Keyword Research Step-by-Step : Best Strategies to Rank #1 (2024)

Oh good, we found each other. But it's not a coincidence inbound marketers like HubSpot want to organically attract and engage potential customers. Target audiences as information seekers want useful and relevant content to answer commonly asked questions. It's our responsibility as the publishers to do our keyword research so you can find us on search engine result pages and lead you to our products and services. So if you intend to leverage a content strategy as part of your own business goals, you need to have a plan in place so your target audience can find you. I'm Tory, a marketing manager here at HubSpot, and in this video I'm going to show you how to conduct keyword research, why it's important, and what you need to do to rank high on the results pages. We also have a free SEO Starter pack in the description below that'll help you execute your keyword research and give you everything you need to increase your website traffic within 30 days. Did you know that 68% of online experiences begin with a search and that organic search generates 53% of all websites website visitors? That means that identifying and incorporating keywords into your content strategy can prove to be more important and useful than any form of advertising. Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Pick the best ones. The higher you'll rank in search engine results and the more traffic you'll attract to your website. Pick the wrong ones and you'll risk wasting a lot of your time and a lot of your resources. The good news here is there are several easy steps that you can follow to discover the right keywords for your business. Starting Starting with keyword research Terms you'll need to know before beginning your keyword research are seed keywords, head terms, and long tail keywords. Seed keywords are the core words and phrases your customers might use to search for what you have to offer. Like seeds, these words will grow into a much longer list. Head term keywords are shorter and more generic keywords that have a high volume of monthly searches, and long tail keywords are longer and more specific phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they're closer to a point of purchase. A good keyword strategy should start by putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience to determine your seed keywords. You'll then take these seed keywords and combine with a few more high search volume head terms as well as some specific long tail keywords in order to create and optimize content targeting these queries. For example, let's say your business is personalized Management Coaching for first time managers and one of the ways you make money is through online training courses. Your seed keywords might be First Time Manager, New Manager Training, New Manager Help, Online Management Course Management Coaching, Management Mentoring, Coaching for new Managers, Professional Management Training for new managers, etc. Using a free keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keyword Generator, you can come up with additional keyword ideas simply by typing suggestions into the search box. Just enter your topic, choose your target country, and click Find Keywords. You'll then see an entire list of relevant keyword suggestions on top of the ones you came up with, as well as a list of the 50 most popular questions people are searching for. Keep in mind that seed keywords by themselves are just the broad ideas related to your website's content. You need to understand which ones should be best targeted with informational blog articles and which should be product or category pages. So how do you choose keywords that are actually worth targeting? You'll want to factor in the following variables. Are these keywords informational, navigational, commercial, or Transactional? Informational keywords are used when someone wants to learn something related to your business or niche. These types of users do not have buying intent, but you may have an opportunity to slip some things into your content to point back to offerings in case they need them. For example, what is the difference between managers and leaders? Are they navigational? When someone types a brand or company name into a search engine? This is when users already know what they want from your site and are trying to find a specific product or page. For example Management mentor leadership articles. Are they commercial? These are keywords that reveal a searcher's interest around specific products or services. These searches are done by users looking to buy or to educate themselves in order to buy. For example Free leadership resources or are they transactional keywords? This is when users are ready to buy. These keywords should reflect that and can be targeted with highly optimized purchase pages or pages where users can take immediate action on a site. For example Buy books for first time managers. Analyzing keywords by intent is undoubtedly the most important concept when it comes to keyword research, as it helps you craft the right content to satisfy the goal behind a search's query and deliver the most relevant results. If you can't match intent, then you probably won't rank for your target keywords. To identify search intent, all you have to do is start with a Google search using one of the seed keywords you want to rank for to see which keywords are sending traffic to your competitors, then analyze the top ranking results you'll see here that none of the top ranking websites for this seed keyword resemble online training courses where you're trying to take your potential customers. We're close with advice, tips and how to guides, but now let's search for something slightly more specific. Here we're getting more relevant results. Notice now that the dominant pages for the query first time manager training are online courses. However, and this is interesting to note, you'll also see in the second spot a landing page for a downloadable leadership guide for first time managers and in the third spot a blog post on how to create first time manager training for your business. This tells us that it may be worth creating both of these pages on your website to potentially get two different spots in the top search results that can lead to your online training courses. But more on that in just a bit now that you've found the competitor website that ranks number one for your keywords. The best way to check which pages bring in the most traffic and what keywords these pages are targeting are by plugging them into free or paid competitive analysis tools. At first glance, you'll see a range of metrics for the URL you entered, such as Organic Search Traffic and backlink profiles, as well as an overview of the paid search presence of your site. So how much of this organic search traffic is based on keywords? Down here in the Organic Search tab we see the number of organic keywords that Ahrefs has found for this page within the top 100 organic search results. This total number of keywords can be further broken down into three different categories, so you can see where these keywords rank. If you look here, this page is in the top three spot for different keywords. We can now determine what those keywords are by going down to Organic positions. Here you'll see the top five keywords that are sending traffic to this page and their positions in Organic search results. And if you want more, let's venture over to organic keywords in the sidebar. Here you can see see a full list of the top five positions that are all bringing traffic to this page. Pick another keyword and do a Google search for it to get a new list of results. And once again a list of multiple pages we can analyze. This is a straightforward and strategic way to discover other keywords that are relevant to search intent and how much traffic these pages are receiving. The data doesn't lie, so instead of guessing at keywords or worse, not using them at all, you can quickly and easily find the actual keywords your target audience is using that are ranking high in the serps along with any other ones you can target. With these insights, you may want to mix in variations of these keywords in a single blog post, a landing page, or separate pages that explain different aspects of your products or services. Whatever it is that's part of your SEO content strategy. However, having multiple pages about the same thing can lead to unexpected or undesirable rankings. When these pages compete against each other to hurt your site's overall organic performance, you've got a keyword cannibalization problem on your hands. Given that pages tend to rank from many keywords as we've just seen, you only have a real cannibalization issue when multiple pages target the same keywords in the search intent instead the same A quick way to detect keyword cannibalization is with a simple search of your most relevant keywords. If you see multiple pages from your site listed close to one another in serps for the same keyword, you have a cannibalization problem. Most competitive analysis tools also provide an easy and automated way to find and fix instances of keyword cannibalization on your site, saving you huge amounts of time. If you're absolutely sure that you have a cannibalization issue, though, you can often improve organic performance just by consolidating the pages. That may mean redirecting an older page to something more relevant that you already have, or combining multiple pages into something new. Remember, it's always best practice to swap out any internal links after implementing redirects because the content you write on your website is directly linked to the keywords you want your website to rank for. Having access to specialized keyword research tools will only make your SEO content strategy stronger. Further, you'll be able to take away key insights from competitive analysis tools and make them a part of your pages in the future to drive more traffic shares and conversions. Is our keyword research working? I'm curious to know how you found us. We'd very much appreciate it if you let us know down in the comments. While you're down there, don't forget to download our free SEO starter tools and subscribe for more marketing insights. Until next time, bye bye. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? 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