SEO – 7. Keyword Research Process

Create a fresh copy of your keyword research template.

Grab one I made for you in Google Sheets by clicking here, or download the Excel file below.

If you're making your own, make sure to freeze the first row!

This one's an easy start because you know what you're writing about.

Just describe the topic you're writing about in a few words.

Examples of related topics that are keywords include:

• Personal Loans
• Apply for a credit card
• What is interest rate

By Googling your keywords, you can see what Google suggests at the bottom of the page.

Some suggestions are just obvious variations, but some are related topics and totally different keywords.

Add all relevant suggestions to your sheet.

While some words just mean exactly what they mean — especially specific jargon terms — some are more universal.

In my list, I find I have 'network security issues', so check for synonyms of 'issues'.

Then, I add 'network security problems' and 'network security questions' to my list. 

We recommend you to use http://www.thesaurus.com to help find relevant synonyms to use

Paste some of your Keywords in keywordtool.io and find more combinations and long tail possibilities 

You can also use Keywordtool.io to find question type search phrases (English language only)

When carrying out keyword research, look for questions that you will be able to answer in great depth. The Google Keyword Planner can be used to find a range of queries relevant to your industry—simply pick out your product category and include keywords such as “how”, “why,” and “where”.

Search for one or more of your target keywords in Google, and note down a high-ranking page's URL.

Set it as 'your landing page' in Google Keyword Planner to see the keywords it is ranking for as well as suggested terms.

Using the same seed as you chose for UberSuggest, search in Quora to find questions real people have about your topic. Add new keywords and phrases to your sheet.

Repeat this for other derivative keywords if you like.

Wikipedia is perfect for well-written content that explains concepts in terms people understand and search for.

Go to Wikipedia and search the topic of your page.

Quality related keywords will be both in the text and as suggested categories. For example:

Add these categories and keywords as new entries to your sheet, and see if you can create new keywords by combining them with existing entries.

BoardReader scrapes a huge network of forums for conversations matching your keyword. Search your keyword in BoardReader and get ideas for quality keywords people will search for.

Add the keywords to your sheet.

The SEMRush software offers a powerful way to get competitor information.

Using the same competitors as in the task above, search a competitor's URL in the Explorer to get a list of keywords like this:

Add any relevant keywords to your sheet, repeat as many times as you feel is necessary, then go to the next step.

Since we’re working inside Sheets, this is easily done with the Remove Duplicates addon. Install that, then go to the Add-ons menu in Sheets and select the 'Remove Duplicates' section.

Press 'Next' the whole way through, then 'Finish'.

The fastest way to narrow down your keywords further is to get rid of the ones that don't have any search volume.

Get all your keywords out of Sheets, then paste them into Google Keyword Planner, like this:

Once the keywords are in Google Keyword Planner, hit Download as shown above.

Open your downloaded Google Keyword Planner sheet or sheets.

Delete everything apart from the Keyword, Volume and Competition columns, then paste it back. If there’s no volume data, then don’t bother. Those keywords aren’t popular enough and that really helps us narrow down our list.

You are certain to get a lot of keywords from automatic generators that are not grammatically correct. Also there will be keywords that are not relevant to your brand's product that you are targeting.

Remove keywords that don't make sense in a sentence. For example, 'network security how to' and 'network security basics youtube'.

Remove keywords that are branded. For example, 'apple network security' or 'microsoft network security'.

Remove non-evergreen keywords. For example, 'network security best practices 2012'.

If you're writing a post about network security tools, then having 'network security best practices' isn't 100% relevant.

Get rid of anything which doesn't accurately describe the page you're optimizing.

Your list undoubtedly contains several highly competitive search terms which we wouldn't have a shot at ranking for, so by filtering by search volume, we can gloss over these and get to the slightly less competitive, but most effective keywords.

In Google Sheets, click the small arrow that appears when you hover over Column B's header (the cell where it says 'Volume' and go 'Sort sheet Z-A'.

There you'll see the more reasonable options at a glance, which I highlighted in the picture below:

A big part of deciding if a keyword is worth targeting is looking who is already ranking for that term.

If you find that hugely popular and authoritative sites are ranking for your target term, you're in for a tough time.

A quick way to judge how difficult it would be to rank for a keyword is by using Moz's keyword difficulty tool.

Take your top picks that you still have left after the filtering, and paste them into the tool, like this:

Alternately, if you want to do this the free way, you can download Mozbar and search for the terms you're interested in ranking for.

With Mozbar enabled, you'll be able to see the Page Authority, Domain Authority and number of backlinks each result has. It looks like this:

Pages with a low PA or DA of less than 30 may be more suitable to target to surpass in the search rankings.

By writing better content, optimizing it properly and building quality links, you could knock an inferior page off of the top spots.

We recommend that you also do this exercise for more long tail search terms in the search engine rankings

There is a target keyword priorities template that you can use which can be accessed at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15uxRIQqPvInD4NW9c9iYXHJika811zmC7KGAAdGYVSU/edit#gid=0 

Use the first spreadsheet you created with all your research in to finalize a target set of keywords that can be referred to when you start to write content on your target landing pages, blog posts or other web page content formats.

This is available via the Keyword Strategy Folder in the CAG SEO Google Drive folder system.

You can create a word cloud to help you when copywriting by using the data in the Word Reference count table that you will need to configure.

These can be created via the following software:

• http://www.tagxedo.com/ 
• https://tagul.com/
• http://www.wordle.net/ 
• http://www.wordsift.com/ 
• http://worditout.com/ 
• http://tagcrowd.com/ 

• Relevant keywords found via your keyword research methods should be included in the table on the left-hand side and then prioritized accordingly
• To analyse the frequency of words within the search phrases you will need to amend the main keywords to look for in the individual formulas in the # References column, as shown below.

Now you have a full set of keywords to use in your document. Check our next list for "Onsite Optimization" to know how to use them.

Please also refer to our On-page Content Optimization playlist on our CGG SEO YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3IOUo62M66lqkmiD_c1ZRQ5CDAqfoIew

Also one of the best examples of how keyword optimization has been integrated with great engaging content is at http://backlinko.com/on-page-seo so check this page out and use it as a blueprint for