How to Do Keyword Research Like a Pro in 2024 [Even If You Know Nothing About SEO].

How to do keyword research like a pro in 2024?

Keyword research is the first step to getting more traffic from search engines.

Most beginners find it difficult to increase their search traffic because they write blog posts without doing proper keyword research.

If you're one of them, stop right now and start spending more time finding the right keywords that will increase your organic traffic.

Finding keywords is never an easy task, even for experts in SEO ! If you are a beginner when it comes to search engine optimization, keyword research is almost a nightmare.

Almost every blogger on the planet is looking to find legitimate ways to increase their search engine traffic after seeing the latest Google updates like Penguin and Panda.

We all know now that we cannot escape these algorithms without having great content and the right kind of keywords on our web pages.

Footnotes : If you are looking for ONE tool to boost your website traffic and spy on your competitors, I highly recommend you Semrush. It has not only helped me gain 15% more search traffic in 30 days, but it is also one of the most recommended SEO tools by SEO experts.

The term " SEO » is a nightmare for most bloggers and webmasters. After all, everyone wants to increase their search traffic at all costs.

The competition is very strong and it is almost impossible to rank high in Google's search results without do a keyword research appropriate. If you don't use the right keywords in your posts, pages, or videos, you won't see increased traffic to your blog posts.

That's why you should consider spending time and energy on researching the perfect keywords for your websites.

The keyword research process begins with making your blog or website compatible with the SEO (by choosing the right keywords throughout your site, in meta descriptions and title tags).

Don't waste time ranking for irrelevant keywords because you may get penalized by Google's search results sooner or later.

While it's possible to recover from Google updates, it's best to play the SEO game safely.

Contents :

What is keyword research and why is it important?

Let's start with the beginning. Let's first define the term “keyword research”.

Finding popular search terms and using them on your web pages to improve your site traffic is how I define the term “keyword research”. It can increase your organic traffic if you focus on finding the “right keywords” for your websites.

If you fail to find profitable keywords, you will fail to drive targeted traffic to your websites. If you don't get search traffic, you won't be able to make money from your blogs. Keyword research is directly proportional to the money you earn. It's as simple as that !

Keyword research includes a few important factors:

• Keyword competition: It indicates how difficult it will be for a few keywords to rank in search results. The higher the competition, the harder it will be to rank for a keyword. Try to focus on a monthly average of <1000 searches if you want to rank well in Google's search results.
• Keyword density: The number of times your keyword appears in your web pages, articles or videos is simply called keyword density. Google considers repeated use of the same keywords to be spam. Generally, you can use your main keywords every 200 words. It's even better to use "relevant keywords" for your primary keyword ideas to get more traffic from Google search results.
• Long tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are usually more specific and include 2-3 words. We will go into more detail about long-tail keywords in this article.

Why is keyword research so important?

It is she who determines the volume and type of traffic you receive from search engines. No matter what keyword you want to rank for, you need to do proper keyword analysis to attract the right kind of visitors to your blog posts.

How to Do Keyword Research Like a Pro in 2024

The search engine optimization you knew is dead and no longer exists. You now have to follow a specific set of rules to outperform your competitors in search results for the keywords you want to use.

Without further ado, let's get into the details on how to conduct advanced keyword research in 2024.

Here is the 3-step formula I follow for finding profitable keywords for my blog posts.

1. Brainstorm Keyword Ideas
2. Keyword evaluation
3. Expand selected keywords

Now let's get into the details of the 3-step formula for doing proper keyword research.

Step 1: Keyword Brainstorming

Find relevant and highly targeted keyword ideas for your niche. Here is the first rule of SEO: always bring targeted visitors to your web pages. You need to get keyword suggestions first before you think about increasing your organic traffic.

The first step to increasing your search traffic is keyword research. It's about finding profitable keywords that improve your overall search engine rankings.

Step 2: Keyword evaluation

Once you have a list of keywords for your next articles, you can start evaluating them to analyze your keyword competition. It's always better to target less competitive keywords, especially when your website is new.

Step 3: Expand selected keywords

Once you've assessed the keyword competition, develop your desired keywords into long-tail keywords. Before do a keyword research, be sure to use long-tail keywords. Here's what I mean.

