keyword Research Spreadsheet stands as an indispensable asset for SEO success, underpinning a strategic approach to digital marketing.

Through comprehensive and organized data – from search volumes and competition levels to searcher intent and SERP features – this tool empowers marketers to prioritize high-value keywords that drive targeted traffic and conversions.

By integrating with SEO tools, employing custom formulas, and maintaining up-to-date records, the spreadsheet evolves into a dynamic blueprint for effective content creation and precise on-page optimizations.

This meticulous orchestration of keyword insights ensures that SEO strategies are data-driven, adaptable, and aligned with ever-changing market dynamics, thereby cementing a brand’s authority and visibility in the competitive online ecosystem.

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Free Keyword Research Template and Step-by-Step Guide

Updated December 2023

Here at Jellyfish Training, we believe in the power of effective keyword research. Whether you’re an SEO beginner or specialist, our free keyword research template in Google Sheets will help you focus your research, whatever your level.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through each step of the research process. We’ll cover how to do keyword research through to analysis of keyword ranking and content mapping. To get started, open the template . This version is view-only, so you’ll need to make a copy. You can do this by going to File then Make a copy

How to conduct keyword research using our free keyword research template via Google Sheets

Once you’ve made a copy of the template, you’re ready to jump into keyword research. The template contains data based on the Jellyfish Training site. You’ll need to replace this with your own data based on the following.

To make sure you get the most value from this guide, we’ve divided it into seven steps:

• Selecting your themes
• Creating your seed list
• Building out your keyword list using Google Ads
• Analysing and refining your list
• Intent analysis
• Final keyword selection
• Keyword ranking and content mapping

Let’s run through each step in more detail so you can get the best use out of the template.

Step 1: Select your themes

Before you dive into keywords, you first need to consider themes. This is an important step that will help steer your keyword research in the right direction. So, to understand your themes, you need to think about your products or services and your customers. Then identify the core topics or messages of your website and marketplace.

Here’s an example: A skincare brand geared towards the premium marketplace with eco-friendly goals could identify luxury face cream, sustainable body lotion, and organic skincare as their themes.

Depending on your business, your website may be geared towards one theme only or a variety of themes. Once you’ve determined your theme(s), you can list these in the Seed List tab on your template.  

Step 2: Create your seed list

With the list of themes identified, it’s time to think about the search terms your ideal customers might use to find the products, services or information you offer.

Open your template and add the keywords you feel your target audience might use to find your website, starting at your theme and then branching out. It’s also important to consider all three types of queries:

• Navigational queries: a search query with clear intent, as the user is searching for a specific website or vendor. These queries are harder to rank for if you do not own the brand.
• Informational queries: a search query where a user is looking for information, such as ‘tips to create a better SEO strategy’.
• Transactional queries: a search query that can include brand names or appear generic, and the user intends to complete a purchase.

With these queries in mind, create a list in your template of 6-12 seed keywords.

This is an excellent opportunity to also use search terms identified as already driving traffic either in Google Search Console or Google Ads.

Step 3: Build out keyword list using Google Ads Keyword Planner

This next step focuses on finding effective keywords using your seed list.

Access the Keyword Planner tool

You will need access to your Google Ads account or create a new account using any Google account. Once you’ve logged in, go to Tools at the top of the page and select Keyword Planner from the dropdown menu.

  Expand your seed list

The Google Keyword Planner will take your seed list(s) and expand on them by providing related search terms users might use to find a website or webpage like yours. Here’s what you need to do:

• Select the option – search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.
• Copy the keywords from your first seed list and paste them into the ‘Your product or service’ field. Make sure that the targeting options match your intended geographical and language targets
• Once you hit Get Results , Google will return average monthly search data for keywords within your seed list, plus all of the terms Google considers related.
• Click the blue arrow in the upper righthand corner within the Google Keyword Planner to download your keyword list into a spreadsheet.

Step 4: Analyse and refine the full keyword list

With your spreadsheet (.csv file) downloaded, you’ll see several columns of data. You’ll want to focus on three columns only: ‘Keyword’, ‘Avg. Monthly Searches’ and ‘Competition’. Unclutter the sheet by deleting all other columns.  

Now, explore the keywords appearing in the list. You’ll find some seem irrelevant, off-topic or provide too little search volume to warrant inclusion in your final keyword selection.

Generally, the more searches a keyword receives the better, because we know people are searching this particular query. But the higher the search volume, the greater the competition, so we don’t want to select high search volumes only.

On the other hand, keywords identified as ‘low search volume’ receive very little search traffic on Google. These can be identified as keywords generating under 250 searches a month. This low search volume indicates these keywords may not be relevant to our target audience and won’t result in traffic to your website.

We recommend aiming for keywords with high-medium search volumes in your initial research. Occasionally, low difficulty keywords can benefit your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), as they’re usually far less competitive; you can come back to these later if needed.

Finally, refine your list of keywords by deleting those we’ve identified above as either irrelevant or with a low search volume. You now have the final keyword selection, otherwise known as the ‘clean list’.

Step 5: Intent analysis

It’s essential in SEO to make sure the pages you are targeting for any particular keyword match the query’s intent. To help you establish whether keywords should be targeted on landing pages, supporting pages, or informational pages, it’s useful to organise your keywords by commercial intent.

Firstly, create a new column in your spreadsheet and mark the key phrases that directly match your core products or services with ‘high’ conversion intent. Where a user could be interested in your product or service but isn't likely to convert, mark these as ‘medium’. If the query relates to your audience but, at this stage, they're probably not interested in your offering, mark these as ‘low’.  

Step 6: Final keyword selection

Your ‘clean list’ will include all of the keywords that you should consider targeting as part of your campaign. Naturally, some of these phrases will be of greater value than others – some will be ‘vanity’ keywords while others will be ‘long-tail keywords’. Here is how we define these:

Vanity keywords: Broad phrases representing an entire industry or topic that are hard to rank for but have higher search volume.

Long-tail keywords: Longer, more specific keyword phrases that can be easier to rank for but have lower search volume.

So, to refine your keyword selection further, it’s a good idea to split your ‘clean list’ into the following groups:

• Primary opportunities: Keywords listed in your final selection that provide the most desirable opportunities for conversion intent and search volume. Your website will typically look to focus on these primary opportunities.
• Secondary opportunities: Alternative (often long-tail) keywords that provide variation to the primary opportunities. These keywords will typically generate less search volume but still offer relevance, although possibly lower conversion intent, and are valid for inclusion within your SEO campaign.
• Tertiary opportunities: Further keyword alternatives that provide the least lucrative opportunities in terms of search volume, and of medium-low conversion intent. In most cases, these will be least targeted within an SEO campaign. These phrases are those you're likely to target with supporting content or blog posts.

Step 7: Keyword ranking and content mapping

Once you have finalised your keyword selections, the next step is to see if you're already ranking for the keywords identified. This process will let you spot gaps in content or key pages not performing as you would expect. You’ll want to ask questions such as:

• Are there priority keywords you've identified that you are not ranking for? This will help you identify opportunities for new content.
• Are some page / keyword combinations performing poorly compared to the site average? If so, these pages will require further analysis and strengthening.
• Are the pages that are ranking for your chosen keywords the ones you would expect? If not, you could be cannibalising search; this is when two or more pages on your website compete for the same search term and will require fixing or further analysis.

At Jellyfish, we use our proprietary tool Myposeo to track keyword rankings. You can test it out with a free trial, but there are many more SEO tools you can use, including:

• SERPWatcher

Once you've completed the steps in this keyword research guide for each of the themes you identified, you’ll be ready to progress with your campaign.

The content in this guide is covered in both our Introduction to SEO and Content Strategy & Copywriting for SEO courses. If you’re looking to elevate your SEO strategy and master the basics of search engine optimisation, take a look at the range of SEO training courses delivered by our in-house experts.

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A Step-By-Step Guide to Keyword Research (Bonus: Best Keyword Research Tools Compared)

Imagine getting over a quarter million visitors to your site every month. We did it thanks to keyword research:

That screenshot is from one of my sites called The Wandering RV . My wife and I grew this site from a brand new site to a quarter million monthly visits in just three years with less than 30 articles.

Yes, you also have to create great content and build links to that content, but those actions come AFTER you know the best keywords to target. Every successful SEO campaign begins with keyword research ; skip this step at your peril.

Ready to get started?

How to Do Keyword Research (Quick Steps):

Good keywords make or brake a successful SEO marketing campaign. Here’s the key steps to get started with keyword research :

Step 1 : Find keyword ideas based on key terms, related search, long-tail keywords, and LSI. Step 2 : Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume. Step 3 : Determine user intent.

In today’s guide, I share a step-by-step guide to keyword research that covers not just how to find hundreds of great keywords, but also how to tell which ones can move the needle for your business and which aren’t worth your time. Let’s dive in!

Keyword Research Fundamentals

Before I talk about the exact steps to find keywords for your SEO campaign, let’s briefly cover what keyword research is and why you should care.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the act of finding and vetting keywords to target in an SEO campaign.

This is done using a number of free and/or paid tools that show you what people are searching for on Google and other search engines .

Suggested in-depth guides: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools .

The Role of Keyword Research in Digital Marketing

As you’ll learn in the next section, the quality of your keywords is the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a waste of time. The keywords you pick will determine your SEO marketing strategy from beginning to end.

Let’s see how.

How Important is Keyword Research? (Don’t Skip This!)

SEO can be complex, but it boils down to three fundamentals:

• Keyword Research
• Link building

Of those three, keyword research is the most important.

