Keyword research done right: how to find the best keywords for your website

The keywords that you choose for your SEO campaigns determine the audience that will come to your site. How do you find the right keywords that attract the right audience? Here’s a step by step guide.

Step 1: set your goals

Of course, you want to get more traffic and you want to increase revenue. However, there’s more to that when it comes to choosing the right keywords.

It takes some time to get high rankings for competitive keywords. If you want fast results, you have to start with low-competition keywords.

You also have to decide if you want to increase brand-awareness, or should visitors buy on your website? Do you need very targeted visitors, or is it enough to attract people who are only slightly interested in your offers?

Step 2: find your seed keywords

The seed keywords are the keywords that you use to start your keyword research. Seed keywords are search terms that consist of one or two words (sometimes three). These keywords usually have a high search volume and a high competition.

Think about what people might search for when they are looking for the products or services that you offer. Avoid jargon and try to use the words that your customers use.

Step 3: use the keyword suggestion tool

Use your seed keywords with the keyword suggestion tool in SEOprofiler. For example, one of your seed keywords might be ‘tax software’. Enter that seed keyword in the keyword suggestion tool in SEOprofiler:

How to do keyword research: seed keywords

You will get many keyword suggestions that are related to the seed keyword. For every keyword, you will get the average monthly search volume, the search volume progression from January to December, the cost per click (CPC), the competition value, and the opportunity value.

It’s not a good idea to start with high-competition keywords.

Keywords with a high competition value are keywords for which many websites advertise on Google Ads. In general, these keywords aren’t a good start. You’ll get quicker results by optimizing your web pages for less competitive keywords. Use the filters above the result list to sort the results by opportunity:

How to do keyword research: opportunities

The opportunity column shows how lucrative the keyword is. A high opportunity value means that it is relatively easy to get high rankings for the keyword, and that the keyword will send a good amount of visitors to your website.

The value is calculated by combining competition, CPC, searches, and the number of words in the keyword. You can also use the other filters above the list to find the keywords that you need. Click a keyword suggestion to refine the suggestions for that keyword.

Step 4: create keyword lists

Use your seed keywords and the filter methods above to find the best keywords for your website. Tick the checkboxes next to the keywords that you like and they will be added to the list of collected keywords at the bottom of the page:

How to do keyword research: collect keywords

Your keyword list should be as specific to your business as possible. Only relevant keywords will deliver good results.

Step 5: benefit from low hanging fruit

The keyword suggestion tool offers additional features. For example, it helps you to optimize pages of your website for your keywords, and you can check the rankings of your web pages for these keywords by adding the keywords to the ranking monitor.

The ‘Opportunities’ page of the ranking monitor shows you the pages for which your website already has rankings that do not get as many clicks as they could. By improving these rankings, you can quickly get many more website visitors.

Find better keywords now

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Optimize your web pages for your keywords and check how they perform. Keep on adding new keywords to your website and optimize your work to get as many targeted website visitors as possible. The SEO tools in SEOprofiler help you with that:

Find better keywords now

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.