5 Tips for an Effective Keyword Research

When building the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy of your website, the most important thing that you have to do is choosing the right keywords you want your website be ranking for. But this is not an easy task and it will require you time and dedication.

First, think by yourself the top 10 topics that your shop is relevant at. It’s ok if these keywords are general and non-specific because we will use them to find more accurate keywords. Now, complete the following steps for completing a successful keyword research:

Keyword Research Step 1: Check the search volume of the keywords

The first think you should do at this point is to choose which Keyword Planner Tool you will use for finding the search volume of the keywords you’ve think of, and even get more keywords suggestions. 

Once you’ve already got your keyword suggestion list, it’t time to start working with the keywords that have more monthly searches and that could potentially bring more traffic to your website. This is only tip #1! Read on for the rest of the tips for successful keyword research!

Keyword Research Step 2: Search for related keywords

Once you have identified the main keywords you want to focus on, search for related keywords that might also be useful for your site. If they are relevant for your website, you should add them to your keyword research.

Keyword Research Step 3: Try to rank for long-tail keywords

Most of the high volume keywords you’ve chosen will be short-tail and medium-tail keywords, which means they are generic and very competitive. You will need to complement your strategy by adding long-tail keywords.

Long-term keywords will be easier to rank for and the traffic that they can bring will be more qualified than the short keywords. The reason behind this is because these searches are far more specific than searches with general keywords.

For example, if I’m selling colored leather cat collars I can rank for the keyword “buy cat collars”, but the conversion rate will be much worse than “buy red leather cat collar”. We highly recommend you to also include some relevant long-tail keywords for your strategy.

We have a complete post dedicated to how to find the best long-tail keywords for your Google Ads strategy.

Keyword Research Step 4: Keep in mind that people use Google to find answers to their questions

That’s the reason why you should be also trying to rank for the most asked questions of your sector.

A good tool you can use to do the questions keyword research is Answerthepublic, just write the keyword that you want to inspect and it will show you a list of the most asked questions related with that keyword. For example, if we search for “cat collars” at the page, we will get:

Check which keywords suit well to your business and start ranking for them.

Keyword Research Step 5: Check for competitor’s keywords

Sometimes, when doing the keyword research, there will be some relevant or good keywords that we will be missing. A good way to make sure that we are not missing anything important is to spy or check the keywords that our competitors are ranking for. You can scan your competitors URL with Clever Ads Keyword Tool for finding it out, some useful tools we can also use for this purpose are BuzzSumo or SEMRush.

By following these steps, you will have all the information you need in terms of keywords, for improving the Google Ads strategy for your website. 

Clever Ads Keyword Planner

The keyword planner by Clever Ads can help you and bring value to your SEO SEM strategy, let’s have a quick view of how it works:

Let’s pretend that we are the owners of an elegant dresses shop and we want to start doing a keyword research. The first keyword that I will use for the research will be our main keyword “elegant dresses”. Let’s see what happens if you write “elegant dresses”:

 As we can see, we are already obtaining a lot of related potential keywords that maybe we can add to our strategy such as: “Elegant Evening Dresses” “Elegant Wedding Dresses” or “Elegant Cocktail Dresses”

 

Now we can start adding new keywords to our list, the best way to do this is to sort it by different parameters and start gathering the best keywords.

If you click on “Search Volume”…

You will the get keywords sorted by those with most monthly searches. We recommend you to use this to check the relevant keywords that has most searches and add them immediately to your keyword strategy.

If you click on “CPC” (Cost Per Click)…

You will be able to see the keywords with more average CPC, this means that these keywords are highly contested by other announcers and each click will be expensive. We recommend you to have only the most relevant keywords added to your strategy and test if they work, if they don’t work in terms of conversion get rid of them.

If you click on “Relevance”…

You will have the keywords sorted by the most relevant to the less relevant ones. Use this feature to spot the keywords that are similar to your main keyword.

As you can see, keyword research are not that hard to do and can bring you a lot of benefits such as more conversions (organic and paid traffic) and less costs. That’s why you have to do a keyword research even before building the website if possible. This way you will know which keywords you have to put on each headline (h1, h2, h3…) or what content to write about.