Why? Because you can create the best content and build incredible links that score you #1 Google rankings and still get zero benefits in terms of business growth or revenue if you target the wrong keywords.

For example, let’s say you want to write some content on your site’s blog so you can show up on Google’s first page. You have an idea of a blog post and think you have a good keyword to target. You make amazing content, build links to it through guest posting and email outreach (here’s how to find anyone’s email address ), and end up on the first page of Google . You’re getting hundreds of visits every month…

But your income from that article remains a big fat $0.

That’s because you didn’t properly research your keyword ahead of time. You may have found a keyword, but finding a keyword and doing keyword research are very different things.

Properly researching a keyword means understanding it’s income potential, how competitive it is, and even the exact kind of content you need to create to be able to rank for it. You’ll see what I mean by the end of this guide.

In a nutshell: Proper keyword research can be the difference between a wildly successful SEO campaign that makes your business tons of money and an utter waste of time and money.

Search Volume and Long Tail Keywords

The first concept to understand about keywords is search volume .

This is what most people look at when they first start researching keywords, and also one of the worst metrics to look at.

A high search volume is very deceiving for two reasons:

• The raw number of people searching for something has very little to do with how much you can actually earn from that traffic. For example, if you rank for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per month, but if people are just looking for information and aren’t ready to buy (hint: you’d need to define the search intent. More below.), that does nothing for your bottom line.
• Just because 10,000 people search for a keyword doesn’t mean all 10,000 people actually click on a result. Take a look at the keyword “How old is Biden”, for example—it gets 51,000 searches per month, but only 17% of those people actually click on anything. That’s because people get the answer right on Google and don’t need to click through to find it.

On the other hand, a low search volume doesn’t mean a keyword is bad or that the number you see is the number of visitors you’ll get. Virtually all pages that rank on Google for one keyword also rank for dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of other keywords.

These other keywords are usually synonyms and long-tail variants. There are also Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, which I get to in a section below.

For example, take a look at this post that my wife, Kayla, wrote for The Wandering RV. She was targeting the keyword “best camping gear”, which gets around 2,700 searches per month according to Ahrefs. But as you can see in the screenshot below, it also ranks for 1,912 other keywords and even ranks on page one for “camping gear” at 32,000 searches per month!

The point of the story? While search volume is an important metric, you shouldn’t base your target keywords solely on how many people are searching for it every month (unless you’re only focused on brand awareness and/or advertising revenue on a per-impression basis).

Search Intent

Search intent is exactly what it sounds like—the intent of the person searching for a given keyword. It’s similar to the marketing concept “buyer intent”.

In other words: What is the user looking for?

Are they searching for an item they are ready to buy right now? Are they doing research before they make a purchase decision? Or are they just looking for information that has nothing to do with buying anything, but rather with a problem they may need a solution to?

Let’s look at an example of each.

High Buying Intent : A high buying intent keyword may be a product name, such as “RV rental las vegas”. If you type that into Google and look at the results, you see a bunch of ads for RV rentals and a map showing Las Vegas RV rental companies. Someone searching this is likely ready to buy, or very close.

Research Intent : These are keywords where people are still doing research on solutions, but will likely buy soon. “Best” and “Review” keywords often fall into this category, such as “best RV rental companies”.

Informational Intent : These keywords are for people strictly looking for information and aren’t ready or even thinking about buying anything. The “how old is Biden” example falls under this category. Another example that fits with RV rentals might be something like “how to travel the country with a pet”.

However, don’t think that you should only go after buying intent keywords. Informational keywords can help you build your email list and get people into your marketing funnel to eventually buy from you.

Search intent is also important to know because it affects what content ranks on Google. If you try to create a landing page to rank for an informational keyword when Google is ranking long-form blog content, you probably won’t rank even with perfect on-page SEO and plenty of backlinks because it’s simply not what the user is searching for.

For example, let’s say you want to rank for “small campers”. So you create a guide to owning small campers. However, when we look at Google, we can see that people aren’t looking for a guide, but rather, they’re looking for a list of small campers to buy.

That’s why even after you find good keyword ideas , you should always manually type them into Google and see what’s currently ranking to get an idea of what you need to create. Don’t write a massive guide when people just want a quick answer and don’t try to rank a blog post when people are looking to buy a product.

The Role of LSI and Synonyms

Earlier, I mentioned LSI keywords. This stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, and it’s a fancy way for Google to say “synonyms and related keywords”. They’re words that are commonly found together within a single topic and are semantically related to each other.

They’re important to tell the search engines what your content is about since there can be multiple meanings to the same keywords.

For example, let’s say you’re writing an article about cars. There are five different potential “cars” you could be talking about:

• Cars, the vehicles
• Cars, the animated Disney movie
• CARS, the Canadian Association for Rally Sports
• CARs, the Canadian Aviation Regulations
• (The) Cars, the American 1970s music band

How does Google know which version of “cars” you’re talking about? By LSI keywords! Take a look:

• Using the words “vehicle”, “used”, “new”, “buy”, “sell”, etc.
• Using the words “film”, “movie”, “Disney”, etc.
• Using the words “association”, “rally”, “sports”, etc.
• Using the words “aviation”, “regulation”, “administration”, etc.

While LSI keywords don’t necessarily matter during your keyword research, they are important when developing your actual content. You should include various LSI keywords naturally in your content without stuffing them, including in headings and image alt text.

You can find LSI keywords (and learn more about them) with a tool like LSI Graph .

How Do You Do Keyword Research? (Step-by-Step Guide)

Alright, now that you have a firm understanding of the important metrics behind keyword research, it’s time to actually find your very own keywords! There are three steps I follow when I’m doing keyword research for a new site, with an optional, more advanced fourth step:

• Find keyword ideas
• Check the TRUE keyword difficulty and search volume
• Determine their search intent
• (Optional) Find & utilize keyword silos

Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Find Keyword Ideas

Finding keyword ideas is the easy part. There are loads of tools that will spit out hundreds of ideas at the click of a button. It’s vetting them that takes effort, but we’ll get to that.

For now, go take a look at the “Best Keyword Research Tool” section below and pick your poison. I’ll be using Ahrefs in the examples because it’s my favorite tool and has all the bells and whistles, but the other tools can work as well.

My favorite way to find great keyword opportunities is spying on my competition. You can do this by plugging their site into any keyword tool and look at their keywords. Ahrefs has a nifty tool called the Content Gap Analysis.

Here’s how it works:

1. Plug your site into Ahrefs, then click the Content Gap link in the left-hand menu.

2. Plug in 1-10 competitors who are ranking on Google for keywords you want to rank for. You can find them by Googling those keywords and grabbing the URLs off of Google or by using Ahrefs’ Competing domains tool right above the Content gap link. Run the tool.

3. From here, you can export the list to an excel spreadsheet if you want. I like to comb through the list right in Ahrefs. If I see a keyword I might want to target, I open it in a new tab and add it to a keyword list using the + Add to button in the top right.

If you don’t have access to Ahrefs or another keyword tool that allows you to see competitor’s keywords, you can also use a tool like Keyword Shitter to give you a ton of ideas, then vet them using other free tools such as Uber Suggest.

Step 2: Check The TRUE Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume

Once you have a list of keyword ideas you’re comfortable working with (I aim for 50-100 at a time but you can do far more), it’s time to see which are even worth pursuing based on keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume.

There’s just one caveat… the search volume and KD you see in most keyword research tools are usually way off. KD in Ahrefs is solely based off the number of linking domains to the top results, which isn’t a 100% accurate depiction of the true difficulty to rank for a keyword.

This is because SEO is a complex beast, and things like domain rating (which I’ll cover shortly) and internal linking can have a massive impact on rankings. Backlinks are only part of the picture.

And the search volume? That’s not including LSI and long-tail keywords!

Remember that camping gear example I showed you at the beginning of this article that ranks for over 1,900 keywords? The main keyword only had 2,700 searches per month, yet the article gets over 5,000 visits per month. That’s because it’s ranking for other keywords besides the main keyword.

So if you see a keyword with 200 searches per month, chances are it’s really more like 500 or 1,000 if you include the related keywords that you’ll rank for.

To determine true search volume, grab the #1 result on Google for the keyword and plug it into Ahrefs or Uber Suggest to see how much traffic that page actually gets. That should give you a more accurate picture of the search volume for a given keyword.

Here’s the traffic for the #1 ranking page for “tiny campers”, a keyword that gets ~3,400 searches per month:

See how the page gets over 10k traffic, despite the main keyword getting a third of that? That’s true search volume potential.

The other metric, keyword difficulty, is also not 100% accurate. But figuring out true difficulty is usually as easy as looking at the top pages domain authority (DA), or domain rating (DR) if you’re using Ahrefs. Let me explain.

If a keyword has a difficulty score of 8, but the top ranking pages are all DR 80+, ranking your site for those keywords may be difficult if you have a low DR, despite the low difficulty score.

My advice is to aim for keywords with a 30 KD or lower if you’re under a 40 DR, then branch up as you build more links and gain a higher authority. As your DR climbs, your internal links are worth more “link juice” (or pass more “page authority” depending on what source you listen to).

But this isn’t an article on technical SEO, so I’ll leave it at that for now!

Step 3: Determine Search Intent

At this point, you should have a pretty decent list of keywords with a difficulty you’re comfortable tackling and a search volume potential you’d be happy to capture. Now it’s time to figure out what people actually want when they search for these terms and whether or not it fits in with your marketing and revenue goals.

This part is as simple as Googling each keyword on your list and looking at the top 3-5 results. Review their meta title and description, click on them to view the page, and check out the angle they took on the page.

