Keyword Research Tutorial: 3-Step Process for All Levels

hey in this video i'm going to show you my complete step-by-step keyword research process for seo just follow this process and you'll find perfect keywords for your campaign and watch until the end because i share my biggest keyword research secret let's dive right in i'm nathan gotch the founder of gotcha seo and i've personally led hundreds of successful seo campaigns since 2013 and i've now taught my proven seo process to over 1 000 seo practitioners inside my training gotcha seo academy so in case you're new here this is lesson two in this seo training series

and there will be a link below to watch video one after you finish this video and to avoid missing the third part in the series subscribe below and hit the bell icon so you can get first access let's dive right in so there are three types of keywords that you'll encounter first are head keywords these are keywords with a single word or acronym like cars and in most cases these are the worst types of keywords to target for a few different reasons number one the intent isn't clear so take a look at the search results

for cars what is someone actually searching for in this case are they looking to buy a car if so used or new what type of car or are they simply looking for more information about the movie cars the intent is difficult to understand which leads to the second reason why you shouldn't target head keywords which is number two because the intent isn't clear traffic quality will be low and as a result conversions will be poor so sure ranking for head keywords will juice your traffic numbers but you'll be disappointed by the conversion rates moving on

to number three which is the competition makes ranking for these keywords a death trap because you'll need a massive amount of resources to rank and even if you do rank you'll suffer from the next point which is number four extreme serp volatility because google has a difficult time knowing what the searcher is actually looking for therefore google is constantly shuffling the results to find what produces the highest organic ctr so overall there's almost never a good reason to target head keywords but now let's move on to the next type of keyword which are body keywords

an example of a body keyword is used cars now things are getting more specific and the intent is becoming clearer and it is still going to be an insanely competitive keyword to attack but at least you have a better idea of what the searcher actually wants now most body keywords will be no more than two to three words max and they're often very competitive because they're the easiest to find and therefore most competitors will invest heavy resources into them and that's why it's usually best for most websites to focus on the third category of keywords

which are long tail keywords long tail keyword phrases will have four or more words like used cars douglas georgia and as you can see compared to the previous examples like cars or used cars the intent for used cars douglas georgia is much clearer it's also a much less competitive keyword for example according to scm rush cars has a 100 keyword difficulty used cars isn't much better with a 99 keyword difficulty but used cars douglas georgia only has a kd percentage of 12 which will be much easier now i talked about this in the previous video

in the series but the first phase of keyword selection should be 100 based on intent yes keywords should have search volume but cars has tremendous search volume with 823 000 searches every month while used cars douglas georgia only has 320 searches per month but used cars douglas georgia is a far superior option because a it will produce a dramatically higher conversion rate and will likely generate more quality leads by volume and b it's lower competition which means ranking for it will be more profitable overall so now that you know the different types of keywords and

how to think about intent let me show you three awesome ways to find keyword opportunities number one your existing keyword profile so the first place you should find keyword inspiration is from what you're already ranking for and these keywords are the best because google is already signaling that you're doing something right to show up now go into semrush and enter your domain into the search go to organic research and click on positions now you'll have access to all the keywords your website is ranking for within the top 100 and i like to categorize existing keywords

into three different buckets first low hanging fruits which are keywords ranking from positions 2 to 15. and these are the keywords you should attack right away just click on the positions drop down and go to the custom range enter 2 and 15 to see all of your low hanging fruits and to take it a step further filter this set of keywords based on kde percentage start with 0 to 14 in the very easy range to find the lowest competition opportunities now keep in mind you'll need to prioritize keywords based on intent and relevance as well

more on this in a second the next type of keywords are from position 16 to 50 which i label as existing they are also good targets but they should be second on the priority list after low hanging fruits and the final category of keywords are from positions number 51 to 100 which i personally call clustering opportunities if a page isn't ranking in the top 50 then there's a good chance that the page isn't targeted enough for example look at this keyword that scm rush is ranking number 52 for which targeting option is best for achieving

brand awareness notice that the page is about youtube targeting options this page isn't targeted enough to rank for this long tail keyword phrase this is a perfect clustering opportunity because you can create a dedicated page for this particular keyword phrase and it will rank much better just remember google's number one goal is to deliver the most relevant results possible so with that said these clustering opportunities are an awesome way to capture more organic search traffic and build more topical relevance which will improve the performance of all pages in that cluster take advantage of it the

next method for finding keyword opportunities is to use semrush's keyword magic tool so while in sem rush go to the keyword research section and click on keyword magic tool now there's no right or wrong way to begin your search but the key is to leverage the filters so let's use seo for example this head keyword is extremely competitive and should be avoided pretty much at all costs however we can use it as a seed to find better opportunities so let's use the filters to get started i like to start with the lowest kd and then

