Learn Keyword Research for SEO – The Ultimate Guide for Beginners in 2023

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Keyword Research for SEO - The Ultimate Guide For Beginners

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Do you want to learn how keyword research works in 2023 or do you want to know about the free/paid tools that exist to do better keyword research?

Whatever the problem is just stay till the end of this article & you’ll get to know about keyword research strategy from scratch.

See, the more and more targeted keywords you find and implement in your article the more targeted traffic you’ll get.

and ultimately, targeted traffic helps us to get more conversions, especially in the affiliate marketing field. else, Ad revenue will be also high.

Once you find out the keyword & write down the article on your blog, the next step is to optimize the article to get more ranking in search engines obviously.

Optimization is an ongoing process.

Learn keyword research for SEO by Rahul Chaudhary
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whenever you feel a loophole in your keyword research strategy to get a better ranking in the search engine, you’ve to make the decision right then and there to make the article more unique and more user-friendly.

Optimization directly helps us to get more ranking factors with respect to search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu etc. this can be done on-page as well as off-page.

In the blogging industry, we define on-page as technical SEO and off-page SEO factors are backlink, link building, SMM (social media marketing) & its integration, brand value, blog authority etc.

We’ll discuss all these factors later in another post.

Blogging is a skill where you’ve to just observe and react to how search engines change their colour of shrewdness.

In every span of weeks or within a month, Google releases a new feature/update. And how fast you get that and implement that in your blog defines the success of your blog.

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In this blog post, we cover almost every single thing you’ve to be aware of about keyword research.

A lot of factors and filters define the value of a perfect keyword with respect to how competitive is this, how many links are required to rank, if there is any seed keyword of that, etc, etc, etc.

But we’ll get to know the all with minimal disruption.

Just keep in your mind that Keyword research is an ongoing process.

The more you do this process on a regular basis, the more you get the outcome on your blog in respect of the blog revenue and obviously affiliate marketing conversions.

My goal here is to cover the topics below:

  1. What is Keyword Research?
  2. Why keyword research is mandatory?
  3. What is the importance of Keyword research?
  4. Types of Keyword research?
  5. What do you need for Keyword research?
  6. Best tools for Keyword research?
  7. 3 different ways to do better Keyword research?

All your rest queries will be resolved at the end of this article for sure.

So, let’s start with the basics…

What is Keyword Research?

Before jumping into this section. first, we need to clarify “What is a Keyword?” and why it is so important for us to get to know about this?

A keyword is simply a word or a set of words we use in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu etc, whenever we want to gather information about anything on the Internet.

The keyword can be a single word like ‘Google’ itself or my name like ‘Rahul Chaudhary’ or a query like “Who is Rahul Chaudhary’?

Every single thing you type on Google search engines and on the rest of search engines is a Keyword itself.

Here is an example of How Google populates some results when we put any query in the search box.

How Google populates some results in search engines

Now, comes Keyword research. then Keyword research is the process of finding the right set of keywords which people use again and again on the Internet to get to know about anything.

Once, you find out the Keywords you can use them to write your blog post around that query.

If your blog post ranks in search engines you get the traffic, obviously the traffic will be targeted traffic and you get the engagement in your blog post.

Ultimately, engagement defines conversions.

Maybe, you’ve integrated any affiliate links or banners throughout your post or you’ve already done Google AdSense Ad banner/code integrations.

Whatever your method of monetization, you’ll generate revenue. and this is how things actually work in the blogging industry.

There are a lot of free/paid tools in the market to do Keyword research. But I’ll suggest you go with Semrush.

In Semrush you’ll get a Free trial for starting phase as an offer and once, you understand the platform you can upgrade with your choice.

Semrush SEO Keyword research tool overview
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Semrush can help you to get details about the Keyword in the following ways:

  1. KeywordSemrush will tell you how this keyword is defined. Is it a seed Keyword? a parent Keyword or etc?
  2. Volume – Volume is the number of searches happening in search engines of that particular Keyword per month.
  3. Trend – Trend defines the graph kind of Info. with respect to past time searches, present and how the expected future wave can come of that Keyword. Overall, what is the demand for that particular Keyword?
  4. Keyword difficulty – Keyword difficulty is the expected requirement of efforts you’ll need to rank that Keyword in search engines like Google, Bind, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, etc.

How much is the high number of Keyword difficulty, and how it’ll be difficult for you to rank through your blog post. and vice versa.

So, you’ve to always look forward to keywords having less Keyword difficulty.

Ultimately, the less Keyword difficulty, the easier it’ll be to get ranking. So, always find out that set of keywords.

Semrush SEO tool will help you find out these Keywords for sure.

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Why Keyword Research is Mandatory?

As we’ve already discussed some factors which define the quality of keywords in the above section like volume. trend, Keyword difficulty, and the keyword itself.

Now, we’ll understand, why is this so important that you can’t even miss it in your blogging journey.

See, there are some kinds of sets that define the keyword’s difficulty without even doing the research in any free/paid SEO tool.