• Are they mainly listicle posts? How-tos? Ultimate guides ? A landing page? Something else?
• How do they seem to be monetizing the page ? Are they using display ads ? Selling products as a solution to the problem? Affiliate marketing ? Just capturing emails and not actually selling anything?
• Take a look at the comments. Are people asking questions that weren’t answered in the article? Do they seem happy, angry, or neutral?

All of these questions will help you dial in on the type of post/page you need to create, how you can monetize it (or use it to capture emails/push notification subscribers/social followers), and what you can do to improve it.

As you’re going through each keyword, keep your answers to these questions in a spreadsheet or word document to keep track of which ones you’re interested in pursuing. Your final list is the list you can start pursuing!

To give you a better idea of how to determine search intent, here are a few examples courtesy of this Moz post :

Informational Intent:

• [product name]
• what is [product name]
• how does [product name] work
• how do I use [product name]

Commercial Intent (AKA Research Intent):

• best [product name]
• [product name] reviews
• compare [product name]
• what is the top [product name]
• [colour/style/size] [product name]

Transactional Intent (AKA Buying Intent):

• how much does [product name] cost
• [product name] in [location]
• order [product name] online
• [product name] near me
• affordable [brand name] [product name]

This graph from Ahrefs may also help:

Now take your list and go crank out some content! Or, you can follow one last step.

Step 4: (Advanced) Find & Utilize Keyword Silos

If you really want to do well, you can optionally take it one step further and look for keyword silos to create corresponding content silos on your site.

A keyword silo is a list of highly related keywords that you can create content around to interlink between on your site (also called the “hub and spoke” method). Here’s a visual I created to help you understand:

Essentially, you create a hub page targeting the primary head term you want to rank for, then create “spoke” pages based on related and long-tail keywords.

For example, while doing keyword research for my wife Kayla’s vegan food blog, I found a series of related keywords asking “Is ___ vegan”. People wanted to know if common foods, such as bagels, donuts, or Oreos are vegan.

To rank for these keywords, we created this hub page which links to all of her “Is ___ vegan” articles. These articles all link to one another, as well as back to the main hub page.

This inter-linking is called content siloing, and it works so well for two reasons:

• Because all the pages interlink to one another, if you build links to any of the pages, it improves page authority across all of the other pages.
• Google uses relevancy in its algorithm, and since these topics are all highly relevant to one another, it can improve your rankings further.

So how do you find keyword silos? There is no silver bullet solution — you have to be good at picking up on patterns and noticing relevancy. However, there is one trick you can use to try and find them: books.

Look for books on your topic on Amazon and browse the table of contents. Oftentimes, books are full of keyword silos: that’s what makes them a book! Think of the binding as the hub page and the chapters as the spoke pages.

Of course, as you can see in the example above, these keywords aren’t exactly what people are searching for on Google. People aren’t typing “vegan out in the world”, but rather “how to eat vegan at restaurants” or “how to eat vegan at family gatherings”. So you may have to do some sleuthing to figure out the keyword that corresponds with the chapter title in the books you find.

Once you find a potential silo, be sure to run the keywords through steps 2 and 3 before you commit to it! Just because you found a silo, doesn’t mean you should pursue it. Think logically about how all that content will fit into your business and how you can expand on it in the future.

What Is The Best Keyword Research Tool?

There are dozens, if not hundreds of keyword research tools on the market today. Some are extremely unique, but most are just slightly different takes on the same idea. So what’s the best one? Let’s break it down by free and paid tools.

Free Keyword Research Tools

There are two free keyword research tools I’ve used and recommend:

Ubersuggest

Keyword shitter.

Let’s put on hold all the conversions about Neil Patel for a second. This tool does its job and, if you’re on a budget, it can work to get you started with SEO.

Ubersuggest is basically a free, scaled-down version of Ahrefs or Moz. It lets you spy on competitor’s backlinks, see what keywords they’re ranking for, and do some decent keyword research. If you’re doing SEO on a budget, it can get the job done.

Keyword Shitter is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You type in a keyword and get hundreds of keyword suggestions. It’s great if you just need tons of ideas, but it mostly only spits out related keywords to the one you typed in, not unique, separate ideas.

Paid Keyword Research Tools

Now we’re getting into the big-boy (or girl) tools! If you’re serious about SEO and you have the budget, these are the tools you want to use.

Keyword Insights

Keywords everywhere.

Ahrefs is hands-down my favorite SEO tool; not just for keyword research, but also for link-building, rank tracking, coming up with content ideas, and more. It has all the bells and whistles and is easily the best all-around SEO tool on the market. However, it comes at a steep price, with just the basic tool being $99 per month.

SEMrush is another great keyword research tool. It’s more affordable than Ahrefs, but it doesn’t have quite as many features. It’s more geared towards search engine marketing and PPC (thus the SEM in SEMrush). However, if you want a great paid tool but don’t want to pay the premium on Ahrefs, it’s a valid option. It even lets you try out the product for free!

Keyword Insights claims to be “the smartest way to group keywords and classify search intent at scale”… and with good reason. The tool utilizes geo-specific, live search engine result page data to cluster keywords into similar groups whilst also working out the search intent behind them.

A user simply uploads a list of keywords (as many as you’d like) and the tool will spit out a preformatted Google sheets document with the clustered keywords and the intent pulled through. Its most recent update also sorts the grouped keywords into “top-level themes” so you can see what their content hubs should be and what their spoke content might look like. The insights will also tell you which keywords you can target a single page with, or which need to be broken into multiple pages.

Keywords Everywhere is an awesome tool that used to be free and now is credit-based. The tool shows you search volume, competition, and average CPC right on Google whenever you type something in. It also shows you stats on related keywords and the “people also search” keywords. Regardless of which other tools you use, I highly recommend grabbing this one.

Want more SEO tools? Check out Kinsta’s list of must-have SEO plugins for WordPress .

Suggested Stack

So what keyword research tools should you get? My suggested stack is Ahrefs and Keywords Everywhere. Ahrefs is a complete SEO software that will help you rank your site, not just find keywords. And Keywords Everywhere lets you see search volume and keyword ideas any time you’re searching something on Google. Plus it’s free, so what’s not to like?

Here’s a quick recap of everything we’ve covered:

• Keyword research is extremely important to any SEO campaign and should not be skipped or taken lightly.
• Search volume and keyword difficulty can be deceiving. Do some deeper research by typing the keyword into Google and reviewing the results before you make a decision.
• Don’t be fooled by low search volume. Check the true search volume by reviewing the top pages search traffic using Ubersuggest or Ahrefs.
• Search intent is king. Make sure the content you’re creating matches the content people want to see (and what Google is already showing).
• Look for keyword silos. They’re can be a shortcut to ranking your pages faster.

And that’s all there is to it! If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment below or shoot me an email. For more help with SEO, click here to read my step-by-step guide and this awesome in-depth guide on how to drive more traffic to your website.

Bill is a content marketing and SEO expert with over 6 years' experience. When he's not nerding out over Google, he loves traveling, playing video games, and spending time with his wife.

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Keyword Research is predominantly a statistical analysis of trending interests that are expressed by internet searches.

Although I realize the importance of said statistics, I am “right brained” and have struggled with being interested in numbers, all of my life. When I look at a keyword research result, the numbers tell me nothing in terms that I can understand. In fact, I’m totally bored by the concept.

I have read many posts, papers, and websites about the subject, and although not many agree with the same approach, they basically are saying the same things. b-o-r-i-n-g!

What is stopping a keyword research tool (once the stats have been gathered) from asking what it is that you sell, and then saying… well, to sell that, try concentrating on this…, and spare me the statistical analysis.

Really helpful article. Especially for the newcomers who want to be an SEO expert.

Thanks, Eva! Glad you enjoyed it. :)

What if I’m a business owner with a brand new site with no blog posts yet? How would I start this if I’m new to KW research? Are there services (real people services) that help with this or do it with me?

Hey, Johnny!

No problem! The steps with the content gap analysis are the same – you just have to manually find your competitors rather than using a tool. To do that, Google some keywords you think you want to rank for and grab the URLs of the top-ranking sites that monetize their sites similarly to you (whether that’s through ads, affiliate marketing, or selling similar products).

Paste those URLs into the content gap tool and follow along from there! Hope this helps! :)

Awesome! i am using this article to share with my students while i m teaching keyword research.

Lots of great information here ! Just wanting to introduce to a free alternative to Keywords everywhere, a chrome extension – WhatsmySERP.com/everywhere it gives you unlimited searches for volume and CPC.

Our team has launched this tool and it already has 5 star reviews and 20k+ users. I’d love for you to try it and see what your thoughts are.

I’d love to know your thoughts :)

This article is really really helpful for the newcomers. specially the one who recently started a blog or a website and Also, wants to Learn SEO.

The thing with the search intent is really important!

This was really what i was searching. perfect timing, thanks Bill such an valuable post.

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Keyword Mapping: What It Is, Why It’s Important & How To Complete One With My Free Template & Guide

Keyword mapping is the final, yet perhaps most important step in conducting keyword research for your website. 

As an SEO or webmaster, failing to properly map your keywords can result in failing to satisfy search intent and a poorly organized website, which makes it hard to rank highly in organic search.

Continue reading to find out what keyword mapping is, why it’s important for your website, and how you can create and complete a keyword map using my free keyword mapping template and guide.

Here’s an outline of what were going to cover:

What Is Keyword Mapping?

Why is keyword mapping important, how to create a keyword map for your website, free keyword mapping template, keyword mapping guide.