work my way up so what you'll notice right away in this case is that there's a ton of irrelevant keywords and you can combat this in two ways first set the language filter to only show the target language in this example it's english and next use the exclude filter to eliminate more irrelevant keywords i've added five to this filter and then at this point you should be left with a nice pool of perspective keywords add each relevant keyword to your keyword list and then repeat this process going further up the kde ladder and once you've

tapped out all keywords specific to the broad topic of seo or whatever your broad topic is you should go to wikipedia and look for relevant subtopics within the larger vertical in the case of seo i found website traffic site maps keywords inbound links meta tags and the list goes on and on use these as seed phrases to find even more untapped ideas in sem rush so the two methods i just showed you are more than enough to build a large keyword database however to take it to the next level i recommend taking advantage of google's

people also asks section bringing me to point number three which is use alsoast.com this tool is incredible for finding all phrases from google's people also ask section and these long tail keyword phrases are a powerful way to build topical relevance and attack keywords that no one else is paying attention to so how do i know that well because most of these phrases won't have search volume in the traditional keyword research tools however you can conclude that these are real searches occurring on google because google wouldn't show them as options in the first place in short

the people also ask section is giving you real-time keyword validation now the tool also asks streamlines this entire process just enter your keyword in this case i'll use seo again and the first tier of ideas might be competitive but you'll strike gold in the second tier and so on because it gets more granular as you go all right so now you should have a nice database of keyword opportunities but how do you decide what keywords are best to target well that's when keyword qualification comes into play but before you can qualify keywords i need to

cover one very important point you need to select a primary keyword so let's say you have a page that's ranking for st louis personal injury lawyer personal injury lawyer st louis and even st louis injury attorney these are all variations of the same primary keyword and therefore they should be targeted on the same page now the key is to select whichever variation has the most search volume but let's say you also want to rank for st louis car accident lawyer well this keyword has a totally different intent and therefore deserves its own dedicated page so

as you go through the following process just remember one primary keyword per page so with that said there are several key factors that should help you filter through your list of keywords number one your current position so if you have existing keywords that are ranking well these should be prioritized number two minimum search volume i recommend a minimum of 100 searches per month for most industries however if it's local you may want to adjust this downward number three keyword difficulty so focus on low competition keywords first and then work your way up as your site

builds more topical authority and acquires more backlinks number four focus on keywords with transactional intent first and then work your way up the funnel to broader targets number five relevance always prioritize keywords that are hyper relevant to your core offerings for example if i sell seo training keywords like seo training boston are super important however a keyword like seo tools isn't as important because it isn't directly relevant to my core offer yes it's broadly relevant but it should not be high on the priority list number six is trend if you're struggling to pick a keyword

then pick the one that's trending the best you can find trending data using semrush's keyword research tool on the overview tab and number seven is ctr potential and this is the final consideration for qualifying keywords which is the potential organic click-through rate for example if there are many cert features and ads then your ctr will be lower so with semrush you can easily see at a glance how many cert features are present by looking under the serp features column so use these seven factors to find the best keyword opportunities but once you've selected a nice

pool of 50 to 100 keywords then you need to decide which ones are best to target in priority order and that's when keyword prioritization comes into play now there are a few factors you can use to prioritize your keyword set and it largely has to do with resources and that said you'll want to prioritize keywords based on content and backlinks for content you'll need to gather word count targets for each individual keyword so go into scm rush go to the on page and tech seo section and click on on page seo checker now you'll need

to run each primary keyword through this tool and collect the target word count and then go to the top ten benchmarking tab and look under content length semrush will show you the average for the top ten and this should be your target and the goal is by identifying the ideal length it's going to help us estimate what our budget will be the second part of prioritization is based on backlinks go to the keyword tool and find the primary keyword in this case i'll use used cars douglas georgia scroll down to serp analysis and look under

ref domains which stands for referring domains this is the total number of unique domains linking to each ranking page i recommend getting the overall average of these top 10 ranking pages repeat this process for every primary keyword and let's just say it costs 300 to acquire a backlink based on time and resources you can now estimate based on content length and the total number of backlinks how much it will cost to rank for this keyword and then from there you can prioritize keywords that have the lowest investment or in other words which will be the

most profitable to rank for so that is how you do keyword research like an seo pro now the next phase of the seo process is to conduct a complete step-by-step seo audit and don't worry you don't need a phd in computer science to conduct and audit you just need to know what to look for and how to prioritize what you find and that's what will be the focus of the next video in this free seo training series so please subscribe and hit the bell button because you'll get first access when it goes live now will

you do me a huge favor if you got value out of this video please like it right now and thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video