The whole pur­pose of key­word research is to define SEO key­words that will bring you more vis­i­tors inter­est­ed in what you have to offer and are like­ly to convert.

It is immense­ly impor­tant to choose key­words that will attract the tar­get audi­ence ready to buy your prod­ucts or ser­vices. If you fail to do that, the whole SEO work will be inef­fec­tive, and you will not be able to achieve results you were hop­ing for.

Keyword ideas and tools for keyword research

There are plen­ty of tools that can help you with your key­word research. Some of them are com­pre­hen­sive and pret­ty expen­sive but there are also favor­able and even free tools that are very useful.

The fol­low­ing web­sites and free tools will help you to con­duct an excel­lent key­word research:

• Search Engines — Enter your key­word in dif­fer­ent search engines and pay atten­tion to search term sug­ges­tions and search­es relat­ed to your search term (the lat­est are dis­played at the bot­tom of search results)
• Rel­e­vant Forums — Look for rel­e­vant pop­u­lar titles of top­ics and categories
• Wikipedia — Check on Wikipedia Table of Contents
• Quo­ra — Use the Ask question/ search bar to check on fre­quent­ly asked questions
• Soovle.com and Uber­Sug­gest — Key­word sug­ges­tion free tools
• Google Tools:
  • Search Con­sole — Look at Search Queries report
  • Trends — Excel­lent tool to check on search vol­ume and inter­est over time
  • Cor­re­late — Use this tool to find cor­re­lat­ed keywords
  • Key­word Planner
• Bing Research Key­words Tool
• Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence

The goal of using these tools is to get key­word ideas and to define search volume.

Evaluating and refining keywords

Now that you have a list of key­word ideas and an aver­age month­ly search pro­jec­tion for each key­word, you need to take the next step and eval­u­ate all key­words you’ve tak­en into consideration.

Keyword relevance and monetizing opportunities

The biggest mis­take in key­word research process is choos­ing key­words most­ly based on a high search vol­ume. More is not always bet­ter — When it comes to key­word research, big­ger search vol­ume means more mon­e­tiz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties but only if these two impor­tant fac­tors are included:

• Key­words are high­ly rel­e­vant to the web­site’s content

Your con­tent has to offer what the vis­i­tors are look­ing for. Oth­er­wise, they will only vis­it your web­site to hit the back button.

• Traf­fic dri­ven by cho­sen key­words has com­mer­cial intent

Search­es with infor­ma­tion­al intent, usu­al­ly one-word key­words, are too broad and rarely con­vert. Even if you dri­ve mas­sive traf­fic each month, you still will not be mak­ing mon­ey. A com­bi­na­tion of rel­e­vant key­words that has the com­mer­cial intent and a decent search vol­ume is the win­ning ticket.

Keyword difficulty

When think­ing in terms of key­word dif­fi­cul­ty you have to bal­ance between:

• vol­ume — aver­age month­ly search­es for a giv­en keyword
• com­pe­ti­tion — who takes top 10 places in SERP

If your com­pe­ti­tion is very strong, it may take a lot of time and effort to rank for the par­tic­u­lar key­word. Some­times, it won’t be even pos­si­ble. On the oth­er hand, if the search vol­ume is very low, it does­n’t make sense to spend time and resources on opti­miza­tion for that key­word, whether or not the com­pe­ti­tion is very low, either.

The best strat­e­gy is focus­ing on key­words with rel­a­tive­ly high search vol­ume and beat­able competition.

Keyword value

In the end, the most impor­tant ques­tion you need to ask your­self is “What is the exact val­ue of a cho­sen keyword?”

To answer that ques­tion, you have to check the fol­low­ing metrics:

• the exact num­ber of month­ly vis­i­tors dri­ven to your web­site by the keyword
• con­ver­sion rate — how many of these vis­i­tors converted
• total prof­it the key­word provided

When you have your data, you can cal­cu­late the key­word val­ue with a sim­ple formula:

total prof­it / month­ly vis­i­tors = month­ly key­word value

Now that you know the exact val­ue of your key­words you can define the final key­word list and plan fur­ther on-site and off-site SEO opti­miza­tion, as well as oth­er online mar­ket­ing activities.