Check out my YouTube video below if you would rather learn about keyword mapping in video format. Otherwise, scroll down and let’s dive into the blog post.

Keyword mapping is the process of assigning target keywords from keyword research to each page on your site.

Keyword mapping is usually completed through the use of a spreadsheet, which is commonly referred to as a keyword map , or a keyword matrix. 

The goal of keyword mapping is to ensure that each of your pages are focused topically, which will help you satisfy search intent and help move your target audience through their customer journey.

Keyword mapping is important because it will allow you to:

• group your target keywords based on search intent and by topical relevance.
• map your site’s internal linking strategy.
• plan your site’s content strategy.
• record and monitor each of your page’s meta data.

Grouping and assigning your target keywords to pages based on search intent and topical relevance will help you rank higher in organic search. If you are able to satisfy search intent, Google will want to get your content in front of more users.  

Mapping your site’s internal linking strategy will help:

• Search engines discover and crawl all pages on your site more easily.
• Users navigate through your site, and find relevant content more easily.
• Distribute PageRank, or “link juice”, throughout your site by sending the authority from more authoritative pages to lower ones.

Being able to plan your site’s content strategy will make it easier for you to keep your site organized as you add more pages in the future.

It will also help you avoid keyword cannibalization , which is what happens when your pages start to compete with one another in organic search, due to content being too similar to one another.

Keyword mapping will help bridge the gap between keyword research and your on-page SEO.

Creating a keyword map for your site is as simple as creating a spreadsheet . The keyword map can be as basic, or as detailed as you would like.

Let me walk you through the key elements that I recommend including in a keyword map.

To start, the first column in your spreadsheet should be a list of the important URLs on your site. Less important pages like contact pages, privacy policy pages, or any other low quality, or thin content pages can be skipped. 

If you have a smaller site, listing out all the important URLs may be an easy process. If your site is larger, I suggest using a web crawling tool like Screaming Frog to help you do this. Use the tool to crawl your site, and then export and copy all the internal URLs into your keyword map.

For each URL that you list in your keyword map, you can then begin to populate the subsequent columns with the following items:

• Page Purpose – provide the purpose of the page (ie – product page, service page, blog post, etc)
• Search intent – list the search intent of the page (ie- informational, navigational, transactional, etc)
• Target Keywords – list the target keywords assigned to each page.
• Internal Links – use this column to map internal linking opportunities between relevant pages. When I refer to internally linking here, I am talking about contextual anchor text (anchor text in your body copy). 

• Title Tag – list the title tag for each page.
• Meta Description – list the meta description for each page.
• H1 Tag – list the H1, or main heading tag of each page.

Now that you know what a keyword mapping template should consist of, go ahead and check out my free keyword mapping template in either Google Sheets or Excel formats below.

For the Google Sheets version, once the file has opened, click File , then Make A Copy in order to save a version for your to start modifying.

For the excel version, click File , then Save As .

Now that you have a keyword mapping template that is ready to use, let me show you exactly how you can complete a keyword map for your site with my step by step guide.  

Whether you are looking to complete a keyword map for your website or a client’s, this guide will show you the necessary steps on how you can complete a keyword map.

Let’s start with the first step.

1. Complete Keyword Research

The first step in the process is to ensure that you have completed keyword research for your website . I won’t cover how to do this in depth in this guide, because this could be a complete guide on its own.

In fact, I actually have created a separate blog post on how to do keyword research.

Check out my free keyword research template and step by step guide on how to complete keyword research and come up with a list of target keywords for your site.

Once you have your target keyword list, the next step is to figure out the gaps between these keywords and the keywords that you are already ranking for.

2. Determine Your Keyword Gaps

To determine the keyword gaps between your target keywords and your existing ranking keywords , you are going to have to determine the keywords your pages are already ranking for.

If you followed my keyword research template guide in the previous step, you will already know how to do this.

If not, I’ll quickly show you how you can pull these keywords from your Google Search Console.

Open up your Google Search Console property and navigate over to your search performance report .

Choose the time period you want the data for (the more the better), and then click Export in the top right hand corner of the report.

This will allow you to export all the data from the report into a Google Sheet, Excel, or CSV file . Once your exported spreadsheet opens up, the Queries tab will be displayed by default. Looking under the Top queries column, you will find a list of your site’s existing ranking keywords from Google. 

Great! Now you have a list of your existing ranking keywords.

To analyze the keyword gaps between your target keyword list and this list that you just exported, use the Excel or Google Sheets VLOOKUP formula to help compare the two lists and find the gaps.

The end goal is to find the target keywords that you are not yet ranking for , and assign these keywords to either existing, or new pages on your site.

Make sure to populate your target keyword column in your keyword mapping template with your existing ranking keywords that you just pulled from Google Search Console.

3. Assign Target Keywords To Your Pages

Now that you have determined your list of target keywords that you are not yet ranking for, it’s time to assign those keywords to pages on your site based on search intent and topical relevance .

To demonstrate how to properly do this, let me use an example.

In your keyword mapping template that you just downloaded, you will see that I have already filled in the template based on a fictitious digital marketing business. 

Let’s assume that this business provides the following services to its clients:

• Email marketing.
• Social media marketing.

Now, a business like this would obviously need the following types of pages:

• A home page.
• Service pages to meet transactional search intent (lead generation).
• Blog posts to help drive traffic to the site and meet informational search intent.

If you look in the keyword mapping template, you will see that target keywords have been assigned to each of the pages based on search intent and topical relevance.

So, what’s an easy way to confirm if your target keywords have similar enough search intent and topical relevance to assign them to the same page in your keyword map?

Use Google.

That’s right. Google the keywords in question. If the majority of the ranking pages that appear on the SERP are the same, then you know the keywords should be assigned to the same page .

Why? Google has gotten really good at determining the search intent of user queries through one of the many machine learning portions of their ranking algorithm, which is called RankBrain. RankBrain allows Google to better understand the search intent behind a query . This usually gives the user exactly what they are looking for.

Therefore, if the Google SERP shows similar search intent between keywords, then this is how you should group them in your keyword map.

For example, in our keyword mapping template, the home page has been assigned the target keywords: digital marketing consulting for small businesses, small business marketing consultant and business internet marketing solutions. 

If you Google these keywords, you will see the majority of the ranking pages for each of these SERPs are similar. This confirms that the search intent and topics align, and that these keywords should in fact be assigned to the same page.

The service based pages in the keyword mapping template example follow the same grouping strategy.

As do the blog pages 

Once you’ve successfully assigned your target keywords to each page based on similar search intent and topic, you’re ready to map out your internal linking strategy.

4. Plan Your Internally Link Strategy

Now that you’ve mapped your target keywords based on search intent and topical relevance, there is no better time to start mapping out your internal linking strategy .

Remember, internal linking will help the organization, authority flow (PageRank), search engine crawlability, and user navigation for your site. 

For our digital marketing business example, here is a visual representation of how the site could internally link the pages.

In the keyword map, you can see how the above internal linking visual representation is applied to the internal linking column .

The home page should internally link down to each service page, as well as each blog pillar page.

While for the blog, each blog category pillar page should link down to the various support pages. The support pages are currently listed as future pages.

As future blog pages are added to the site, each pillar page should continue to link down to each support page.

Each support page should also link back up to its relevant pillar page. This will highlight the importance of all the pillar pages.

The final step in the keyword mapping process is to list each page’s title tag, meta description and h1 tag.

5. List Title Tags, Meta Descriptions & H1 Tags For Each Page

Listing the page title, meta description and h1 tag for each page in your keyword map will help you plan and continually monitor these for each of your pages.

You can also use revision columns for each item to help you track changes. This will help you test and track the impacts from various revisions to your title tags, meta descriptions and h1 tags.

Well there you go, that’s how you can successfully complete a keyword map for your website.

Over time, as you create new pages and update existing ones on your site, this keyword mapping process should be revisited. 

Keyword mapping should be done regularly for your site. It should be viewed is a continuous and on-going process, and should never be looked at as a one and done task.

In this post we’ve covered what keyword mapping is, why it is important, and how you can complete one using my free keyword mapping template.

Remember, keyword mapping will allow you to:

• group and assign your target keywords to each page by topical relevance and search intent.
• create a content plan for your site.
• identify internal linking opportunities between pages
• list and track your pages metadata.

Keyword mapping will help you build the foundation for each of your page’s on-page SEO success.

What other tools or tricks do you use to map target keywords to your site? If you have any questions or comments about keyword mapping, please let me know below. 

Thanks for reading.

Frank Piedimonte

Frank Piedimonte is the author of SEO Frank. He is an SEO consultant that specializes in keyword research, on-page SEO, and conducting SEO audits. By trade he is a Chemical Engineer, which is where his strength of problem solving, analysis, and trial and error comes from. He applies these strengths to his SEO work daily.

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How To Use Google Search Console As A Keyword Ranking Tool

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Keyword Research: How to Find the Best Keywords for SEO

• Timothy Carter
• June 17, 2023

Keyword research is relatively simple (and we’ll get to it shortly).

But online keyword competition can be fierce.

Consider the the total number of SERP results for “SEO”:

Is it any wonder why you might be having difficulty ranking for a particular keyword or key phrase?

The sheer volume of competitors in online search in nearly every conceivable niche makes those top 10 positions more coveted (and valuable) than ever.

So, if you want to be successful in SEO , you need to understand what people are searching for, how often they’re searching for it, and why they’re searching for it.