Football: short tail keyword

Football players: medium drag keyword

Football players in France: Long keyword

I hope you understood what I meant. The next time you do keyword research, be sure to enter long-tail keywords to increase your organic traffic.

Here's also why long-tail keywords tend to get you more organic traffic.

See how your website's click-through rate can increase with the use of long-tail keywords? This is why you need to start using “long tail keywords” when doing your keyword research.

4 Lesser Known Tips for Keyword Research in 2024

1. Keyword research in the FAQ

Finding out what your audience is typing on Google can come in handy when researching keywords. Most of the time, people ask questions before buying something online. You can use FAQ keywords as long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content marketing strategy.

So how do you find the questions your target audience is looking for?

The best way is to use Quora, the best Q&A platform where millions of people from all over the world come online to ask questions and get quality answers.

When you ask a question like "what are the best stocks to buy" on Quora, you not only get very helpful answers from experts, but also related questions in the sidebar, as you can see on the picture above.

So, if you want to use FAQ keyword research to find high-quality question-based keywords, Quora is the best place.

You can also use Google search to quickly get information about FAQ keywords. This is what it looks like;

As you can see above, Google displays “Other questions asked” questions for the keyword “keyword stuffing”. When you click on one of them, Google offers you an even more complete list of questions that Internet users ask during a search.

All of this data can be very helpful in coming up with LSI keyword ideas as well as long-tail keyword phrases to improve your blog's organic traffic.

2. Use Google Trends

Did you know you can use Google Trends to do keyword research? Yes, Google trends is one of the most misunderstood tools, which can provide you with valuable information on any topic you want to discuss.

Here's how it works;

From the illustration above, you can see that nutrition garners much more interest in Google over time than SEO. You can also add other topics to compare to know the interest of the audience.

Go to Google Trends and follow the next steps to perform keyword research.

• Enter a search term and perform a search
• Then enter a search term in the “+ Add comparison” search field.
• On the right side of the first search box, click More Edit filters.
• Select a period or enter a custom period and click OK to continue.

There it's done ! It will show you all the data you need based on your search.

3. Sneaking into your competitors' sites

One of the fastest ways to find high-performing keywords is to do a competitive analysis. You should always have a list of 10-15 top blogs in your industry, so you can use these sites to get a ton of blog post ideas as well as keyword ideas.

Be sure to find a list of the blog posts that are driving the most traffic as well as the posts that are generating the most profit on your competitors' sites. This way, you can also consider creating 10x better content on the same topics to drive more search traffic and sales.

We strongly recommend that you try tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs to research your competitors, as both of these tools help you find information about your competitors easily;

• Traffic-generating blog posts
• Profit-generating blog posts and keyword ideas

4. Evaluate keywords

The best way to find profitable keywords is to assess their cost and CPC value. Although there are many tools out there to find the CPC value of a keyword, we highly recommend giving Semrush a try as it provides a ton of information including the following.

• Keyword: These are the keywords that are ranked for a specific page on search engines like Google.
• Pos: The position of the keyword in the search engine (specific). In this example, I've already selected the default Google US database, but you can change it for other locations and search engines.
• Volume: This is the number of queries matching this keyword exactly.
• CPC: Average cost per click for the keyword (the most important to assess the profitability of a keyword)
• URL: URL to which the keyword is driving traffic
• Com: it indicates the competition of advertisers for this keyword. A lower number means there is little competition and a higher number means there is more competition for that term.
• Results: This is the number of results obtained by search engines.
• Trend: You need to make sure that the traffic trend for this keyword is not going away. This column displays the search trend for this keyword over the past 12 months.

The 5 Best Keyword Research Tools

Semrush

If I had to choose just one SEO tool, I would choose Semrush. Note that I am a long time happy user of Semrush tool, but it helped me increase my search traffic by 15% in just 30 days.

Semrush is much more than a keyword research tool but I'm not going to go into detail about its other features as instead we are going to talk about how it will help you find the most profitable keywords for you. any niche.

In case you are wondering what Semrush is, I will explain it to you briefly.

If you want to spy on the top performing keywords of your competitors and know their BEST link building strategies, Semrush is for you.

