Keyword research is one of the easiest and the most important process in online marketing. By finding the best keyword for your content, you can rank for that keyword and attract potential customers to your website. Keyword research is not about finding the most popular search terms on the internet, but targeting the people in your niche and try to rank for it.

So how to do keyword research for content marketing? Here I go through every single step of finding a good keyword, each step is a must have, don’t miss any one of them.

Long Tail Keyword

Aiming popular keyword like “make money” that has over 50K searches per month seems to be a perfect choice, but do you know these popular keywords make up less than 30% of all searches?

The other 70% is the so-called “long tail keyword”, for instance, “best ways to make money online” which has only about 700 searches per month, but these very specific long tail keywords make up 70% of all searches and convert the most.

There are two particular reasons why you should always use the long tail keyword:

People in Your Niche

Let’s say you choose the keyword “make money”, this includes investment niche, stock niche, cryptocurrency niche, offline marketing niche and many other make money niches. When you choose “best ways to make money online” as your keyword, you are only targeting the make money online niche.

Long tail keyword can narrow down your targeted audience, the more specific is your audience, the higher the conversion rate.

People Who are Ready to Buy

People who search for “iPhone” are probably just browsing or find its images, they are not ready to buy it, but if someone searches for “iPhone X 256GB space gray price and review”, he is most likely ready to buy that phone.

Low Hanging Fruit

Just like a fruit tree, the best fruits are on the top of the tree but they are the hardest to get, fruits that hanging lower are not so sweet but are easy to get. Keywords that have a crazy amount of traffic will normally have tons of competition, if you are not an authority in your niche, it’s nearly impossible to rank for those popular keywords.

We all want to rank on the first page, the ideal way is to find low competition keywords or low hanging fruit keywords. When you receive more traffic and start to rank, you can then gradually target more competitive keywords.

The low hanging fruit strategy can be used forever no matter you are an authority or a new website, its how you can constantly get traffic.

Keyword Competition

So how to define what keyword is a low hanging fruit keyword, first we need to check keyword competition. The competition (QSR) we are talking about is the number of websites that rank for the exact keyword.

Our goal is to find a keyword that has less than 100 competition and at least 30 searches per month. It’s not a strict rule, its OK to use a keyword has 110 competition and 25 searches, but it’s better to reach that goal.

Trying to avoid keywords like “how to make money online”. Although the amount of traffic is very tempting, the competition is so high that you won’t get any traffic.

Keywords like “the best way to earn money online from home” are very great, not only it reaches the goal but also not deviates from the original keyword. We are targeting the same group of people but with a lower competition keyword.

SERP Competition

SERP stands for search engine results page, basically, SERP is search results. Most people only focus on the keyword competition and forgot the importance of SERP competition.

SERP competition is the competition between you and other authority websites, for instance, Wikipedia, Amazon, CNN or Google.

Some keywords may have very low keyword competition, but the websites you are competing with are authority websites, the SERP competition is so high that you still have no chance to rank for it.

The quickest and the easiest way to find out SERP competition is to search your keyword in Google and see who are your competitors.

Make Sense

When you are doing keyword research, you will find some keywords that have very low competition and high traffic, like “make money online home”.

Yeah, people will definitely search this kind of words on the internet, but you should never try to rank for keywords that have a grammatical mistake and don’t make human sense. Why? Imagine you are searching “make money online home” and here are the search results…

How to Make Money Online From Home

5 Legit Ways to Earn Money Online

Easy Ways to Make Full-time Income Online

Make Money Online Home

Which one will you click? Definitely not “make money online home”.

Alphabet Soup Technique

This will happen to us sometime, when you run out of content or keyword ideas. The best way to fix this is let Google help you, this is called alphabet soup technique.

You need to choose your root word first, in the example I’m using “make money”. Start from “a”, what I do is I typed “make money a” in the search bar, Google will show any related words start with “a”.

And then I typed “b”, “c”…

Alphabet soup technique is a good way to find out what other people are searching for, this can give me some rough ideas what other people need, I can then do keyword research, find the best keyword and write my content.

Keyword Research Tool

Having the right tool can not only help you find the best keyword but also make the process much easier. The keyword research tool I’ve always been using is Jaaxy.

Jaaxy shows keywords in a very clear way, I can know the traffic and the competition for each keyword immediately. In fact, the screenshots I took earlier are all from Jaaxy. It’s more than a keyword research tool, you can actually do alphabet soup technique inside Jaaxy, the site rank feature can check your ranking in Google, and more… read my full review.

But first, let’s see what you have learned and give it a try.

Do you have any other tricks of doing keyword research or do you have any question about these steps? Leave a comment below, and if you enjoy this post, please share it with your friends!!