These sets basically know by their name in the industry:

  1. Short tail keyword: is also known as head-term.
  2. Long Tail Keyword: basically like, any kind of query.

Short tail Keywords: These keywords are basically as long as one to three words.

Short tail keywords are also known as head terms in the blogging industry.

These keywords cover a broad topic because it’s a general term of 1-3 words. It’ll give you more difficulty in the beginning.

Short tail keywords are those keywords having very high keyword difficulty and ultimately, these kinds of keywords are very difficult to rank in search engines.

For newbies/beginner’s short tail keywords are not recommended to write articles upon because they will now get ranking in their initial phase.

Long tail Keywords: Long tail keywords are keywords having three to five words in length and even more.

Long tail keywords are very easy to rank as compared to short tail because the keyword difficulty you’ll get is very low with respect to any general term.

These type of keywords covers a wide topic and hence, you got a chance to rank in the first few pages or SERPs (search engine result pages) of any search engine even in the initial stage of your blog.

A long tail keyword is a phrase that allows you to target niche demographics.

These keywords are also less competitive than generic keywords/short-tail keywords because they are designed to better reflect how people make queries on a regular basis.

Note: Always look forward to finding out long-tail keywords, they will help you to get better ranking and better outcomes.

What is the importance of Keyword research?

After discussing every deep dive information of the keyword like its volume of searches, the trend in the now and in the future, and its keyword difficulty.

You can barely minimum get an idea about how important it is to do before writing any article for your blog.

No worries! if you didn’t get it till now.

There are a lot of factors which can define the importance of research, but to understand the intelligence of search engines and how they measure the quality of an article.

Let’s understand the importance of Keyword research through some valuable points:

  1. Language of the targeted user: Language plays an important role in doing fair and optimized keyword research. here you can observe the behaviour of your targeted audience.
  2. Untapped query collection: Simply find out the ideas/keywords that no one is reached yet and make a blog post right at that point in time.
  3. Competition Analysis: Keywords research can surely help you to take the right decisions on your strategy with respect to your completion. You can play much better with your product/service by doing this.
  4. Customer Trend: Human psyche leads by the trend of their surroundings. In today’s Era of the Internet world, that can be easily tracked by search engines and ultimately what people are searching & boom!
  5. Easy to Rank: Once you find out the keyword difficulty of a specific keyword, you can make minimal backlinks and rank on Google itself easily. Keyword research makes the process easy and the results expected.
  6. Engaged Audience: Targeted Keyword gets you the targeted audience. Ultimately, you’ll get high engagement and better conversions surely.
  7. Customer Need: Customers need help you to make your post/product more conversion friendly. You can use affiliate marketing or AdSense for monetization.
  8. Market Trend: Market trend defines market needs with the help of search engines as search engines are the primary source of knowledge in today’s Era of the Internet world.
  9. Reduce PPC Cost: Pay-Per-Click is one the best campaigns to get conversions or leads through lead magnets by running your Ads on search engines like Google.
  10. More Ad Revenue: It may happen, that you’re especially dependent on AdSense revenue & to increase that revenue you need better Keyword research.

Besides these, there are a lot more factors which can define the importance the Keyword research.

Here I’ve already provided you with some essential parameters you can use to find out the value of a targeted keyword.

Now, we need to know how a keyword can be categorized according to its intent with respect to the user’s behaviour.

So, let’s move ahead to it…

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Types of Keyword research?

When it comes to categorising the keywords according to the intent of users searching on search engines, there can be four categories to discuss:

  • Informational
  • Navigational
  • Transactional
  • Commercial
The intent of keywords in the SEMrush SEO tool
Intent of keywords in SEMrush tool

1. Informational: Informational keywords are those which define the need of users to get knowledgeable regarding any query.

These keywords generally start with WH Family. Like, “How to make money online?”, “What is Keyword Research in SEO?”

Informational keywords generally can be monetized with AdSense & Affiliate both.

2. Navigational: Navigational Keywords generally have the intent to get aware of any product or service through the Internet world.

These types of keywords are just searched to get aware & make a comparison between the two.

Some examples of navigational keywords are ‘baby toy, Bluetooth speaker, etc.’

3. Transactional: Transactional Keywords have high intent of buying any product or service.

These types of Keywords can be monetised with affiliate products to get maximum revenue through ranking or PPC.

Some of the examples of transactional keywords are ‘best headphones under 10k, best laptop under 50 thousand, Bluetooth speaker under 15 thousand, etc.’

4. Commercial: Commercial keywords basically derive the user intent towards a specific brand.

Through these types of searches, users mostly put the brand name along with the query.

These types of keywords are highly convertible, just with respect to the brand name involved.

We can also categorise these as biased searches.

What do you need for Keyword research?

Keyword research is a complex process. But steps and proper navigation make it easier to understand as well as to implement.

Now, we’re playing with technology and technology is completely different from human nature.

Obviously, humans have introduced the tech but, algorithms of specific search engines are not in control of anyone.

So, to do better keyword research, we need some kind of tools they may be, (free/paid) which can help us to get the data from the algorithms.

And that data we can use to better SEO strategy.

