Which keywords should you start working on first?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this question. As SEOs like to say, “It depends.” 

• Are you working on a brand-new website or an established business?
• Are you the only marketer, or do you manage a large team?
• Are you responsible for the actual conversions or providing new leads to the sales team?
• How fast do you need to show results?

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 much traffic as possible as fast as possible, which comes down to finding the high-volume, low-difficulty keywords. Other times, you’ll need to focus on leads or conversions, in which case business potential will be the most important metric to focus on.

Keyword research is not the process of finding “easy to rank for” keywords. It’s the process of finding the keywords that make the most sense to your business.

You should also have short-, medium-, and long-term ranking goals. If you only focus on short-term goals, you’ll never rank for the most lucrative keywords. If you only focus on medium- and long-term goals, it’ll take years to get any traffic.

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Part 6

Keyword research tools

Keyword research is practically impossible to do without specialized tools. And if you’re only starting out or have a tight budget, here are some free keyword research tools for you:

• Google Search Console – It shows all of the search queries that your website is currently ranking for and getting clicks from.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – This is our free plan, which is very similar to Google Search Console. But other than showing you what keywords your website is ranking for, we also show you their Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores.
• Google Keyword Planner – It’s a tool for those who want to run ads in Google. But SEOs, too, can get some value from using it.
• Keyword Generator – Our free tool for generating keyword ideas.
• Keyword Difficulty Checker – Our free tool for checking the ranking difficulty of a keyword.

And once you get truly serious about growing the search traffic of your website, make sure to sign up for Ahrefs and give Keywords Explorer a spin. This tool has pretty much everything you need to perform expert-level keyword research and discover some lucrative keyword ideas.