You may ask yourself, “Why should I focus on my competitors? »

The reason is simple – if you want to get the best search results for any keyword you're targeting, you first need to know who currently ranks at the top of Google.

Once you know their top keywords that get more traffic and the inbound links they get, it becomes easy for you to outrank them.

This is where Semrush comes in. It allows you to spy on and crush your competitors no matter what niche you are in.

Use Semrush to do advanced keyword research

I know the majority of bloggers use Google's Keyword Planner (which is a free tool available to anyone) but the only problem is that even if you find uncompetitive keywords, there's a lot of competition for them because everyone uses the same tool.

To get rid of this problem and discover the hidden keywords that will help you increase your website traffic, you need to find other ways.

I highly recommend you try Semrush which is a fantastic tool that gives you details on search volume, number of competing pages, average cost per click, related keywords and many more details.

It is definitely 100% better than Keyword Planner. Here's how to use it to do better keyword research.

For example, if I want to rank for the keyword “WordPress tutorial”, here is how I can use Semrush to find really good keywords that will actually help me increase my traffic.

Long Tail Pro

Content is king they say. That's true, but have you ever wondered why your blog isn't getting search traffic when you're posting quality articles?

It may be because you are not using long-tail keywords in your content. If you are wondering what it is, here is a simple example.

• Short tail keyword: “cars” (highly competitive and nearly impossible to rank keyword)
• Regular keyword: “best cars” (highly competitive and nearly impossible to rank keyword)
• Long tail keyword: “best cars in france” (Now guess what? You can rank for this keyword by posting quality articles around this keyword)

Anyone (even if you have a new blog) can rank higher in search results by using “long tail keywords”. But the only problem is how to find them without hiring an SEO expert who will charge you thousands of dollars.

Long Tail Pro comes in two versions: the basic tool (enough for most bloggers) and Long Tail Platinum (advanced version that gives you control over keyword research campaigns).

See also: 9 Best Content Marketing Blogs Every Blogger Should Follow

KeywordTool.io: the best free alternative to Google Keywords Planner

The only downside to using Google Keywords Planner is that almost every other blogger in your industry is already using it. Even if you find less competitive keywords, they are still being used by most other bloggers in your niche, leading to more competition and making it difficult to rank higher.

This is where KeywordTool.io comes to the rescue, it is the BEST alternative to Keyword Planner. It not only gives you keyword ideas that are not provided by Google Keywords Planner, but it also helps you easily optimize your articles with long-tail keyword phrases.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is the SEO tool run by expert Neil Patel himself. Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that you can use to easily find a ton of useful keyword ideas to get more traffic and sales.

This is what it looks like;

As you can see above, immediately after entering a keyword of your choice (ex: marketing), Ubersuggest gives you a ton of keyword ideas along with the following actions.

• Trendy
• Search volume
• CPD value
• Difficulty of paid referencing and
• SEO difficulty

You can also click on the other “Related” tab to find a list of highly relevant keywords for your target keyword.

KW-Finder

KW Finder is one of the best keyword tools if you are looking for accurate keyword data. Unlike other premium SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs – KW Finder also gives you free limitations for every registered user (up to 5 keyword searches per day), making it an awesome tool even for beginners .

This is what it looks like;

Here are some of the metrics that you can find in KW Finder that can be very helpful when mining successful keywords.

• Trend – search trend over the last 12 months
• Search – average monthly search volume (exact match) over the past 12 months
• CPC – average cost per click of the listed keyword
• PPC – level of competition in PPC advertising (min=0; max=100)
• DIFF – SEO difficulty of a keyword, based on statistics SEO (DA, PA, MR, MT – we'll talk about that in a moment) of Google's first SERP pages (min = 0; max = 100)

Another tool: Use the Keyword Planner tool

We will start with Google Keyword Planner as it is not only free but widely used by majority of bloggers to conduct keyword research.

Google's Keyword Planner is perhaps the BEST free keyword research tool for finding profitable keywords for your websites. Just create an account in Google Adwords and you can use the free Keyword Planner tool to start finding keywords for any topic.