So how can you find this information? It all starts with a repeatable keyword research process of uncovering keyword phrase opportunities for your brand to rank higher in search engines .

Table of Contents

Step 1. Brainstorm your “seed” keywords

You’ll start your keyword research by selecting what I call “seed” keywords. Seed keywords are those that you either already know your target audience is using to search for your product or services, or that you would use if you were a member of your target audience. Also be sure to include SEO power words in your seed keywords list.

For example, since SEO.co is a content marketing agency, I can easily guess that my target audience might search for “content marketing agency,” or perhaps one or more of the following variations of that keyword:

• Content marketing services
• Link building services
• Digital marketing services
• Content writing

When it comes to your initial focus, especially if you are a startup doing digital marketing , you will want to focus on the long-tail, particularly long-tail keywords where you feel you have a competitive advantage for matching the search intent of your target audience.

Long-tail keywords are extended phrase search queries, such as “what is the best roofing company in Wyoming?” Compare that to a traditional “head” keyword or keyword phrase like “roofing company” or “roofing company Wyoming.” There’s no strict line to draw here, though generally, if a query is in sentence format, it can be considered as a long-tail phrase.

Long-tail keyword research can be more advantageous because when they tend to have a much lower competition than head keywords. The catch is that the long tail, by nature, have low monthly search volume. It’s great to use long-tail keywords to rank quickly for niche positions, but if you’re looking for some heavy-hitting rankings to build over the long-term, head keywords are better.

Step 2. Add seed keywords into your preferred keyword research tool

Now that you’ve got your seed keywords, it’s time to start gathering data on them. Start by plugging at least one from each group into various third party and even free keyword research tools.

Moz and Ahrefs are the industry standard, but don’t forget to use third party keyword tools in conjunction with Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics and Google Ads Keyword Planner. All three include quality data for finding quality keyword opportunities.

Below is a Moz screenshot of the search results for my keyword, “content marketing services.”

Source: Moz Keyword Explorer

Or the same result from Ahrefs:

If you want to generate an expanded keyword list of long-tail keywords, we like to use AnswerthePublic , which provides a fan-based UX for showing new keyword ideas, searches related to one another and other keyword variations you may not have considered.

AnswerthePublic fan graph related result for the phrase “content marketing”

Step 3. Conduct competitor research & content gap analysis

Next, you’ll want to take a closer look at the competition, and what types of strategies they’re using in their search campaigns and how you stack up.

Competitor content gap analysis helps you identify content opportunities by analyzing what your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. By understanding the gaps in their content strategy, you can develop and optimize your own content to capture those missed opportunities.

Ahrefs “Content Gap Analysis” tool to help you understand where and how your competition is ranking for various keywords in search engines and how you can create new pages and posts to find new content ideas for your next post or page :

You’ll get to see their names listed, as well as their relative competition “level,” and where they’re winning the keyword game. You can export the data and manipulate it to source keyword ideas for your next blog post.

Compare the pages that rank for your target keywords with your own website’s content. Look for gaps where your competitors have content that you don’t. These gaps may indicate opportunities to create new content or improve existing content to fill those voids.

SEMRush and Ahrefs are fantastic automatically listing some of your “main organic competitors” once you enter your website domain name:

(Image source: SEMRush )

Examine the content that your competitors have created for the keywords you’re targeting. Look at factors such as content length, format (blog post, video, infographic, etc.), depth of information, and engagement signals like comments and social shares. This analysis will help you understand why their content is performing well.

There are a few reasons you need to learn about your competitors:

• Inspiration. If you can understand how they’ve optimized their websites, where they currently rank, and how they’re getting more relevant customers to their sites, you can adopt some of these techniques for yourself.
• Understanding competition levels. When you analyze keywords, you’ll be able to gauge what level of competition you’re in for. Are your competitors all fighting viciously for web real estate, or is it an open field?
• Discover weaknesses and opportunities. Are there certain niches that your competitors haven’t been able to touch? Are there opportunities for development they’ve missed?

Based on your analysis, develop strategies to address the content gaps. This may involve creating new content targeting specific keywords or enhancing existing content to make it more comprehensive, valuable, or engaging. Consider the unique value propositions you can bring to the table.

After implementing your content improvement strategies, monitor the performance of your new or optimized content. Track keyword rankings, organic traffic, engagement metrics, and conversions. Adjust your strategy as necessary based on the results and continue to refine your content to stay competitive.

Step 4. Evaluate your keywords

You want to start targeting keywords that have the following characteristics:

• Relative low competition
• Relative high(er) search volumes
• High relevance to your brand, product or service

You should now be looking at a spreadsheet that contains a bunch of keywords and data on their respective search volumes.

Now, it’s time to pick which ones you’re going to use for your PPC/SEM or link building efforts campaign.

If you plug a keyword into Keyword Explorer, you’ll see a volume measurement for it and a number of other related terms:

Source: Keyword Explorer

It’s also good to juxtapose this to data from other sources like Ahrefs:

There’s variation because keyword searches fluctuate from month to month. For example, taking a look at the screenshot above, you can count on the keyword “content marketing” to earn between 11,500 and 30,300 searches each month.

There’s no rule for what search volume you should target; obviously, higher is better, but it usually comes with the tradeoff of higher competition and keyword difficulty, which means it’s going to be harder to rank.

If you’re looking for keyword ideas with at least a certain search volume, you can use Moz or Ahrefs to gauge the overall search volume, average cost per click (CPC) and overall difficulty to rank:

You could also use Google Ads Keyword Planner (GKP) to perform this search, but since Ahrefs’ and/or Moz’s Keyword Explorer pulls much of this data, you run the risk of redundancy. Also notice that Google’s tool offers much less specific ranges of monthly search volume:

(Image source: Google Keyword Planner )

SEMRush offers similar features, but strives for a volume count with pinpoint accuracy. This may be useful in the short term, but if you want better long-term projections, it’s better to rely on a range.

3. Competition. Finally, you’ll want to take a look at the competition rating for each keyword. Again, GKP will be able to tell you this, but unfortunately, this data is less objective (giving you only “Low”, “Medium” or “High”) and much less precise than search volume.

After you finish removing all the irrelevant keywords, you’ll be left with a list of keywords that are relevant and have some measurable amount of search volume and competition.

Step 5. Add keyword research data to a custom spreadsheet

Once you have sourced all relevant keywords in both your keyword research tool and through competitive analysis, you will want to export those to a spreadsheet. In the various keyword research tools, you will see a prompt that says “See all [X] keyword suggestions” or “Download Results to CSV”

Export the given long-tail keywords into a CSV which you can add to your growing spreadsheet list.

Your spreadsheet will be a derivation of the following (from Ahrefs):

Once in your spreadsheet, you can filter based on your strategy and run pivots on things like keyword difficulty, volume, total clicks and cost per click.

Step 6. Input your winners into rank tracking software

There are many important metrics to monitor in a full-fledged SEO campaign, including your organic traffic , social traffic, referral traffic, and conversion rates , but when it comes to evaluating your keyword progress specifically, there’s no better metric than your actual keyword rankings. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t explicitly publish this information, so your best bet is to use a tool to help you track your Google Rankings  is what I personally use, but there are a ton of software options that do this, such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, AuthorityLabs, RankWatch, and more. We use both Moz and Ahrefs:

Ahrefs lets you view the value, search volume and difficulty of your desired terms.

Or, you can also track your rankings for a given term vis-a-vis the competition:

With Ahrefs, you can also easily track individual keyword performance, including rankings gains and rankings losses , for a given website:

Rank trackers will allow you to track your progress for specific terms and rankings over time.

Based on your keyword analysis, prioritize the keywords that are most relevant to your goals and have a balance of search volume and competition. Categorize them according to your website structure, content strategy, or target audience segments.

Step 7. Determine your goals and budget

Generally, if you’re looking for fast results, you’ll want to choose long-tail keywords with a low competition rating; these are going to be your fastest road to rankings, but keep in mind high rankings here won’t always send much traffic your way; it depends on search volume for each keyword.

Head keywords and higher-competition keywords are better for long-term search results, assuming you’re also picking higher-relevance keywords with a high search volume. A bigger marketing budget would allow you to theoretically invest more effort in either side of the equation, allowing you to cover more ground and rank faster for your target terms, especially if you’re able to effectively phrase match the search intent of your audience with high quality content.

For example, take a look at the major difference even a single variant can have on a target keyword, between “ content marketing ” and “content marketing for law firms”, dropping the competition score from 91 to 42, and the search volume to “no data” (though Google’s suggests it to be between 10-100):

It’s hard to estimate exactly how much time or money you’ll need to rank for a given keyword, but these metrics should help you understand your biggest opportunities, and estimate the relative degree of effort you’ll need to invest in each to see search results. In turn, this should guide the development of your SEO keyword research.

Step 8: Monitor, Refine & Tweak

Continuously monitor the performance of your targeted keywords, analyze the changes in search trends, and adapt your strategy accordingly. Refine your keyword list over time to ensure it remains effective and aligned with your evolving goals.

