Category: Keyword Research

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this question. As SEOs like to say, “It depends.”  Keyword research is an act of balancing your unique circumstances with a set of metrics and concepts, which we’ve just covered: traffic potential, keyword difficulty, business potential, and search intent. In some cases, your job will be to get as…

Many marketers judge the value of a keyword by mapping it to the so-called buyer’s journey, i.e., a process people go through before making a purchase. Conventional wisdom says the earlier people are in their journey, the less likely they are to buy. Here’s one popular buyer’s journey framework: TOFU keywords tend to have high search…

Let’s say that you have the following keywords on your list: Now you need to understand which should be best targeted with informational blog articles and which should be product or category pages. For some keywords, this is obvious. You wouldn’t create a product page for “how to brew cold brew coffee” because searchers are clearly looking for…

Let’s say that you’ve got the following keywords on your list: All of these search queries seem to be talking about the same topic: “whipped coffee.” But does that mean that a single page can rank well for all these keywords? Or perhaps you’ll need to create individual pages to target each of them separately?  The…

Cost Per Click (CPC) shows how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click on an ad displayed on top of search results for a given keyword. It’s more a metric for advertisers than SEOs, but it can serve as a useful proxy for a keyword’s value. For example, the keyword “project management software” has a…

Experienced SEO professionals typically gauge the ranking difficulty of each keyword manually. That is, by looking at the search results for each keyword and analyzing them. They account for many different factors to judge how hard or easy it’ll be to rank: This process varies from person to person, and there’s no consensus on precisely what…

Everything we’ve discussed so far is enough to generate an almost unlimited number of keyword ideas. But at the same time, the process kind of keeps you “in the box.” You can solve this by going to the places where your target audience hangs out—industry forums, groups, and Q&A sites—and studying their conversations. For example, here’s…

Competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas. But it’s very likely that there are many keywords that your competitors haven’t covered yet. You can find these using various keyword research tools. Keyword research tools all work the same way. You plug in a seed keyword, and they pull keyword ideas from their databases…

Looking at which keywords already send traffic to your competitors is usually the best way to accelerate your keyword research. But first, you need to identify those competitors. That’s where your brainstormed list of keywords comes in handy. Just search Google for one of your seed keywords and see who ranks on the front page. If…