Here are some benefits of using Keyword Planner;

• You can find the top performing keywords using this tool. No matter what niche you're in and what topics you want to rank for, the Google Keyword Planner tool helps you find the best keywords. You can also find additional keywords and add them to an existing campaign to improve your keyword research.
• You will also get a traffic estimate using the Keyword Planner. They include click estimates and statistics history to find good keyword ideas.

Use the most advanced keyword research technique: alphabet soup

This is actually an amazing strategy that most SEO experts use to find the best keywords in any niche. Alphabet soup involves finding different keyword ideas for a particular keyword using Google's instant search tool.

Here's how to use alphabet soup to come up with fantastic keyword ideas for your niche. This process also gives you unlimited blog post ideas and you will never run out of blog post ideas if you use it correctly.

Open Google and start typing the keyword you want to rank for. For example, I consider the keyword "affiliate marketing", and Google Instant gives me the following suggestions.

Instead of spending time writing blog posts that target a high-competition keyword like "affiliate marketing," we can focus on a more specific keyword like "affiliate marketing for dummies." . I'm not saying it's an easy keyword to rank for, but you'll get the idea once you start using Google Instant Search.

Here's how to find unlimited keyword ideas using Google Instant.

Just enter the letter "d" after your keyword "affiliate marketing" to get search results for the most popular keywords.

Do you understand me now? Here's how you can get unlimited keyword suggestions just by using Google Instant.

5 Big Keyword Research Mistakes to Avoid

Keyword research is no picnic. We've been doing keyword research for years and still sometimes struggle to find high potential keywords. That being said, if you're a beginner getting started with keyword research, here are some big mistakes you should avoid to get more search traffic.

Target “short” long-tail keywords

We all know that long tail keywords are easier to rank for because of their low competitiveness. But here's the problem. If you target “short” long tail keywords, you will get NO results (especially if you have a new website with a low backlinks or domain authority profile).

Here's what we mean by "short" long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords can contain 3 or more words, but that doesn't mean you should target a 3 word long tail keyword because it will definitely have a lot more competition than a long tail keyword. trail of 5 words.

Here are some examples of short long tail keywords (to avoid).

• best apple phone
• cheap bluetooth speakers
• macbook-air
• Perfumes for men
• And the list continues

As you can see above, all of the example keywords above are short keywords that are 3 word long tail keywords. And you can't compete for the terms above because you can't rank for them unless you have a big budget and quality backlinks.

Ignore business intent

Whether you know it or not, there are several types of keywords;

• Sales-oriented keywords, also known as transactional or shopper keywords (the intent is to buy something online or search for the best deals online).
• informative keywords (the intention is to get more information about a product or service)
• Navigational keywords (the intention is to reach a specific site or brand, eg: “twitter”, “Amazon”, etc.)

If you ignore sales-oriented keywords and only focus on informational or navigational keywords, you will NEVER attract people who will actually buy products from you.

Here are some examples of business-oriented keywords, just in case you are curious about them.

• best macbook air discounts
• Semrush Free Trial
• Grammarly promo code
• And the list continues

If you look at the examples above, these are all commercial intent keywords where people are actually looking for the “best deals” to buy online.

Not checking keyword competition

This is a HUGE mistake when researching keywords. If you don't keep tabs on the competition for the keywords you're going to rank for, how can you even get into the top 10 of search results?

With that being said, here are some keyword metrics you need to find to easily discover the competitiveness of any keyword you're trying to rank for.

• Google SERP – top Google search results for the selected keyword. The overall SEO score is calculated as the average of the SEO competitiveness of the first 10 pages. Red color = strong SEO competitiveness. Green color = low SEO competitiveness.
• DA – Domain Authority (developed by Moz) predicts a website's ranking in search engines.
• PA – Page Authority (developed by Moz) predicts the ranking of a specific page in search engines.
• MR – MozRank of URL represents a link popularity score reflecting the importance of a given website on the internet.
• MT – URL MozTrust is similar to MozRank, but instead of measuring link popularity, it measures link trustworthiness.
• Links – Number of authoritative external links to the URL.
• FB – number of Facebook shares for the URL
• Rank – SEO Competitiveness Rank – the higher it is, the harder it is to be competitive. (min=0; max=100)
• East. visits – estimated number of visits per month on this SERP position
• Quick Tip: Install the Moz Toolbar (available free for chrome) to easily discover PA, DA, and backlinks metrics while searching Google on the go.