• Track keyword rankings : Use SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to monitor the rankings of your targeted keywords. Regularly check how your website is performing for these keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). Identify any fluctuations or changes in rankings and investigate the potential causes.
• Monitor organic traffic : Analyze your website’s organic traffic using tools like Google Analytics. Keep an eye on the traffic trends, paying attention to which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site. Look for opportunities to optimize and improve the performance of keywords that are underperforming.
• Analyze user engagement metrics : Beyond rankings and traffic, analyze user engagement metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and conversion rates. These metrics can provide insights into the relevance and effectiveness of the keywords driving traffic to your site. Identify keywords that drive high-quality traffic and optimize your content to enhance user engagement.
• Stay updated with industry trends : Regularly stay informed about industry trends, keyword research software, changes in search algorithms, and shifts in consumer behavior. Follow authoritative SEO blogs, attend webinars, or join industry forums to keep up with the latest developments. This knowledge will help you adapt your keyword strategy and refine your targeting based on emerging trends.
• Leverage Google Search Console : Google Search Console provides valuable data on how your website appears in Google search results. It offers insights into the keywords that are driving impressions, clicks, and click-through rates (CTRs). Use this data to identify keywords with high impressions but low CTRs, as they may require optimization of title tags and meta descriptions to improve clickability.
• Conduct regular competitor analysis : Keep an eye on your competitors’ keyword strategies. Monitor their rankings, organic traffic, and the keywords they are targeting. Identify any gaps or opportunities where you can refine your keyword targeting. Additionally, observe their content and promotional strategies to gain insights into successful keyword usage.
• Test and refine your content : Continuously test and refine your content based on keyword performance. Experiment with different variations of titles, headings, and content structure. Monitor the impact of these changes on keyword rankings, traffic, and engagement metrics. Use A/B testing and analyze the results to identify effective optimization opportunities you may not have seen before.
• Revisit and update older content : Periodically revisit your existing content and identify opportunities to update it with fresh, relevant keywords. Conduct keyword research to find new related keywords that you can incorporate into your existing content. This can help improve the visibility of older pages and drive additional organic traffic.
• Seek feedback from users : Actively engage with your website visitors and customers to gather feedback on their search experiences. Encourage them to provide insights on the keywords or phrases they used to find your website, and if they encountered any difficulties or gaps in the keywords or content. This feedback can help you refine your keyword targeting and address user needs and search intent more effectively.

Search rankings are in a constant state of flux and change.

Monitoring and changing your content, internal linking and overall strategy will be necessary as competitors too refine their approach to link building and content development.

How to Use Keyword Research to Rank Better in Search Engines

It’s important to know how you’ll be using keywords if you want to choose them appropriately.

Title tags , header tags and meta descriptions

Your page titles and meta descriptions are some of the most important areas to include your desired keywords.

Dedicated pages

Because page titles are so powerful when it comes to evaluating relevance, and because each page is indexed separately in Google, it’s sometimes a good idea to create dedicated pages for each of your head keywords, bearing in mind that you do not want to cannibalize your link equity and compete for the same terms with different pages and posts .

Ongoing content

Your ongoing content is your best place for the ongoing support of your target keyword phrases. If you’re developing multiple new posts for your blog a week, you’ll have multiple opportunities to optimize for new keywords, new pages with new title tag and meta description opportunities, and of course, plenty of body copy.

Link building

You will likely have less control over anchor text coming from other sites, but when it comes to your own site, you should be using your desired head a long-tail keywords all day long for your internal link building .

Why is Keyword Research Important

With an understanding of the function of keywords in a modern SEO campaign, let’s take a look at some of the tangible benefits you can get by conducting keyword research:

Search volume analysis

First, you’ll gain insights into what keywords are more popular than others.

This can help you find more popular topics to optimize for, which will eventually lead you to higher search engine traffic and a higher ROI.

For example, take a look at the difference in search volume (the number of times a user has searched for a given query) between “how to bake a cake” and “how to build a particle accelerator.”

The clear winner is “how to bake a cake” (and let’s be thankful for that), making it far more favorable to optimize for.

(Image source: Google Trends )

Competitive research

Competitive research can help you determine which keywords and phrases your direct competitors are already ranking for in search engine results pages (SERPs).

From there, you can decide which ones are worth fighting for and which ones are worth leaving or putting on the back burner.

For the most part, you’ll want to shoot for target phrases that none of your competitors are currently ranking for, as they’ll be easier to rank.

Content ideas and SEO direction

Next, keyword research will give you keyword ideas for your content marketing campaign, and help you set the direction for your search engine optimization.

With a solid group of high quality “money” keywords in mind, you’ll be able to establish the meta data and body copy for the main pages of your site, and come up with an editorial calendar full of topics that are actually relevant to your audience.

In this way, keyword research coincides well with content gap analysis for finding topic & keyword ideas where your competitors rank for a particular blog post , but you do not.

Market research

Doing keyword research also helps you understand your key demographics better , giving you information you can use in other areas of your business, including other areas of your marketing campaign.

For example, you may find that search patterns for a specific product tend to escalate in winter, giving you a critical marketing opportunity to push that product more during winter months.

Ranking measurement

Finally, doing keyword research in advance gives you a concrete way to measure the progress of your SEO campaign , giving you benchmark metrics when you check your rankings in Google search .

Personally, I’m a fan of using a diversity of Google ranking factors like overall organic search traffic and conversion rates to measure SEO campaign progress , but being able to definitively chart your rankings for a handful of target keywords also lends accuracy and thoroughness to your campaign.

Noteworthy Keyword Research Tools & Software

The following (some referenced, some not) are great SEO tools for conducting keyword research:

• Google Keyword Planner : Google’s own keyword research tool, which provides keyword ideas, search volume data, and competition levels. It’s free to use, but you need a Google Ads account to access it.
• SEMrush : A comprehensive SEO tool that offers keyword research, competitive analysis, backlink analysis, and more. It provides extensive keyword data, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and related keywords.
• Ahrefs : Another powerful SEO tool that provides keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and more. Ahrefs offers keyword data such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic potential.
• Google Cloud NLP : Google’s Cloud Natural Language Processing tool can provide meaningful insight into potential deficiencies in the way your content is written compared to your competitors. The tool is free and is one of the more powerful means of content analysis.
• Moz Keyword Explorer : A keyword research tool by Moz that provides search volume, keyword difficulty, and opportunity metrics. It also offers features like SERP analysis, organic CTR data, and keyword lists.
• Ubersuggest : Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that provides keyword suggestions, search volume data, keyword difficulty, and content ideas. It also offers insights into domain and backlink analysis.
• AnswerThePublic : This keyword tool generates keyword ideas in a visual format, presenting questions, prepositions, comparisons, and related queries based on a specific keyword. It helps identify long-tail keyword opportunities and understand user search intent.
• KeywordTool.io : It generates keyword suggestions from various sources, including Google Autocomplete. It provides keyword ideas for multiple search engines like Google, YouTube, Bing, and Amazon.
• Serpstat : Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that offers keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, and site audit features. It provides keyword data, search volume, keyword difficulty, and related keywords.
• LongTailPro : Designed specifically for finding long-tail keywords, LongTailPro provides keyword suggestions, competition analysis, and keyword metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty.
• Keyword Explorer by WordStream : WordStream’s Keyword Explorer offers keyword research and management features, including search volume data, competitive metrics, and keyword grouping capabilities.

Need expert help with your SEO or competitive research and keyword analysis?

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How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner's Guide

Published: April 04, 2024

While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin' out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.

In this post, we’ll define what keyword research is, why it’s important, how to conduct your research for your SEO strategy, and choose the right keywords for your website.

Table of Contents

What is keyword research?

Why is keyword research important, elements of keyword research, how to research keywords for your seo strategy, how to find and choose keywords for your website.

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

Keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.

Insights from these actual search terms can help inform your content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.

People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online.

So if your content is successful in getting in front of your audience as they conduct searches, you stand to gain more traffic. Therefore, you should be targeting those searches with content that features those keywords in a meaningful way.

Additionally, inbound methodology focuses less on creating content around what we want to tell people. Instead, we should be creating content around what people want to discover.

In other words, our audience is coming to us for helpful content that provides the answers they’re looking for.

In a nutshell, all of this starts with keyword research.

Conducting keyword research has many benefits, the most popular being:

Marketing Trend Insight

Conducting effective keyword research can provide you with insights into current marketing trends and help you center your content on relevant topics and keywords your audience is in search of.

Traffic Growth

When you identify the best-fitting keywords for the content you publish, the higher you’ll rank in search engine results — the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.

Customer Acquisition

If your business has content that other business professionals are looking for, you can meet their needs and provide them with a call-to-action that will lead them into the buyer journey from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.

Keywords vs. Topics

More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years and how seemingly unimportant keywords have transformed our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.

And to some extent, this is true, but in the eyes of an SEO professional, it’s a different approach. Rather, it’s the intent behind that keyword and whether or not a piece of content solves for that intent (we’ll talk more about intent in just a minute).

But that doesn’t mean keyword research is an outdated process. Let me explain:

Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience.

The operative term here is topics, plural. By researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics or buckets that you want to create content on.

Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.

Keyword Research Template

Build your SEO strategy with this free template.

• Search Volume
• Keyword Difficulty

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

There are three main elements I have discovered that you should pay attention to when conducting keyword research.

1. Relevance

Google ranks content for relevance.

This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers’ needs.

In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?

2. Authority

Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative.

That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, informative content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks.

If you’re not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword’s SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can’t compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional.

You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. It's like setting up a shop in a ghost town.

Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.

• Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
• Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
• Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze accordingly.
• Research related search terms.
• Use keyword research tools to your advantage.

I’m going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting.

That way, you’ll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about.

Step 1. Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.

To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets.

You’ll come up with about five to 10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you’ll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.

If you’re a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they’re the topics that come up the most in sales conversations.

Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas . What types of topics would your target audience search that you’d want your business to get found for?

Don't forget to share this post!

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Discover opportunity for growth in your keyword strategy with this easy-to-use template.

