One of the most important factors of SEO is choosing the right keyword(s) as there’s simply no point in ranking for keywords that never get searched and so this is a guide to carrying out such keyword research. There are several options available to you and some of free whereas others cost money, you can get all that you need with the free services though and so you don’t have to pay for advanced keyword research services.
So the best place to start is with the Keyword Planner from Google, with this you can simply enter a keyword and it will then return the search volume of that keyword as well as lots of other related keywords and their search volume too. They used to provide accurate search volume data but you now need to have an Adwords account with some good spend in order to get that data and so if you don’t have such an account then you are going to have to put up with mere ranges for the search volume data.
So from that you can get some great keyword ideas, another great thing that you can do with Google is to simply search for your keywords as it will give suggestions as you type and so from that you can see other popular choices and so there are often gems to be found doing this. And as well as that they also often show related keywords on the search results page and so that can also be a great source of keywords.
Then if you are looking for more advanced data then there are lots more options that are available to you. There are services like Moz which can offer SEO difficulty data so that you can tell how hard it is to rank for a keyword and Moz also offer a full keyword research tool which is amazing at finding keywords. And then there are also services like SEMrush as Ahrefs which offer Seo tools that tell you what your competitors rank for and use on Adwords and so these can give thousands of keywords for popular web sites and again unearth a huge amount of amazing keywords.
So once you have your large list of keywords you then need to plan on how you are going to use them. The best thing to do is to group them into tight groups (you can do this in Excel) and so with this you can use each group on one page of your web site and so it gives a brilliant way of seeing the pages that you will need on your web site. And of course the more tightly you group the keywords the more specific the pages will be on your web site and this means that they will likely do better in the rankings as pages that are very specific usually do better for those specific keywords.
So you then just need to optimise your web site really well for those keywords and so making sure that you use them well in your content (include lots of variety and so plurals and synonyms etc) and also make sure that the keywords are used well in your meta data and this should see the pages ranking well for those keywords.
So that is our guide to keyword research and with this you can easily find the best keywords for your web site and become a true keyword research legend.