One way to rank higher on search engines is to conduct SEO keyword research.
[Actually, it's niche keyword research _We'll go there in a moment_]
If you're an absolute SEO beginner or even a content writer with previous experience, then this SEO keyword research template will save you tons of effort and time.You can jump there directly👇, or stay with us and go through a detailed keyword research guide with all the free tools that you might need.
Table of Contents
What Is Keyword Research?
To make a long story short, keyword research is the process of
finding what your target audience is looking for (on a specific search
engine such as Google or Bing), how many websites are providing them
with what they need, and how hard it is to compete with them.
The ultimate goal of this practice is to rank higher on search
engines, and although it is not the only factor that SEs use to rank
websites, it is relatively important to your success.
Before we go on, if this is the first time you read about keyword
research, I highly recommend that you read our beginners guide the first
blog, which defines SEO and its basics in a very simple manner.
Free SEO Keyword Research Template (Google Sheets)
Grab the all-in-one sheet that you will ever need for your website to
rock!
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Grab Your Free Template
Before we start our guide, let's understand what each term on the sheet
refers to, and how you're supposed to use it.
1. General Topic
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Suppose you have an IT website and you are preparing a new SEO strategy. The first step is to organize the main topics your target audience wants
to read about. I.E:
- Web development
- Software development
- Business Intelligence
- App Development
- Laptops
- etc.
2. Keywords
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3. Global Monthly Searches
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A keyword's global monthly search volume is the average number of times it has been searched for in a given month. They give you an insight into how
popular that term is.
Of course, if you're targeting a particular county, then you shall focus
on the monthly searches in that country.
4. Keyword Difficulty
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Difficulty (KD - competition) is a scale from 0 to 100, given to each
keyword based on the number and authority of domains that are linking the
first pages that appear on search engines.
Although SEO tools differ in the way they scale this difficulty, we have
chosen the one that most of them follow:
- From 0 to 10: EASY
- From 11 to 30: MEDIUM
- From 31 to 70: HARD
- From 71 to 100: SUPER HARD
Of course, this scale is relative to your website's position: so if you
have some linking going on, with good SEO practices, you might consider
mediums easy, hard to be medium, and super hard to be just hard.
5. CPC
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Cost per click (CPC) is the average amount that advertisers are bidding on
a keyword on Google Ads.
It is really important to have this metric studied in case you ever run a
campaign.
6. Keyword Relevance
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Unlike CPC and KD this metric is not given by a tool on the internet, but
by You. You have to measure how close the keyword is to your niche, which
takes us to the:
Niche Keywords
Niche keywords are directly related to your niche, they're long-tail
keywords that you don't want to miss, because ranking on them has never
been easier.
However, this type of keyword is usually not accessible using free tools,
as most of these tools won't show you all results until you
subscribe.
Lets me give you an example:
You have a web development blog, where you post your projects, explain
certain concepts, and review technologies, ...
The word "Symfony" is specifically related to web development, so
it's classified as high relevance.
The word "3D Development" might not be 100% related to your niche,
but to an extent, it is close, so you can classify it as medium relevance.
However, the word "accounting" is way too far from your niche, so
you might classify it as low relevance.
Free Keyword Research Tools
Before we jump into a fast guide for our keyword research template, I'd
like to present you with the tools that I personally find helpful, and
that I've used working with an eCommerce agency for their website. Here we
go:
- SEMRush
- Key Search
- Wordstram: if you're targeting Bing users, then this is the one Bing keyword research tool you'll ever need!
- Ahrefs Free Difficulty Checker
- Small SEO Tools Keyword Difficulty Checker
- H-Supertools for bulk keywords (MY FAVOURITE)
and one more unmissable tool that I personally use daily, is my Notion
blogging template which has everything you might need, from brainstorming
to editing and publishing a blog.
How to Use This Template?
Let's go step by step, and fill out our keyword research template.
First, let's pick the Marketing niche as our niche (see what I'm
doing?). Let's think of general topics related to marketing and fill out the
sheet.
Our main topics are:
- Marketing
- Digital Marketing
- Advertising
- Branding
Of course, the list goes on, but we're just taking a few examples.
Once that's done, we're starting our research.
The first tool you might want to use is H-Supertools:
Once you find most of the keywords, you're going to check each one's
difficulty using one of the tools above. Here is a demonstration using a
few tools:
- Ahrefs Difficulty Checker
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Here we checked the difficulty of the word "Marketing Funnel" and
it's 71/100 (71%) which means this keyword is relatively hard
to rank for.
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- Small SEO Tools Keyword Difficulty Checker
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Long-tail Keywords
Throughout your keyword research process, you'll stumble upon some of
these, and you should not miss them!
Long-tail keywords are one the most effective SEO targets, and if you
find the right ones, you're all set!
They're usually made of 3 to 5 words,
Here's how you specifically look for them using SEMRush:
1.
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2.
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What Keywords Should You Focus On?
Now, once you've filled your sheet, it's time to pick the keywords
you're going to prioritize over others.
Rule of thumb: the best keywords have:
- high search volume
- low difficulty (less than 50 on average)
- high relevance
although you might not find keywords that follow these 3 requirements,
you should try to, at least, have two.
If you're starting out, with a fresh new website, then the metric you
should focus on the most is KD: choosing the easiest keywords will
help you make some progress and get noticed.
After reading this short guide, were you able to use our keyword
research template and apply it to your blog?
Do you have any remarks or questions? Feel free to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
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