18 Tips for Google Keyword Research + Top Tools

Only when you have done keyword research can you start designing your landing pages with the right content, provide backlinks with the right anchor.

The basis of search engine marketing is keyword research. Always. Only when you have done keyword research can you start designing your landing pages with the right content, provide backlinks with the right anchor texts, and that kind of thing.

Needs, thoughts, and fears

People enter their thoughts, needs, and fears in the Google search bar. With keyword research, you will investigate the needs, thoughts, and fears of your target group, your potential customers.

Compare Good Keyword Research with Market Research

With good keyword research tools, you will not only find good keywords for your website, which will give you more visitors to your site.

You will also get to know your customer needs better. You can see good keyword research tools as a kind of market research. Which is a big advantage for your business as a whole.

Finding Valuable Keywords

Good keyword research is all about finding valuable keywords.

Low Competition

Valuable keywords are keywords on which, realistically, it should be possible to get a top position in Google. This has to do with the competition on the keywords. The less competition there is on a keyword, the easier it will be to obtain a top position in Google (quickly).

Commercial Intent

Valuable keywords are keywords that have a commercial intention. Keywords with commercial intent will convert well and lead to sales and leads.

The commercial keywords will have to fit in well with the product or service offering. They will have to be relevant to the business.

Sufficient Volume

Finally, there will have to be sufficient search volume on a keyword to justify the investment. To rank well on a keyword, investment is always required, in the form of time, money, or both.

The Google Keyword Planner

The Google keyword planner is a tool within Google AdWords. This tool is actually intended for Google AdWords ads but is also suitable for keyword research.

Almost everyone who does keyword research will use the Google keyword planner. And for many, the Google keyword planner is the only tool that people use for keyword research.

The Google keyword planner provides keyword suggestions for "your product or service".

An example

If, for example, I request ideas for an accountant in the Google keyword planner, I get 491 suggestions.

Suggestions such as self-employed administration, accounting sole proprietorship, online accountant, bookkeeper requested, I am looking for an accountant, etc.

The Google keyword planner shows me with each keyword suggestion on how often it is searched for each month. What the competition is and what the proposed CPC offer is.

The competition and the proposed offer of course apply to advertise with Google AdWords. In practice, if there is a lot of competition in Google AdWords, there will also be a lot of competition for the organic keywords.

The amount of the proposed bid tells you something about the commercial intent of the keywords. For keywords with a commercial intention, more will be offered in Google AdWords because these keywords convert better.

Also Read: SEO In 6 Steps For Your Website & Hundreds Of Visitors Per Day?

Amazing, right? I do not need more? You might think? Well, the Google Keyword Planner is a great tool but unfortunately, it has some shortcomings for really good keyword research.

The Google Keyword Planner only shows you suggestions that are closely related to what you enter in "your product or service". The tool does not do any further thinking for you. Also, the Google Keyword Planner shows your competitors exactly the same suggestions. As a result, you run the risk of focusing on the same keywords (and therefore competing) together with all your competitors.

I will explain what I mean using an example. I recently needed someone to file the property tax return (sales tax).

I searched for property tax returns in Google and so I ended up on the website of an accountant. There are undoubtedly more people who search for search terms that are related to the services (such as property tax return, income tax return) that a bookkeeper offers.

However, you will not find these potentially valuable suggestions in the list of suggestions provided by the Google keyword planner.

Such suggestions are potentially valuable because your competitors are unlikely to identify them (because they only use the Google keyword planner) and they can lead to conversions.

In this article, we will therefore discuss ways to find keywords, in addition to the Google Keyword Planner, which your competitor is unlikely to find (because it is limited to the Google keyword planner as a tool).

Tip 1: Avoid Keywords

My first tip in keyword research is to avoid main keywords. Main keywords are the keywords that consist of one word such as car.

The main keywords look interesting at first glance because of the huge search volume that is on such keywords. The problem with main keywords, however, is that there is a lot of competition and that they often convert poorly.

For example, someone searching for "car" does not know exactly what his search intention is. Does the seeker want to buy a new car or an occasion or just stay up to date with the latest car news?

If you focus on search terms that consist of more than one keyword, you can focus much better on a target group. For example, you can focus on 'buy used car' or 'used cars Amsterdam', which already has a lot less competition than 'car'.

This does not mean that search terms that consist of one word must by definition avoid. If you are in a niche market it may well be feasible to target your main keywords. It depends a bit on your market.

But in general, it pays to focus on search terms that consist of 2 to 4 words (the long tail keywords). The competition will be less strong and you can use this to attract visitors to your site who are willing to purchase.

Tip 2: Google Related Search

If you search for something in Google, you will see the following at the bottom of the page:

Google shows search terms that are related to your search query. For "occasions Amsterdam" these are, for example, "cheap occasions Amsterdam" and "car companies used car Amsterdam". Google has learned that people who also searched for these search terms on "occasions Amsterdam".

If you have a car company that sells used cars at the bottom of the market, you can deduce from these related keywords that it is worthwhile to set up a landing page for cheap used cars Amsterdam. After all, people look for it.

In order to get new keyword ideas again, you can search for "cheap occasions Amsterdam" to see which related searches Google provides for this search term. And so you can continue to deepen a search term.

With the help of the Google Keyword Planner, you can retrieve the volumes of the search terms that you have found in this way. Based on the volume, you can determine whether the search term is worth your investment in time and/or money.

Tip 3: Know Who Your Customer is

Understanding who your customer is can be a great help in your keyword research. If you have insight into who your customer is, you can ensure that they find you, even if they are not directly looking for you!

