Keyword Research

Before starting any online project, you need to study your competitors’ websites, look at the pages they have and which keywords they are ranking for.

This will help us put together a strategy to focus on and keep moving forward.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the search for keywords targeted at each, or most, of the pages on our website.

To carry out keyword research we can use various programs such as ahrefs, sistrix, semrush, kiwosan, keyword planner, answer de public, etc.

There are plenty of online services that help you do this. Here is a post where I explain several tools for finding keywords that will help you with your keyword search.

How do you do keyword research?

In the keyword research process, what we will do is identify the words users type to find the products or services we offer, and group them into pages according to search intent.

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What types of keywords do I use in my strategy?

It is normal for your keyword research to include both short tail and long tail keywords.

In the strategy we will prioritise ranking for long tail keywords, as they are much easier, but in the long run many long tail keywords are made up of several short tail ones, so these will gain strength over time, and when necessary we will make an extra effort to strengthen the short tail keywords.

What tools do I use?

I recommend using Kiwosan, because in terms of value for money I think it is the best for getting started and getting your hand in.

The other alternative I recommend is Semrush’s keyword magic tool, but it is far too expensive. I would only recommend it for agencies or freelancers who are going to get a lot out of it.

I suggest these two tools because they are pretty good at finding and generating keyword ideas from the ones you enter.

To organise the keywords, I usually work with them in an Excel file or a Google spreadsheet, so we can group and organise them.

How do you organise keywords?

It is important to organise keywords and group them by page and search intent, as I mentioned earlier.

Here you can organise it however you like, by tabs, rows or columns, using a spreadsheet. In the example below, I organise them by rows, so that I can then filter quickly or create pivot tables and pull out the information I need.

Having it this way is also useful for cross-referencing the information with other tools in the future.

Once we have this, we need to review the pages the project needs and its initial architecture, that is, how the pages will link to each other.

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