So, the things which are required to make this process happen are:

1. Tool: free/paid doesn’t matter. But a tool is highly required to do better keyword research.

You can use Free as well as Paid tools but, I’ll recommend SEMrush Free Trial, in the beginning, to understand how things actually work.

After you got knowledgeable, upgrade to any plan you want to.

2. Seed Keywords: Seed keywords are keywords which are primary and generic in nature.

Some examples of how keyword differentiation works are:

  1. ‘Headphones’ is a generic keyword that means is a seed keyword.
  2. ‘Bluetooth Headphones’ is a navigational keyword.
  3. ‘Best headphones under 5 thousand’ is a transactional keyword.
  4. ‘Best headphone under 5thousand from xyz brand’ is a commercial keyword.

3. A Document: After doing the keyword research you need to clean up the process and note down the existing searches.

So, you need a document (Excel/Notepad).

4. Execution/Delegation System: Execution should be the primary motto in every single field. Similarly, if you’ve done the research, and exported the file in excel/notepad, but have not yet been implemented.

There is no way to get the desired results.

So, there should be an execution or delegation system required in this process as well.

5. Optimization: Optimization is the process of getting better in every stage whenever you feel any loophole in your strategy or in your teamwork.

Note: Optimization is an ongoing process.

6. Monitor: Last but not least, after doing all processes fully fledged. Now, you need to monitor all the happenings on a daily basis.

Summary: How do I Strategies my process of Keyword research?

  1. Research
  2. Cleanup
  3. Execute
  4. Optimize
  5. Monitor

Best tools for Keyword research?

Various tools in the market exist already. Some of them are free & some of them are paid.

What if I recommend, one of the most popular tools of the SEO market to do your keyword research for absolutely FREE?

Yes, you heard me right, Semrush paid tool free trial is just here for you.

You need to just sign up and use the full functions absolutely free of cost.

Once, you understand the tool functionality and how keyword research works, you can easily upgrade to a pro plan of your choice.

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3 different ways to do better Keyword research?

Keyword research in just 3 steps:

1. Find a competitor/top site keyword: First, you need to analyse at least one of your competitor sites and its top keywords.

You can analyse the same by your Semrush Free Trial.

2. Keyword Gap Technique: Through this technique, you can find some of the Un-Utilized keywords.

The Keywords which your competitor is not covered yet.

3. Using Seed Keywords: Once, you get a seed keyword, you can get some long tail keywords with respect to that seed one with the same intent.

This strategy can help you to rank even for some alternative keywords as well.

Make a list of alternate long tail keywords and add them in your blog post as per usage.

You can find them by just going to SEMrush

  • Head Over to Semrush 
  • Click on Keyword Magic Tool 
Keyword magic tool by Semrush
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  • Enter the seed Keyword 
  • Select the targeted country

And, Semrush provides you with tons of results related to that seed keyword.

SEMrush can help you to filter down various parameters. Some of the parameters which I generally use are:

Keyword Match Filters in Semrush SEO Tool
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  1. The exact match: The exact match will include the exact match of the phrase ‘Bluetooth headphone’ with the same word order. So, you will get ‘buy Bluetooth headphones’, ‘where to Bluetooth headphones’, ‘Bluetooth headphones in Washington’, etc.
  1. Broad match: Broad match helps you to match multiple phrases with the same seed keyword. Like (new, buy, in New York, etc.)
  1. Phrase Match: Use can use the tools like SEMrush to match phrases with the seed keywords.
  2. Related Keywords: Obviously you can find the related keywords & Boom like anything in the whole niche.

Always create an SEO plan in the beginning phase of any product/service launch and even for your blog also.

After planning just be clever with the new features and always look forward to making any optimization you think is required.

I generally use the Semrush tool for the majority of my uses and I heavily recommend you the same if you want to do the same like this.

Else, you can use KWFinder, Google Planner and Long Tail Pro for the same as well.

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Conclusion: Hi, I hope you got through this article deep dive & you learned a lot.

From understanding the keyword, itself, its importance and its use to understanding how you can do the keyword research using the SEMrush tool using its free trial. All covered already.

Now, you just need to sign up for the free trial and start your journey to get better rankings through search engines.

If we summarize the whole intention and output of this article then it would be as:

The initial Phase would be:

  1. Finding the keyword
  2. Find its volume and trend
  3. Find the keyword difficulty

The second Phase would be:

After this process, just clean up and execute the same within an article to publish.

You can also delegate your work within your team for better outputs.

The final Phase would be:

Lastly, optimize the article and its monetization purpose to get better outcomes in terms of ranking as well as monetary.

After all, all process has been made, now you need to keep your eyes to monitor the things as they are in the working zone or not.

All learnings have been done, now you need just execution.

So, Start your blogging journey with Bluehost to make your website with a free domain offer and use Semrush to crack all the competition in the market.

I hope you find this valuable. If yes, just share your thoughts below.

Till next, I love you all.

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Rahul Chaudhary

Founder and Editor-in-chief of Gazab Blogging & Savvy Media | Social Media Entrepreneur | Podcaster, Youtuber, Blogger, Digital Marketer & Personal Branding Practitioner.

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