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The Best Keyword Research Tool for SEO is a Simple Google Spreadsheet [With Template!]

Not even a few days after we published our keyword research guide , the questions started to flow in. How do you keep track of all of those keywords? How can you possibly manage to sort through a thousand keywords to find the best one? How can you turn all of this raw data into an SEO strategy that actually works?

While there certainly are some guides out there that insist that the best keyword research tool for digesting all this information is some expensive piece of software (or some secret proprietary method), the reality is that all you need is a simple keyword research spreadsheet.

Wait, what? The best keyword research tool is just a spreadsheet?

Yes — and we’re not talking about some complicated, algorithm-filled wonder, either. While there certainly are websites out there that will “pick” the best keywords for you, at TCF, we feel the best content strategies spring from keyword research that is a little more hands-on — meaning that it’s up to you to comb through the data to find what keywords work best for your business.

Download Our Free SEO Keyword Research Template

Our keyword research template can help you organize your keywords as you find them — and help you turn them into a content and SEO strategies that works for your business. Get yours here:

Here’s the step-by-step guide on how to use it:

1. Do your keyword research.

Before you can write a blog post that converts, before you decide on a content strategy, and — certainly — before you start writing, the first thing you need to do is  research (our keyword research guide might be helpful for you.) After all, you can’t break data down if you don’t have it! Make sure you’re thorough with your research, too. The more competitors you can research, and the more keyword categories you can investigate using AdWords and Google’s keyword tool (or whatever your research tool of choice is), the better off you’ll be.

2. Export the data.

Most SEO tools will allow you to export the raw data into a .CSV file. If you’re planning on using our keyword spreadsheet template, having the raw data is essential to being able to break it down into something useful.

If you are using Google AdWords to find keywords, click here to export the data:

If you are using SEMrush to find keywords, click here to export the data:

3. Put it in the keyword spreadsheet.

Regardless of what site generated your keyword data, it will always be organized by the same variables: CPC (cost per click), search volume, position, and competition. You should easily be able to highlight the individual columns and copy/paste them into their respective columns in our SEO keyword spreadsheet template.

If you’re using our keyword spreadsheet, then make sure to pay attention to what tab you’re pasting the data into. Try to keep your data organized — separate your competitors’ keywords into individual sheets, and make sure to keep any keywords you’ve found independently (in other words, keywords your competitors aren’t ranking for) in their own sheet. By splitting up this information, you’ll easily be able to compare specific keywords (and make sense of what strategy your competitors are using).

4. Analyze the data.

Before I get into the analysis, it’s important to note here that this process will be slightly different for every person or business. Likewise, the amount of “analysis” you will have to do will vary dramatically depending on the size of your enterprise. If you’re a brand new startup with no real web presence 

entering into a market that doesn’t really exist yet, you probably aren’t going to be playing with a ton of keywords. Similarly, if you are a global cloud hosting company, you’re probably going to spend several weeks combing through the data.

If you’ve already stuck the data into our SEO keyword spreadsheet template, you’ll probably notice that it automatically color-codes the level of competition each keyword has. High competition keywords are in red, medium ones are in yellow, and low competition keywords are in green.

The competitiveness of a keyword is highlighted in our spreadsheet for a pretty good reason: generally, high-competitive keywords are the ones most important to your competition (and they’ll likely be incredibly important for you). That doesn’t mean we’re telling you to target them exclusively, though — high competition keywords, while worth targeting, are usually not worth focusing on exclusively.

"high competition keywords, while worth targeting, are usually not worth focusing on exclusively." - The Content Factory

What they can tell you, though, is where you should start looking to find a keyword that might produce results for your business. “Cloud computing” might be a high competition keyword, for example, but a longer-tail keyword, like “cheap hybrid cloud computing” might not be. Something to remember here is that a good content strategy isn’t just about stealing away traffic from your competitors’ websites. While you want to target some of their keywords, you also want to find keywords that no one has touched yet.

Take a look at every column. What are the most valuable keywords by volume? What are the most valuable keywords by CPC? Take a note of which are the most competitive. Do you notice trends? Are there certain root keywords that are present in multiple keywords? Keep in mind that just because you’re starting to analyze the data, that doesn’t mean that you are done playing around with AdWords, SEMrush, Moz, or whatever keyword tool you use. If you see some terms multiple times among your batch of keywords, go see which ones that might not be being targeted (and that add that data into your spreadsheet).

How do you decide what a good keyword is and what a bad keyword is for you? I suggest checking out our keyword research guide , but the short version is that you have to decide some cutoffs for yourself. For example, do you have a large enough presence to target high competition or high volume keywords? Are you aiming to generate organic traffic for a blog, or are you trying to sell a very specific product or service? All of these questions should inform what keywords you target. Check out our post on keyword research and analysis for an even deeper dive!

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5. Create a content strategy.

Keywords are useful — but only if they are put to use in a solid, thought-out content strategy. You can’t toss keywords randomly into blog posts — you have to think up ideas that creatively (and accurately) use the keywords that you’ve researched.

You want people to find your website because it has information that is useful to them — not because you’re just bombarding them with keywords.

"Find 50 keywords that work for your business, then try to build 10 pitches based on those." - The Content Factory

A good method here is to find 50 keywords that work for your business, then try to build 10 pitches based on those keywords (and remember you need to use the keywords in the title!) For example, if you find the keyword “creative marketing team,” you could write a pitch for a post titled, “Building a Creative Marketing Team: What You Should Know.” Not only does that pitch contain the keyword in the title, but it’ll naturally include the keyword in the post without much effort. Even better, it’d be a good idea to twist that title into something that’s likely to convert by targeting people who are looking to purchase whatever it is you are selling (so, for example, using the title “Hiring a Creative Marketing Team: X Things You Should Know”).

Remember, though — a good content strategy isn’t just built around a month or two of content, nor is it structured around a single round of keyword research. Ideally, you should be continuously looking for new keywords, and you should always be looking to improve your content strategy. After all, if you start ranking for certain keywords, you’d be wasting your time trying to continuously target them (and on the flip side, if you aren’t successfully targeting a certain set of keywords, it might be a good time to rethink how you’re targeting them — or if your content marketing strategy is working for you). You also should be ranking for multiple keywords so you get a good idea of what you can realistically rank for (and what type of keywords your content does best with).

6. Use your content strategy to guide blog posts.

You need to know how to write a blog post that converts . You can have perfect keywords, incredible pitches, crazy-strong titles, and a content strategy that is absolutely killer — but if you don’t actually turn all of that hard work into content, it won’t matter.

It’s not enough to just write a few pieces of solid content, either — the more content you can pump out, the better. Just make sure you aren’t sacrificing quality for the sake of quantity.

Starting in on keyword research can feel like a daunting task. Depending on the size of your business, you might be dealing with anywhere from tens of keywords to thousands of them: and in either case, it’s going to take a lot of analysis to figure out what will work for you and what won’t.

While an SEO keyword spreadsheet template might not seem like the best keyword research tool when you’re just starting out, once you’re swimming in CPCs and SERPs, you’ll be thankful that all of that data is properly organized. Want some extra help? Here are some other tools that we find helpful:

BuzzSumo — BuzzSumo allows you to quickly search a domain (or keyword) for relevant social media posts. With BuzzSumo, you can see which titles are doing well — and on what platforms.

Moz — Moz provides a handful of keyword research tools, all of which are useful (and many of which are useful long after you’ve done your first round of keyword research).

SEMrush — SEMrush is our favorite tool for SEO research — that's why we're affiliate partners with them! With SEMrush, you can see what keywords certain domains are ranking for (or the other way around). It’s fast, easy to use, and it gives you easy access to all the information you need for effective keyword research. Want to give it a try? Click here  to land a free 7-day trial of SEMrush!

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What? You can learn the arcane secrets of SEO wizardry in the comfort of your home or office? That's right — we're happy to show you our secrets! We offer digital training in SEO and content writing for marketers and entrepreneurs who want to drive more organic traffic to their site and win more business. Get your feet wet with our free webinar on fixing 9 expensive SEO mistakes, then sign up for our comprehensive SEO course !

Still struggling trying to find keywords that work for your business? Contact us ! The Content Factory can help you with every step — from finding keywords and analyzing competitors, to writing your content and making sure that your customers see it.

Have a question about the spreadsheet — or SEO in general? Tweet us! @ContentFac .

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By   Guest Contributor

Thanks for effective SEO strategy! 

Moz and Semrush is very helpful tools for seo, but additionally i use Serpstat. This is such a powerful tool for analyzing competitors or keywords research. Would you, please, check it? Thanks!

We haven’t heard of Serpstat for SEO before, but we’ll definitely check it out. Thanks for the tip!

Could you recommend me a tool that has real updates on the regular basis? Lots of services just CLAIM to have that, but if you check yourself, many of them (SEMrush, for example) received last update of their bases in Dec, 2015! I KNOW, RIGHT!

I've used Serstat for some time. So far so good. But I quess they should put more effort as their share on the market is raletively low.

 Fantastic article. Adwords is definitely an unmatched discovery platform for keywords. I typically start in much the same way you have but then import the list into Moz.com's (paid but free trial available) keyword diffuculty checker. This gives a ranking on difficulty and allows me to narrow down the list to the easy hits. I then use answerthepublic.com or keywordtool.io to find the long tail keywords from the list and again process them through moz. Once I have my hit list down I run full reports and begin the process of rebuilding better versions of the top ranked page. I run a lead generation consulting agency and have seen this strategy executed successfully by several clients with little to no SEO experience! It really works to rank and generate traffic and leads!

