2020 Ultimate Checklist for your Keyword Research (Updated from 2019)

You must have done some type of research in your life while working on any project to make right strategies for yourself.

Same is needed while choosing the best keyword for your website. One should do a proper Keyword research before finalizing the keywords

You can convert the number of your visitors to the customer by just using right keywords.

What is a keyword?

Keyword is that word or words/phrase, which people use in the search engines to find something, related that words or phrase

For example, one person wants to know about leather shoes but has no idea about leather shoes. He wrote that phrase in the search bar of a search engine. The search engine brought him lots of results. Thus, he got an idea about leather shoes. Here, “leather shoes” is a keyword.

What is Keyword Research?

It is the research which identifies a popular word or phrase related to your website which people are searching.You get to know the search volume of that phrase. This can be done with the help of Keyword Research Tools. What are some useful tools you will get to know in this blog.

Importance of Keyword Research

Keyword Research is one of the most important activities that you need to carry out in order to make it easy for people to find your website on Google or any other search engine.

Just by using the right keywords you can not only be able to attract visitors but also can convert them into customers. There are many online tools that can help you to find the best-suited keyword for your site. Nowadays there are many institutes which provide free Digital Marketing Course in which they properly teach you how actually you should do keyword research and its impact on your Google rank. While doing keyword research it’s important to pay attention to a type of keywords.

 

To help you we have come up with our comprehensive checklist which will help you selecting the right keyword for your website

Before going through checklist one should know

STEP WISE DETAIL OF EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO DO A KEYWORD RESEARCH

You must have gone through plenty of resources online on how to conduct a Keyword Research for your Search Engine Optimization / SEO campaigns. And yes literally I have myself dived into a lot of them.

So the question really is why another Checklist… I know you know all the details about Keyword Research (in case you don’t, then click here),  but the most important and difficult task is to give perspective to our Keyword Research and not get carried away by using various Keyword Research Tools.

And most importantly not to miss on any of the keyword research steps in the changed environment of 2020.

Of these some have been spot on like the one in MOZ, which provides the comprehensive guide to doing a keyword research. They have rightly given this topic such importance as emphasised by the following lines:

Moz SEO says,

“Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. Keyword research checklist helps you in researching your market’s keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.

It’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of
consumers in virtually any niche.”

Hubspot has their own Guide to Keyword Research. After going through loads of Guide on Keyword Research, Keyword Analysis Tools etc, I have come down to the following Keyword Research Checklist of Steps to Execute a Perfect Keyword Research/Analysis in 2020

Step 1: Understand your Customer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most important task is to understand your Customer. To become keyword research expert, you have to understand the importance of knowing your customers. There are several ways about how one can understand their customer that will help you in keyword research and analysis.

I have personally found the following Blog very useful to understand the customer. It defines 12 ways to understand the Customer.

 

Step 2: Build your Buyer Persona

Buyer Persona is essentially the key takeaways from our understanding of the customer. There are many templates for Creating Buyer Persona.

Primarily you need to answer the questions as shown in the following example:

You can use following tools to Create a Good Buyer Persona.

• Makemypersona.com
• Upandclosepersona.com
• Buyerpersona.com/resources

Step 3: Create your Seed List

By creating your seed list we create a list of keywords which is being used by our target audience. We should use the following steps to create a Seed List
of Keywords:

1. Getting the Buyer Persona on Board

2. Find the search terms in use by the Buyer

3. Get some Suggestions for the above search terms. You can use the following Tools to get more suggestions ( Please click here to understand on how to use each of these Tool )

a. Google Keyword Planner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This shall give you a fair idea on the search volumes a particular keyword is having. But please remember this is purely with reference to PPC Campaigns.

 

b. KeywordTool.io

 

c. Ubersuggest.org

 

d. Keyword Discovery

Step 4: Segment your Seed List using Big Bang Theory of Keyword Research

Next step for your keyword research is segmenting your seed list of keywords using the Big Bang Theory. Click here to know the entire process of Using the Big Bang Theory of Keyword Research


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Step 5: Expand your list using Keyword Research Tool

Once you have segmented the entire list of Keywords using Step 4, you need to expand your list using more Keyword Research Tools. Some of the popular ones that I use are:

 

1. Google Auto Complete: This is an amazing Tool to understand what are people searching right now. Keywordtool.io & Ubersuggest use this feature of
Google only for making suggestions.

 

2. MetaGlossary.com: This tool uses high traffic definitions around the Web to give ideas on Keyword Suggestions.

 

3. Amazon.com: This is the mother of all E-Commerce. So for products this one surely suggests some great keywords

 

Step 6: Check your Competition

This step is very necessary to understand more about what the best in business are using and doing to get more and more traffic. When doing keyword research for E-commerce then it is very beneficial to check your competition. I use following tools to
understand the competition and get keyword ideas from them.

 

a. Niche Laboratory: It fetches all the Top 10 Search Results on entering your suggested keyword and gives you a report on what the Page Title & Meta Title is. You can identify your target keywords from there and find several other good ranking keyword ideas.

 

b. SpyFu: It clearly tells you about what are the kind of keywords that the competition is ranking for and bidding upon. Though it’s a paid tool but is very insightful. It saves you a lot of hardwork to do.

 

c. Moz.com:
Moz has been my personal favourite. Apart from the host of things it does, Moz’s paid tool also offers better competitor analysis insights for you to use and expand your keyword research.

Step 7: Refine your Keyword List

Next up is refining your keywords list. These are the things you must do to refine your list:

1. Identify various categories of keywords and refine them on those category lines. For example: In case you have Hair Oil and Shampoo.
Then Hair Oil shall be one Category and Hair Shampoo shall another category. Google Keyword Planner provides some good categorization

2. Search Landscape: Taking cues from Step 6 about Competition, you need to identify about how difficult it can be to rank on a particular keyword. MOZ helps in providing this data. Conducting this research shall make you even more targeted and focused and your shall make early inroads in SERP’s

3. Make a list of Negative Keywords:
This list is very important to ensure that no resources and efforts are being wasted on keywords that are ambiguous. This is a beneficial step in keyword research. For Eg: In case your keyword is Paris Hilton Perfumes, then it would be better idea of getting Paris Hilton (exact match) to negative keywords list.

Advanced Strategies and Tips

Above mentioned steps will give you the desired result but after you are done with the basic it is necessary to know the higher version of all this as to win with big players who are working on the advanced level. So, talking straight about the tips.

1. Barnacle SEO :It is the practice of using other sites authority to be on the top rank of the page. for exp

I wrote an article based on keyword research tool on my website and when searched then it is on the rank 1, you will think it’s great but no, it’s not great. It is only one spot in the SERPs.

So, what I will do I will also create YouTube video optimized for that same keyword and that video will also get one spot and ranks number 1 on the page. Here I have a total of two spots and the probability of getting more readers got increased.

Bottom Line: The moment you get an awesome keyword then first create content on your website and then opt for an optimized keyword on other authority sites like YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

2.GSC Keyword Research: Google Search Console is a keyword-rich mine, if used properly then will able to get some fantastic results.

It is a powerful strategy as it will make you super focussed on the specific keywords.

3. Optimize Content around Synonyms and related keywords:

IT is true that by applying specific keywords you will get a good number of fall but opting for more related keywords and synonyms will increase the number of readers on your website.

4. Ahrefs Content Gap: This will help you to take the competitor analysis to the next level.

5. Analyse Keywords Based on Searcher Intent

6. Find “Shoulder Keywords”

These keywords are not what you are selling to your buyers but the keywords your customer is searching for.