Keyword research is a big part of search engine optimisation. You need to make sure that you’re optimising your website for keywords that people are searching for. If no-one is searching for the phrases you’ve optimised your site for it’s a waste of your time. And time is money my friend. If you’re just dipping your toes into the SEO waters you’re probably looking to keep costs down, at least until you get the hang of it. And in this post I’m going to show you how to do keyword research for free.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
How to do keyword research
Before we get stuck into how to do keyword research for free I want to cover the basics of keyword research.
Keyword research, as the name suggests, is the process of researching which keywords and keyword phrases are being searched for on search engines. We need to make sure that people are searching for the phrases we want to optimise our sites for.
To do keyword research you’ll need to use a keyword research tool (I’m going to be talking about free keyword research tools further down).
In a nutshell you’re looking to be as niche as possible with your keywords, with the highest search volumes, but the lowest competition. Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? I explain in more detail below.
Specificity / Niche
The real magic is making your keywords niche enough so that you know that the people searching for them are definitely interested in your content or your service.
Niche is the one thing almost all business coaches and consultants talk about because it helps you weed out the people who aren’t for you. You’ll also eliminate a lot of your competition (SEO-wise and business-wise) because not everyone in your industry will have your specialism or expertise.
Ideally when you do your keyword research you’re looking for keyword phrases between 4-6 words long. These are often called long-tail keywords. That should be enough to let you get really specific with them.
Search Volume
When looking for keywords we want to make sure there are enough people search for our chosen keywords to make it worth our while optimising our websites for them.
As your keywords get more specific the search volumes will go down. Whenever you get more niche in whatever you’re doing you’re effectively narrowing the pool of interest BUT a bigger percentage of those people will be looking for your help.
There’s no hard and fast rule about how low is too low a search volume, but here is how I go about choosing.
Usually I’m looking for keyword phrases with no lower than 50 searches per month unless I find a cluster of similar phrases where I know I can easily fit them all into a single piece of content.
There’s no real reason for cutting off at 50 other than knowing that it takes time to create high quality content, especially a blog post. And 50 searches per month seems like a good cut-off point for that effort. You might feel differently and that’s OK. Go with what feels comfortable to you.
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Competition
Search engines are a competitive place. Everyone is vying for that number one spot in Google’s search results. And some of those websites will have SEO experts on retainer and they’ll have big budgets too.
So, along with checking search volumes, this is one of the most important parts of keyword research. You want to target keywords that don’t have lots of other websites trying to rank for them.
As you get more specific with your keywords, just like search volumes, competition should go down too. Like I mentioned earlier around niching, not everyone in your industry does what you do in the way you do it, with your experience and expertise.
Caveats
There are a couple of situations where the guidelines I mentioned above go out of the window.
Blog posts
When you’re writing blog posts I follow all the advice I’ve given you here with one exception. If I’m writing a blog post that has information my clients need to know or that helps them choose to work with me. For example I recently wrote a blog post on how to choose a web designer. The competition for my chosen keywords there was slightly higher than I would choose normally, but I felt it was a worthwhile piece of content to have on my site.
Pages vs posts
It’s much trickier to SEO the standard pages on your website (home, about, services etc.) than a blog post.
One of the main reasons I write blog posts is for the SEO benefits, so I write the post around the keywords.
It’s not quite so simple on a home page, for example. There will be certain information that you have to have on a home page, like services, bio, calls to action, testimonials etc. And they won’t naturally lend themselves to being optimised, and you’ll find that if you try, it won’t sound right.
You’ll probably need to make trade-offs here with your search volumes and competition. Because there is only so many ways you can phrase what you do in your business without people getting confused. So if you find that you have to use competitive keywords, then you’ll have to use competitive keywords. There’s no way about it.
But this is where having a blog can really come into it’s own, because it gives searchers another avenue to find your site. If you have a really highly optimised blog where you provide high quality information, your visitors will get curious and check out your offers.
How to do keyword research for free
I have a couple of free keyword research tools that I use weekly for my content.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Some people are put off signing up for an account because it asks for payment details during the sign up process and asks you to allocate some money on an ad campaign. BUT you can set it up with as little as £1 and then stop the campaign before any money is spent.
This is the tool Google provides its ads users therefore the information it gives around keywords and competition here has to be as accurate as possible. Otherwise their ad customers might not get the results they expect, which may cause them to go elsewhere. There is some trial and error when running ads, but the data needs to be good for customers to make educated decisions on their ad spend.
If you use this tool along with others and you get differing information, this is the one I would believe over the other as it’s come straight from Google. Other tools might use Google information but there may be a lag. You can bet that Google will make sure it’s own tool has the most up to date data before 3rd party tools.
Using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner
- Log into the Google Adwords keyword planner
- Type in a topic or an idea for the keywords you want to research and search
- You’ll be presented with a list of keywords with the average monthly searches and competition.
- The keywords you provided will be at the top.
- Order by competition by clicking on the Competition heading (one click will sort high to no competition, the second click will order no competition to high)
- Choose the keywords you want to use
Ubersuggest
This is more than a keyword research tool – it’s like an SEO hub. You can search for keywords using the keyword research tool, but you can also set up a project which monitors the SEO performance of your site.
It adds new functionality all the time including:
- monitoring competitor websites – so you can see what keywords your competitors rank for
- monitoring your own content – identifying opportunities for your site to rank higher
- AI writer – to help you write better content quicker
- keyword generator – based on your current site content and your competitors
The only drawback is that you get 3 free searches per day, but there is a free chrome browser extension where you get more free searches per day.
Using the Ubersuggest keyword research tool
- Log into Ubersuggest if you have an account, if not you’ll still be able to use the keyword research tool
- Type in the topic or phrase you want to research
- Choose a country from the drop down list (choose the country you do most business in)
- Click search
- You’ll see a table of results with search volumes and SEO difficulty (competition). Ubersuggest assigns each phrase a number between 1-100 to signify how competitive it is. Any numbers in green are what it considers low competition
- Choose the keywords you want to optimise for your site
Do you want more dream clients to visit your website via search engines?
Is your website not quite the lead generating machine you’d hoped?
Maybe it’s beautiful, but no-one’s visiting, let alone dream clients?
It could be time to look at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), to make it easier for dream clients to find you via Google.
It could be time for the SEO: Simplified Workshop.
I promise it’s not as scary as it sounds.
How to do keyword research for free: summary
- In this article we discussed what keyword research is and how to do it
- I covered why niche keywords are best, what to consider with search volumes and competition
- There are a couple of caveats with niche, search volumes and competition when it comes to different types of content
- My go to free keyword research tools are Ubersuggest and the Google Adwords keyword planner and I talked about how to use them
- I recommend tracking your keyword research so that you don’t accidentally repeat keywords across your site and have it jostling for position with itself.
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