Long tail keywords, like you correctly opined, drive more targetted traffic and in the long run, converts far better.

However, long tail keywords (and their numerous variations) also help bloggers and information marketers avoid Google penalties for keyword stuffing as an article that properly follows this standard appears natural both to readers and search engines.

…while being also, very highly optimized!

Be certain to make the day great!

Always, Taposh

Nice article Kari! Do you think that keyword research will change in future, as SEO tools start evolving? 

Great post! For those of us whose bread and butter mainly consists of keyword research, tools described in this article are indispensable. SEMRush, SERPstat, Moz are my favorite for keywords research and competitors research.

Kari, Great post. Another tool that has pretty fresh updates for your keyword research data is Ahrefs. Similar to SEMRush, but has other metrics as well and has a site specific keyword difficulty feature in Beta now that can help you gauge which keywords to go after first, for the biggest effect.

Sem Rush is the greatest tool out there!

Great article! I’ve just started using Moz and I think its great. I’m still having a problem getting my better ranking keywords to fit into sentences (that make sense) but I think that will improve with practice! Also think you made a great point about using long tail keywords.SEMRush seems a little pricey for me at the minute but thanks again for the article.

Glad you found it helpful! We’re big fans of Moz as well, the point is to find what tool works best for you (and then use it!). Happy optimizing 🙂

Thanks for sharing it. It will help me a lot.

Is thi spossible to import it automatically from G-Adwords?

You wouldn’t want to. Adwords can be a great place to start, but you get much more info out of a tool like SEMrush.

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How to do KDP Keyword Research and Sell More Books on Amazon

KDP Keywords are essential for getting your books ranked on the Amazon searches and seen by customers. When used correctly in your book listings they give your book a better chance of getting free organic traffic from Amazon and, therefore, a better chance of making sales. We will take a look at what keywords are, why they are so important and how to do KDP keyword research to find those valuable search terms that can be used in your Amazon KDP no content and low content book listings on Amazon.

Although this article is aimed at no content, low content and medium content book publishers the same research process can also be applied if you are a regular fiction or non-fiction author or publisher.

What are KDP Keywords?

Simply put, KDP keywords are those search terms that customers enter into the search bar on Amazon when they are looking for something to buy. They are commonly a string of 2 to 3 words but can be a single word or many words depending on what the customer is searching for.

Why are KDP Keywords Important?

KDP keywords are important because if you know what customers are actually searching for you can give it to them, increasing your chances of making a sale. There is no guessing.

For example, if you know that a customer is searching for an ‘adult coloring book with animals’ then you can optimize your book listing by using that keyword or related keywords in the title, subtitle and description of your book. So now, when a customer types that search term into the search bar on Amazon there is an increased chance that your book will appear.

If your book is exactly what the customer is searching for then the greater the chance you will get that sale, provided your book is of sufficient quality and appeal of course.

The skill comes in finding KDP keywords that customers are typing into the search bar which is what we will explore in depth.

The aim is to get your book ranked high up on the first page of the search result listings when a customer searches for a product. This will get the most traffic and the most eyeballs on your book and so more chance that someone clicks on your book and buys it.

Where to Start with KDP Keyword Research

When starting out with your kdp keyword research the best place to start is the Amazon search bar on Amazon itself. This is a great starting point to do free research and will get you a lot of useful information.

After you’ve decided on what type of book you’re going to publish, or niche of your book, the first thing to do is to enter a broad search term related to your book into the search bar on Amazon.

I recommend doing your KDP keyword research on Amazon.com, the U.S. site and not your local country specific Amazon site. Amazon.com is by far the biggest market for your books, will give you the most sales and provide the most useful data. If your book is specific to your country or a different language specific country then by all means do your research on that particular Amazon site.

Now, one important point, as you can see I am searching in the ‘All’ category. There are a number of reasons for this which I covered in a video on my channel but the main reason is because this is where customers are actually doing their searches. It is unlikely they are going to go to the ‘Books’ category straight away. They would normally open up Amazon and dive straight into their search. So by searching in the ‘All’ category we get to see what our customers are seeing.

How to Find Amazon KDP Keywords

So, when you enter a search term you will notice a list appears.

These are all search terms or keywords that are related to the search term you entered into the search bar. These are gold. These are the keywords you are after.

Amazon is actually telling you what people are searching for and customers will tend to click on these keywords if they see something that matches their interest. And those keywords near the top of the list will be clicked on more often than those at the bottom of the list.

So what you need to do is open up a spreadsheet – I write all mine down on a Google sheets spreadsheet but the choice is yours. I write them down under a column called keywords. How original!

Assessing Keyword Competition

Now not all keywords are the same. Some will be more popular than others (those towards the top of the Amazon suggestion list) and some will have a lot of competition in the Amazon listings. That is, a lot of other publishers creating similar books.

An example of a popular keyword would be ‘adult coloring book’, as we’ve used in the example above. These sell extremely well, making a lot of money for their publishers, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month. The problem is that there are a lot of other publishers who also want a slice of the pie and so there are many adult coloring books listed on Amazon and, therefore, creating a lot of competition.

The chances of publishing one of these books and it appearing even on the first page of the search results would be slim. In order to get it to rank there you would probably have to run a paid advertising campaign and send outside traffic to the book from sites like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and your own website. And it would probably take a couple of years to get your book ranking organically.

Now take the opposite end of the spectrum, a ‘17th century french poetry book’. The competition in the search results on Amazon is a lot lower and, therefore, would be a lot easier to rank one of these books high on the first page of the Amazon searches. However, the problem is that these books are not very popular and so you wouldn’t make any sales.

So the strategy I suggest is to aim for the middle ground, to balance that popularity and competition. Find those keywords that are still popular enough that books make sales but that don’t have a large amount of competition.

How do we do this? Glad you asked.

When you enter a search term into the search bar on Amazon and hit enter you will notice in the top left Amazon tells you the number of search results.

The higher that number the greater the number of results and, therefore, competition. The converse is true – the lower the number means less competition.

So this gives you an idea of the competition for the keywords you’ve found.

So, you would then take each keyword you found, enter it into the search bar, take a note of the number of search results and enter it into a second column on your spreadsheet, labelled ‘Amazon Search Results’.

So now you are starting to build a list of keywords that you know customers are searching for and you also now have an idea of the competition – the number of search results.

What I recommend doing, at this stage, is removing keywords unrelated to your product or don’t enter them into your spreadsheet in the first place.

What is a Good KDP Keyword?

After publishing over 2400 no content and low content books on Amazon I started to get an idea of what number of search results constitutes a lot of competition and what constitutes low competition. And I came up with a simple rule:

Low competition keywords are keywords with search results of less than 1000. (And remember, that’s in the All category, not the Books category).

From experience I’ve found that if I use these keywords in my books, with 1000 search results or less, I have a very good chance of ranking on the first page of Amazon.

Those with search results of greater than 1000 are not off the table. It just means in order to rank on the first page organically you may have to start thinking about running an Amazon Ads campaign to get your book seen and make sales or running some other marketing campaign to drive traffic to your book. Eventually, after getting a sales history and building reviews your book would start to rank organically in the listings.

An organic ranking just means a ranking based on the Amazon algorithm and not dependent on ads.

Building a KDP Keyword Spreadsheet

So now you have that initial list of keywords from your first search in your spreadsheet. When you enter each keyword into the Amazon search bar to find the number of search results you will also find that more search terms appear in the suggestions. These also go down in your spreadsheet. So pretty soon your spreadsheet will begin to grow and grow.

I often use a free Chrome plugin installed on my browser called AMZ Suggestion Expander. This will give you even more suggestions when you search on Amazon. Like the suggestions Amazon gives you, these keywords are also being searched for on Amazon by customers.

AMZ Suggestion Expander is free but if you want even more functionality there is a pro version available too.

And yes, you guessed it, these also go into your spreadsheet and your list of keywords will rapidly grow in size.

You will eventually get to the point where no new keywords appear and they start repeating themselves. At that point you can stop.

Keywords Everywhere Plugin

This next step is useful but not essential. I have an additional Chrome browser plugin installed called Keywords Everywhere. Currently, with the free version, when you perform a search on Amazon a list of numbers often appear next to the suggestions.

You will notice I have some additional information and those pretty looking blue sales graphs. That is because I pay $10 for 100,000 search credits. This seems to last me a long time but how quickly you use up the credits will depend on how much research you’re doing and the plugin settings.

These numbers are the number of Google searches per month. It can tell you if that keyword is also popular in the Google searches and that just gives us some extra information. If a keyword has a lot of Google searches it can indicate that a keyword is popular and has some potential extra search traffic from Google and it’s possible your Amazon listing could also appear in the Google searches.

So, back to our spreadsheet. I create a third column and name it ‘Google Monthly Searches’. In this column go those figures. Many of the keywords you find won’t have any monthly Google searches listed at all but that’s ok, it’s just a bit of extra useful information to give you an edge over the competition.

So now you’ve created your spreadsheet using this free method and will now have a good list of high and low competition keywords.

The method can be made quicker and you can get some further information by using paid tools such as Helium 10 or Publisher Rocket , my favorite KDP keyword research tools, but they are not essential, especially when starting out.

This research has helped me get my books ranked and seen on the first page of the Amazon search results and, as a result, build consistent sales. I’ve also performed research on many different KDP low content and medium content niches and published lists of these keywords in my Gumroad shop. Some are free and some are paid for.

The next step is then to use those keywords correctly in your KDP book listings which I will cover in another post. You can also watch this video on how I use KDP keywords to get books ranked on Amazon: