We show you 6 free tools to filter the most popular keywords in your industry and attract more organic traffic
The first step to climb positions in Google is to carry out a study of keywords (Keywords Research). This is the basis of any SEO or SEM strategy that we wish to develop. For those who are not familiar with this process, we are going to explain in detail what keywords are , how to do keyword analysis for our business and what tools can help you with this process.
First of all… Why do I need a keyword study?
We will answer this question with another: how do you know what information your audience needs?
When building a content strategy, it is extremely important to know the needs of the Buyer Persona at each stage of the purchase process. If you want to attract sales opportunities, you must share valuable information for your target audience.
How do we discover those needs? Asking Google. The famous search engine receives an average of 3.8 million queries every minute . If there is data that shows what users are looking for the most by region, type of business and season, Google has it.
At this point, it is worth clarifying what keywords are . Basically, they are the terms that users use in search engines (such as Google, Bing and Yahoo) to make their queries.
So, doing a keyword analysis involves searching for and identifying the terms associated with our industry or business, which have the highest number of searches per month on Google.
The correct interpretation of this data will allow us to:
✔ Understand what information users need
✔ Know what content will attract more readers and leads
✔ Organically position the website on the first pages of Google
✔ Detect new niches in the business
✔ Avoid high bounce rates
✔ Rule out economic losses
✔ Evaluate the performance of the competition
✔ Capture qualified leads
✔ Increase conversions
Types of keywords
Before doing a keyword study, you need to recognize the types of keywords you will find on the internet. We can categorize from two perspectives: according to the user's intention and according to the volume of searches.
According to the user's intention
Informative: The user uses this type of keywords to obtain information on a certain topic. A good example is: Life insurance in Peru.
Transactional: The objective of those who use transactional keywords is to buy. For this reason, they are usually much more specific. For example: “ Prices of life insurance in Peru ”.
Navigational: These are those that refer to specific websites. Like “ Facebook ”, “ Amazon ” and the like.
Based on search volume
Head or short-tail keywords: These are those terms normally made up of one or two words, which deal with very broad topics and have millions of monthly searches. For example: Houses, cars, shoes.
Middle Tail or middle tail keywords : They usually have two or three terms in their composition. They are a bit more specific but they also have thousands of searches per month. For example: " Houses in Miraflores ", " Ford cars ", " Nike shoes ".
Long Tail or long tail keywords: Finally we come to the specific terms. They are widely used for transactional queries because the user uses them when they intend to buy. For example: “ House prices in Miraflores ”, “ Used Ford cars in Lima ”, “ Red nike shoes ”.
What type of keyword suits my website?
This is a very important question. It's easy to assume that the words we need are the ones with the highest search volume. But this is a tremendous mistake.
Short tail keywords have extremely high competition. If your website is just making inroads on Google, it will hardly beat the titans of the first three pages of results.
Also, it is proven that short tail keywords attract a lot of audience, but generate fewer conversions than a long tail.
Taking advantage of the Long Tail is the key for your website to make space in Google results. Being low competition, you can position many more terms and appear for other searches. And also, as they are considered transactional, there is a greater possibility of successful closings. And that is our goal.
Let's show it with an example:
Let's say that we manage the account of a dealership and we manage to position the keyword “ cars ”, which has 23 thousand monthly searches in Peru. We will surely have a lot of traffic, but in most cases there will be no purchase intention behind it. In contrast, the keyword “ kia cars 2020 ” has only 10 monthly searches, but those visitors are likely to generate a much higher conversion rate.
How to do a keyword study? (KeywordResearch)
Now that we know what keywords are and understand their ranking, we are going to explain step by step how we carry out keyword research for our clients.
Step 1: Identify the most important keywords
For this first step, we don't need any tools. We just need to organize our thoughts and answer a few very basic questions.
→ What does the business do?
→ What do you sell?
→ What services does it offer?
→ What is the basic profile of your Buyer Personas?
→ Do you have a physical store or office?
How do these questions help us? We will show you with another example.
✔ What does the business do?: Life insurance
✔ What do you sell?: Health insurance, travel insurance, vehicle insurance.
✔ What service does it offer?: Cancer insurance, Soat digital.
✔ Do you have a physical store or office?: Yes, in Lima.
From this simple exercise we get an important list of keywords:
✔ Life insurance
✔ Health insurance
✔ Travel insurance
✔ Vehicle insurance
✔ Cancer insurance
✔ Life insurance in Lima
✔ Health insurance in Lima
✔ Travel insurance in Lima
Step 2: Group the keywords by categories
At this point, it is necessary to work with an excel sheet. Let's take the keywords above and create categories. This is very important to develop a healthy internal linking architecture. In addition, it will help a much more effective web positioning.
If you want to know more about how to create an SEO positioning strategy from scratch, we recommend our guide for beginners.
Continuing with the previous example, we can start with the following categories:
✔ Health insurance
✔ Vehicle insurance
✔ Travel insurance
And starting from there, we feed our keyword research.
Step 3: Expand the list of Keywords
Perhaps you had not noticed it, but the keywords that we detect in our first approach are Head and Middle Tail. If we are starting in the world of SEO, it is advisable to delve into Long Tail terms that can feed these categories.
For this task, we will extend the keyword analysis. Now we will need a tool to help us detect the Keywords used by our potential customers in Google. We use Ahrefs , which is a fairly complete tool. But there are many other very good options:
✔ Google
✔ Uber suggest
✔ MergeWords
✔Google Keyword Planner
✔ Keyword Difficulty Tool (Semrush or MOZ )
✔GoogleTrends _
✔ Keywords Everywhere
The main ally of SEO specialists is Google itself.
This search engine suggests keywords to us while we write our queries. And the ideas it proposes are those that have the highest monthly search volume.
Likewise, after launching the first page of results, it places a list with the most popular terms associated with our search in the footer. This gives us good ideas to feed into our keyword research.
Ubersuggest
This is one of the best tools that exists on the internet and it is completely free. In addition, it is designed so that beginners can understand how it works.
Just by placing the main keyword in the search bar and selecting a country to crawl, Ubersuggest offers us a very complete list of combinations, their respective search volumes and even shows data on the difficulty of positioning.
It also offers content ideas, basic SEO audits, backlink analysis, and search statistics.
Merge Words
This is another free and very useful tool. Especially to combine keywords. Merge Words has three boxes, in which we will place classified keywords (For example: Type of vehicle + brand + year). In response, the program will launch all possible combinations.
The not-so-positive part of this trick is that we must then purge the list, in case some combinations don't make sense.
Google Adwords Keyword Planner
Once we have a significant number of keywords in our excel, we will take a very important next step: find out which of these Keywords will really attract traffic to our website.
To do this, we'll use the Google Keyword Planner. We select the option “ show only ideas directly related to my search terms ”, we copy the list of Keywords that we organize in excel and analyze the results.
We organize the data returned by the system, ordering by volume of local searches. We can download that file in CSV.
Then we separate the text into columns (data> text in columns> choose the option delimited> commas) and that's it. We only have to delete the columns that are not necessary for our keyword analysis and order from highest to lowest.
Keyword difficulty tool (Semrush or MOZ)
The next thing we need to evaluate is the difficulty of positioning. Semrush and MOZ software have a tool for this, which is called the Keyword difficulty tool.
These show us how many backlinks the website should have and how much domain authority is needed for our page to reach the top of Google results.
To do this, we just copy the keywords, paste them into the tool and choose the language. The search results can also be downloaded to CVS to add additional information.
Google Trends
Finally, if our portal is for news and information, Google Trends can be very helpful. This tool shows the trending topics at each time of the year. In this way, we can find useful content for our blog.
Keywords Everywhere
This Chrome extension allows you to see the most popular keywords for each search you do on Google. Although it does not show statistics, it does show a wide variety of keywords and associated terms.
Step 4: Add synonyms and related terms
Google's algorithm identifies better and better the relationship that words have with each other, when they are used on the same web page. It is an indicator of content quality. Hence the importance of playing a little more with semantics to improve SEO positioning.
Add synonyms and alternative words to your list. In this way you will avoid using the keyword too many times and you will have a much better written content.
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