The perfect guide to Keyword Research for SEO

Here’s what you want to know about Keyword Research for SEO:

1. Understanding seed keywords

We call them “seed” keywords because all your other keywords grow out of them. Finding the right seed keywords will absolutely make or break your entire keyword research strategy.

Finding the right seed keywords is about asking and answering three key questions:

1. What do you think you want to rank for?
2. What do you already rank for?
3. What do your competitors rank for?

After this, you validate your answers with data to find the absolute best seeds.

We also show you the exact process and tools we use to extract these seeds, such as Google Search Console (shown below).

The cool thing about seed keywords is this: they grow more seeds! Once you find the right seeds, you can reiterate the process again and again to grow a complete keyword strategy for an entire site, even one that’s thousands of pages.

2. Building perfect keyword lists

This is where the rubber hits the road. Here you expand your seed keywords into complete lists. These lists support multiple pages and topics, and can even grow more seeds.

This is also the place you want to be as comprehensive as possible, in order to uncover the opportunities your competition probably missed.

3. Prioritizing keywords

Nearly any old keyword tool can give you lists of hundreds or thousands of keywords. The secret to success is knowing which keywords to prioritize and pursue.

Which keywords will actually prove profitable? Which keywords can you actually rank for?

To answer these questions, we do a deep dive into the keyword metrics that help us to prioritize our keyword lists:

• Relevance
• Monthly volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Organic click-through rate (CTR)
• Priority

Understanding how to use these metrics goes a long way in choosing the exact right keywords to invest in.

4. Grouping keywords

Keywords never exist in a vacuum. Instead, they almost always appear with other keywords.

Adding related keywords to a page is a smart strategy for increasing topical relevance. At the same time, trying to target too many keywords on the same page may dilute their relevance and make it more difficult to rank.

Here, we show you techniques to address both of these problems:

1. When to create separate pages for each keyword
2. How to group related keywords together

We’ll also show you some grouping tips to help set you up for your next task: on-page keyword optimization.

5. On-page keyword optimization

Very few keyword research guides ever even mention on-page keyword optimization.

We wanted to do better.

Because keyword research uncovers intent, this is a great starting point for on-page optimization. If you understand not only what your users are searching for, but also what they expect to find, you can better create your content to satisfy their expectations. We’ve also included a brief overview of where and how to incorporate keywords on the page. While this section is mostly beginner level, more immediate SEOs should find the refresher useful.