Why do you do keyword research?

It’s to find more lucrative keywords to rank for on Google, right?

But once you find these keywords, you still have to figure out how to rank for them.

For that reason, I decided to update Ubersuggest because I wanted to show you what kind of content to create and even how to promote it.

That way you can start ranking for these newly found keywords.

Broad and unusable volume ranges, misalignment with other Google tools, and conflating similar yet distinct keywords — these are just a few of the serious issues that make relying on AdWords search volume data alone so dangerous. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we discuss those issues and offer a few alternatives for more accurate volume data.

What exactly is keyword clustering? To cluster keywords means to group your long overwhelming keyword lists by relevancy. I have done an article explaining keyword clustering in a most easy-to-understand way. At the heart of it, keyword clustering is what it sounds like: you take relevant keywords and arrange them together into groups. Use these keyword clusters to: Better understand your topic Optimize your content for several keyword phrases instead... [Read More...]

By crafting content around keywords, you're increasing the likelihood that many more people will see and read your work. Here's how to pick your keywords.

"Historically, keyword research has often been limited to to keyword selection. This is not to say that keyword selection isn't important; in fact, identifying a small set of keywords to write a piece of content on, or target for a particular page, is still one of the most important skills an SEO should master. However, the maturation of keyword tools has given us far more uses than this singular skill. Unlike tools of the past, we aren't limited to the standard process of "keyword in, keywords out." In this post, I hope to show how a keyword tool like Keyword Explorer can be used to accomplish far more than page-level keyword targeting, bringing keyword research out of the realm of mere keyword selection.

• Know thyself: What can my site rank for?
• How long-tail should I go?
• How should I organize my local pages?
• A year's worth of content in a day: content calendars"

Conduct deeper keyword research

Use tools like the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to make sure you’re targeting the best possible keywords for your business.

Make your call-to-action more prominent

Reduce loading times

Slow-loading pages have 72% higher bounce rates than the faster ones (Decibel Insight)
Over half of your users will ditch your mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load (Google)

• Google AdWords: Keyword Planner
• SEMRush
• Google Correlate
• Alexa
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Keyword Tool
• Uber Suggest
• WordStream
• Wordtracker
• Bing Keyword Research

But how do you know what keywords are appropriate at various buying cycle stages? Imagine you’re a customer starting your search from the awareness phase. What questions are you likely to have? Find keywords that reflect questions and answers that prospective customers are likely to ask.

Google Suggest is a great place to begin mining these potential leads for keywords. For example, using the Keyword Tool Dominator, I can see Google Suggest queries that show up around a term like “women’s running shoes”:From the list on the left, I found keywords and added to the list on the right to narrow down some selections. Some questions I can see forming from these keywords based on what searchers are entering:

• Where can I buy running shoes?
• What are the best rated running shoes?
• What are the best running shoes for my knees?
• Which running shoes have the best ankle support?
• Which running shoes have the best arch support?
• Which running shoes can I also use for hiking?

Use LSI Tools

What is LSI? LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, and LSI keywords are simply keywords that are semantically related to the primary keyword topic of your page or article and are usually classified as long tail keywords.

Customer Service Call Logs

Sales Team Brainstorming

Customer Emails And Sales Inquiries

Forums, Reviews, And Blog Comments

Just Ask Your Users

Listen To Usability Testing

Competitive Analysis

Keyword research is the process of finding words and phrases that best represent what your site does. Keyword research is heavily based on searching behavior: We research keywords that people tend to type in the search box. The main goal of keyword research is to get your pages rank for keywords we optimize them for.

This guide will take you through the process of selecting, organizing and placing the keywords in order to help you brainstorm article ideas and create content that achieves higher search rankings.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner (free)

Pinterest (free)

BrightEdge (fee)

Conductor (fee)

Google Correlate (free)

Google related searches and auto fill (free)

Moz related topics (fee)

Keywordtool.io (free and fee options)

Use this approach on SEMrush to find valuable keywords for your SEO and PPC campaigns.

"What if I told you that there was a specific formula you can follow to dominate any keyword you choose? What if you could knock it out of the park every time and continually outrank your competitors?

During the years, I’ve experimented with nearly everything under the sun and have come up with a surefire formula for dominating the SEO game by targeting the right keyword and tailoring your campaign to reach your audience.

Here’s how to do it step by step..."

3 Gs: Gather, Group, Generate

I've taken to calling this approach to keyword research the 3 Gs, and it goes likes this:

• Gather keywords
• Group keywords into clusters
• Generate exemplars

Another way to think of this process is that we're grouping keywords into concepts, and then converting each concept back into a representative keyword/phrase: Keyword --> Concept --> Keyword*. The result is a specific search phrase to target, but that phrase represents potentially dozens or hundreds of similar keywords.

Step 1: Build the “Big List”

Step 2: Get keyword volume

Step 3: Filter keywords

Step 4: Map priority keywords

I’d consider where you want to target people in your sales funnel, and where you need to improve your current website traffic. If you have wide top-of-funnel traffic for your product/service and need to better provide long-tail transactions, check out Moz Keyword Explorer. If you need a brief overview of top-level searches, take a look at Google Keyword Planner results.

I'm a little ashamed to say that I still use both. Checking Google Keyword Planner gives me the peace of mind that I’m not missing anything. But, Moz Keyword Explorer continues to impress me with its search volume accuracy and ease of list creation. As it gets better with top-of-funnel keywords (and hopefully integrates competition up front) I would love to transition completely over to Moz.

I’ve also been a big fan of ubersuggest.io to give your initial keyword list a boost. You can add your selected keywords directly to Google Keyword Planner or Moz Keyword Explorer for instant keyword data. This can help identify where you should take your keyword research in terms of intent, sub-topic intents, geographic, etc.

1. Human-Powered Suggestions: Seed Keywords

2. Local Keywords: SERPstat

3. Related Terms: DeeperCloud

4. Entities: AlchemyAPI

You’re probably familiar with the Keyword Planner tool, which is one of the best sources we have to spot opportunities and make the business case for an investment into paid or organic search campaigns.

One of the things it provides is guidance on the volume of searches for any given query. The numbers reported in the tool have always been somewhat vague. They are rounded up and numbers end with at least one zero. 

It turns out that these numbers are now even more imprecise.

Jennifer Slegg spotted that Google has started to combine related terms, pooling them all together and reporting one (bigger) number. No longer can you separate the data for keyword variants, such as plurals, acronyms, words with space, and words with punctuation. As such it would be easy to get a false impression of search volumes, unless you’re aware of the change. No sudden jump in search queries, just an amalgamated number. Be warned.