Free Keyword Research

This post is super basic. If you know how to do keyword research, it’s not for you. But if it’s something you’d like to learn, this post will teach you the basics of keyword research. It’s meant to be a resource for those of you who have never done this before and would like to learn a little bit about how to do some basic, free keyword research.

Not all my videos are super basic, but after working with lots of clients, I’ve realized that they want to learn how to do a lot of this stuff themselves. I can’t give away all my secrets, but I can give you the most important stuff that will let you do a lot of this stuff on your own. So this video, on keyword research, is an example of that.

Anyhow, below is a pseudo transcript of the video. It’s the document I based the video on.

What is Keyword Research

Knowing how to do some really basic, free keyword research is a huge asset to anyone who has a website. The information garnered through this simple online marketing secret helps site owners to understand how many people look for the subject being written about. Keyword research can also be a good wake up call to site owners reminding them just how immersed they are in their own industry’s jargon.

This is a problem I understand well. As a search marketer who has been in the industry long enough to have been sapped of the ability to talk about internet searching in normal terms, I have made an effort to put this document in language that a person who has never heard of keyword research can understand.

What is a Keyword?

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo send little robots all over the internet called spiders. These spiders go page to page reading the content, and Google depends on complex algorithms they have written to determine what the page is about. When an user goes to Google’s homepage puts a phrase or a word into the search box and searches it, Google uses the information that it has obtained from all the pages that its Spiders have retrieved and delivers results to users based on what it thinks will give that user the most relevant website for their query.

Millions and millions of searches are done every day. So it should come as no a surprise that some of those searches use the same words. Those phrases that people search are called keyword phrases. For simplicity, we call them keywords. The goal of any marketer is to identify keywords that are searched regularly and make a website rank well for them.

There is way more to all of this, but you get the basic idea.

How Do I Find Keywords That Have Lots of Search Volume?

There are several proprietary tools that allow people to find those keywords. But most of them are more helpful for doing competitive research and fall outside the purview of a document on basic keyword research. The best tool for really simple keyword research is the aptly named Google Keyword Tool.

This free keyword research tools is a powerful fountain of knowledge. Google takes all of the searches that users do and gives the information away for free.

You use this tool by typing in a keyword phrase into the top box, and clicking “Get Keyword Ideas”. So long as you keep the “Use synonyms” radio box selected, the Google Keyword Tool will put out a list of keywords that are related to the word you put into the box.

The way I use it is I start with the broadest term or terms I can possibly use, and I let the program output all the related words.

Let me give you an example. In my industry what I do is called search engine optimization. It is oftentimes abbreviated SEO. So, I will search both “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” in order to get a sense for what people are searching for with regard to my own profession.

I then sort the search in ascending order by “Global Monthly Search Volume” by clicking on the link on top of the column, and I make sure that “Broad” is selected under “Match Type”.

The results are interesting. SEO has become kind of a buzzword, and as a result, the acronym “SEO” is searched 5 million times while “search engine optimization” is searched just 823,000 times. Following the broadest search terms, I see that the most searched terms within my industry are “seo services” at 165,000, “seo company” at 135,000 searches, “search engine optimization marketing” at 90,500, and seo optimization at 74,000 searches per month.

The next part of this is guessing. While paid services could assist in this, generally, for more basic keyword research, a little bit of educated guessing will suffice. After thinking about what your article is about, or what your site is about, you make good keyword selections. These keywords should be put all over the article or page in ways that make sense to users and the crawlers. Make sure to include them in your meta description, <h1></h1> tags, <h2></h2> tags, within your site’s <title></title> tag, and within the body of text.

How Many Keywords Should I Target

A good rule of thumb is to select no more than three keywords for a given page. Remember that part of targeting keywords means incorporating them into your content. That said, selecting more keywords dilutes your keyword density which will make it hard to get your site ranking well for things. That means that keyword targeting is a pretty good way to help a person understand how to arrange their site. If you want to rank for more keywords, you should build out more pages that allow you to target those keywords.

I’ve Picked My Keywords; Now What?

Ok, so now that you’ve picked your keywords and written your content that incorporates the keywords you selected. The next thing you do is get some links. There are a lot of in depth tutorials online about getting links. The best way to get them is by asking people you know who also have websites if they can give you links. Just ask them to link to the page you set up with using of the keywords you picked.