Before we start this post, I need to tell you this.

Why do you need to conduct keyword research?

Keyword research helps you find keywords that people use to find content, new products and services. Next, you use those keywords on your site so that people can easily find you.

With the right keywords, you can drive higher traffic back to your site. Never rely on assumptions if you’re serious about blogging and want to treat the same as a business. Here you need a clear direction to go ahead.

Most content creators often move in the belief that they know exactly what people want. They make educated guesses at times to create supporting content. They don’t go beyond that and therein lies the problem. By spending time to figure out what people want, you end up making more money.

Here’s how to start:

Make a List of Topics Based on What You Know About Your Business

The key is to begin from a place that you know. Think of topics that align with your business and use that to base your keyword research process.

These might be topics that you may have had conversations with customers before or something you blogged about before. These are the topics the target audience is searching for to land on your site.

If I run a site for freelancers, perhaps these are the questions my target audience is thinking about:

• Freelancing
• How to start freelancing
• Best freelancing sites
• Best freelancing ideas
• SEO for freelancers
• Making money as a freelancer

Each keyword has a monthly search volume that helps you determine if you should spend time creating content for that particular keyword. The search volumes and organic difficulty should determine your content strategy. Approach the particular subject only if there’s enough interest. The data lets you see which are the most important topics for your audience. You can organize the most important subjects by their monthly search volumes. You can delve further into subtopics for each topic.

Fill in These Main Ideas With Secondary Keywords

Now that you have the main keywords think of all the secondary keywords that belong to the primary set.

These phrases are important because not everyone searches for the main keywords when finding your blog.

So here’s a sample of the keywords that belong to the main idea on “how to start freelancing” will contain. 

• Tools for freelancers
• Best CRMs for freelancers
• How to create a blog for freelancers
• Automation software for freelancers
• Top automation tools for freelancers
• Webinar software for freelancers

Come up with more and more keyword phrases you can use.

You need not think hard to find these lists of phrases. Just enter the main keyword into a keyword research tool to generate a number of ideas you can use.

You can drill down into your own traffic analytics software like Google analytics or Clicky analytics to find website traffic referrals, organic search phrases and list of important keywords.

Base this on the main category mentioned here. 

Understanding Search Intent

User intent is the key factor that affects how well you rank on search engines. It’s important to address the problem that the searcher is looking for to get solved at the start. This affects how you conduct keyword research.

Keywords have different meanings based on who’s asking what.

Because the intent is the driver and it determines how well you rank you need to examine these keywords carefully.

Let’s say someone is researching the keyword where to buy gifts.

Now these gifts can be for anyone. It can be for the person’s spouse, child, for their colleagues, colleagues’s kids or anyone else.

It’s important to decipher why the person wants to learn where to buy gifts. Because only this will help you plan a content strategy that’s going to help them. In addition to figuring out user intent you should also create content in a manner that appeals to the audience. Say, videos created through screen recording tools.

In that sense you can create a gift-giving guide for a target audience, be it men, women or for children.

So you need to decide on the intent before delivering the promise with a blog post.

There are however tools that can take the guesswork out of the equation. And this post is all about automating keyword research for a much more refined approach towards content marketing.

Here’s how to use keyword research tools:

Using Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful keyword research tool. With it you can uncover both keywords and links of competitors.

Thor; index has 12 trillion links indexing 200 million domains. They add 6 billion pages to the index daily.

The user interface breaks down data into easy to recognize tables. Add a domain and you get all the details around the said domain including keywords it ranks for, highest traffic garnering pages and so on.

You see an overview of results, number of backlinks RDs, organic keywords and content data as well.

With the organic keywords data you get a list of keywords the domain ranks for and see the search volume, url and rank.

You can also enter a keyword into the search box and get data like suggestions

Here’s the data you get on each keyword

• Search volume – number of monthly searches for the keyword
• Keyword difficulty(KD) – the difficulty to rank for the keyword on Google
• Traffic – the estimated traffic that the site gets by ranking for that keyword
• Cost per click (CPC)– cost per click on Google ad

Using AnswerThePublic

With Answer the public you get free access to keyword research. The search data is presented in an easy to understand visual format. With auto suggest feature you get access to data in an understandable format.

Add the keyword. The tool gets you keywords and presents them as visual maps. You get questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related keywords.

Download the data provided in simple to use visual format as images or export them to a CSV file and use with your preferred spreadsheet software.

Using Ahrefs you will get plenty of data for conducting keyword research.

• At the start use broad terms and then narrow down the search to more specific terms.
• Enter your own site to Ahrefs to see all the keywords your site ranks for and then see how you compete against customers in that respect.
• Focus on keywords that answer customer questions and edge them toward a buying decision.

Conclusion

Make sure that you do keyword research and change priorities depending on customer needs. Keyword research is a tactic that works across all industries be it marketing, freelancing or even health and wellness. As you gain more authority in SERPs you will be able to add more keywords to your primary and secondary lists and grow your presence and boost the same.

Author bio: George is a writer and blogger at Kamayobloggers and ThinkingNE, two sites he started to share cutting edge marketing insights online. He has over 9 years of experience writing online.