Little advice : install the Moz toolbar (available for free for chrome) so you can easily discover PA, DA and backlinks metrics when searching Google.

Ignore the value of the keyword

Not all keywords are the same. Some keywords have higher value (more than $10 CPC, cost per click) while others have low CPC value (less than $1 CPC).

Therefore, if you are looking to attract high potential keywords, you also need to consider the value of a keyword. In other words, you should always keep an eye on the CPC to find highly profitable keywords.

This one mistake in keyword research can cost you thousands of dollars in the long run, so be sure to give more importance to CPC when doing keyword research.

Not finding multiple LSI keywords for the main keyword

LSI keywords are basically keywords related to the keyword you are looking for on search engines. In short, LSI keywords are the keywords related to your main term.

For example, "apple laptop" can be an LSI keyword for "Macbook air" or "Macbook pro"

You can easily find a multitude of LSI keywords using tools such as

• LSI Graph
• Ubersuggest
• Semrush
• Google autosuggests, etc.

LSI keywords help Google better understand the relevance of your pages. A legitimate page about "Apple computers" will probably contain a bunch of other words related to Apple computers, such as "apple phones", "apple iphone 14", "apple new ipad", etc. In contrast, a keyword-stuffed page about "Apple computers" will likely only contain that one keyword.

This is why Google has moved from the era of “keyword stuffing” to that of “LSI indexing”. So be sure to find multiple LSI keywords when looking for a main keyword to rank for your website.

FAQ

Other resources to discover:

• SEO Friendly Titles: 8 Best Practices with Examples
• 15 Best Blog Examples to Inspire You to Start a Money-Making Blog
• 22 Affiliate Marketing Strategies and Tips to Make More Money
• 13 Best SEO Blogs You Can't Miss to Improve Your SEO
• How to Link Your Blog Posts Like a PRO
• SEO Friendly Titles: 8 Best Practices with Examples 
• 25 Most Important SEO Stats You Should Know 
• 30 Twitter stats, facts and trends for the current year
• 40 Stats and Facts About Content Marketing
• 13 Best SEO Blogs You Can't Miss to Improve Your SEO
• 12 Proven Methods to Build High-Quality Backlinks Like a Pro
• Top 25 SEO Tips and Tricks That REALLY Work
• 25 Most Important SEO Stats You Should Know
• SEO for Beginners: The Guide

Final reflections

Keyword research is an art and it takes time to master. You can't find better keywords that increase your traffic right from the start. Once you start spending more time and playing around with the keyword research tools mentioned in this guide, you'll learn how to rank for any keyword in Google's search results.

How to do keyword research is perhaps the one question most people can't answer correctly. Finding buyer keywords for your articles, web pages or videos is a difficult task, especially when you are new to search engine optimization. You should first focus on finding the right kind of keyword ideas for your entire site and make your site search engine friendly by optimizing it for those keywords.

Once you've analyzed your keywords, start focusing on writing quality content (nothing beats quality, you can't expect good results from Google by creating thin content ) in order to increase your organic traffic. There is also an effective way to increase your search traffic, which is to attract backlinks from other sites. The more links pointing to your websites, the more authoritative your articles will be and can easily rank at the top of Google search results.

Although there are many keyword research tools out there, I highly recommend starting your keyword research process using Google's Keyword Planner. This tool is one of the best keyword research tools and it is free to use. You can not only find the best keywords, but also analyze the keyword competition to rank better in Google search results.

When doing keyword research, always focus on using long tail keywords as they can give you low competition and higher traffic. And it's easy to rank in the top results by focusing on long-tail keywords in your blog posts.

Once you have mastered using the Google Keyword Planner tool to do keyword research, you can start using advanced keyword research tools like HitTail, Moz, WordStream, Semrush, etc. . to find the most profitable keywords for your niche.

As a general rule, NEVER write another article without doing proper keyword research. And focus on using high-volume, low-competition keywords to rank higher in Google's search results for any keywords you use.

Please share this keyword research guide with your friends if you found it useful. Do you have any other questions about keyword research in 2024?

If so, please ask them in the comments section below and I would be happy to respond to your comments.