On the basis of a customer profile, you can calculate where your customer is located (on the internet). For a customer profile, you must have insight into things such as:

• Sex
• Age
• Location
• Family composition
• Income scale
• Educations
• Hobbies and interests

What do they want to achieve, in life or in their career

Suppose you sell protein shakes and your average customer's profile is that they are male, ages 18 to 24, and you know they are interested in a muscular body.

With your protein shakes you do not only have to focus on keywords such as "protein shake", "buy protein shake", "order protein shake", etc.

You can therefore focus on what keeps your customer busy. For example, you can set up landing pages on which you provide strength exercises or nutritional advice for young men for gaining muscle mass.

And so you can come up with something for most branches.

Tip 4: What Are The Thoughts and Fears of Your Customers

Identifying the thoughts and fears your potential customer is struggling with can also be a great way to find keywords.

And the great thing is that you don't even have to ask your customers this. You can simply find what your potential customer is struggling with online: on internet forums.

If you never visit forums then I recommend you take a look around forums like forum.viva.nl and forum.scholieren.com. Under the anonymity of a nickname, one really dares to ask anything. Their thoughts and fears are exposed (anonymously).

For us marketers, this provides a nice insight into the fears and thoughts that our potential customers have.

If you want to know what the fears and thoughts are with your potential customers, search Google for your "keyword + forum". You will then find the forum threads of various forums where people exchange thoughts about your keyword.

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To cite the example of the protein shakes again: if you look on forums you will find threads about "when protein shakes", "protein shake after exercise?", "Can you leave a protein shake?". These are things that keep your potential customers busy and there is a good chance that people search for these keywords in Google.

With the Google keyword planner you can then find out how often these keywords are searched. So that you can assess whether it is worthwhile to set up a separate landing page for this.

Tip 5: The Scrapebox Keyword Scrapper

If you search for something in Google, Google will show your keyword suggestions based on what you can enter.

If you enter "hotel a", Google will suggest "hotel Amsterdam", "hotel Antwerp" etc.

For every letter behind "hotel" you get suggestions based on what people are searching for in Google.

If you search for "hotel Amsterdam a" you will get even more suggestions such as "hotel Amsterdam Arena" and "hotel Amsterdam airport".

All of these suggestions are potential keywords to target because you know that people are using these keywords in Google.

Now you can manually dig out the keyword suggestions in Google by typing in your keyword + a letter each time. But that is very labor intensive. There is software that can do that for you. An interesting software tool for this is the Scrapebox keyword scrapper.

You install this software on your PC. You enter your main keywords and then you choose "Append A-Z", this ensures that the software will enter your keyword + the letters of the alphabet in Google. The suggestions of what data is collected by the Scrapebox software.

You can also choose to let other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo search this way. This will give you a large list of keyword suggestions. The duplicate keywords are automatically filtered out.

You can make an export of the keyword suggestions found. You can then import this export into the Google Keyword Planner so that you know how much search volume there is on your found keywords.

Tip 6: Google Trends

If you have chosen a number of keywords that you want to focus on, it can be useful for certain industries to first view your keywords with Google Trends.

You can then see whether interest in a keyword is increasing or decreasing (or whether it is stable). This prevents you from putting a lot of time and energy into ranking on a search term that will be used less and less.

Using Google Trends, you could also determine how the demand for your products or services is developing.

If you look up the trend for a specific keyword in Google Trends and then scroll down, you will see the trends for related searches.

In the image below, Google Trends shows the development of keywords that are related to the keyword "keywords". As you can see in the picture, there is an upward trend (+ 300%) for the keyword "keyword research". A sign that more and more people are becoming aware of the importance of keyword research.

Tip 7: Google Search Console

The Google Search Console was called Google Webmaster Tools in the past. And if you are not using this yet, I advise you to do this.

The Google Search Console will alert you if problems (such as dead links, duplicate page titles or malware) are found on your site.

The Google Search Console also shows you which keywords your website is found on. It shows you where you are listed in Google for different keywords and it shows you how often your webpage has been shown in Google and what the Click Through Rate (CTR) to your site is.

In the Google Search Console you will find this data under Search traffic à Search analysis. You can download this data and open it in Excel.

I personally find the Google Search Console very valuable for identifying search terms with great potential. In practice, it is often the case that you rank on keywords that you have not (primarily) focused on.

Also Read: How to Use SEO to Drive High Quality Organic Traffic

These are keywords that put you on the second, third, fourth page of Google (or even lower). In other words, Google's desert. A keyword that puts you on the fourth page of Google will bring you little or no visitors because most people don't get that far in Google.

But because you already rank on this keyword, it is easier to get high in Google for this keyword. Much easier than trying to rank for a new keyword.

If you find interesting keywords (keywords with a commercial intention) with which you are low in Google, you can improve your position by giving some love to these keywords. You could fine-tune the content to better target these keywords and build some links using the keywords as anchor text.

Tip 8: Google Correlate

Google Correlate is a tool that shows which words are related to the keyword you enter here.

If you use this tool, make sure you first select Netherlands under "Country".

This tool retrieves the data from web pages where your keyword can be found. For example, if you request the data for the keyword "lose weight" in Google Correlate, you will see that "healthy weight loss" and "fat burning" are related to this.

If you click on "Show more" you will see even more words. You can also download the keywords as .csv. You can then use the keywords that you find interesting as a "seeder" keyword in Scrapebox. We discussed Scrapebox under tip 5.

Tip 9: Find Out The Questions Your Visitors Have

Answer The Public is a great tool to find out what questions your visitors have.

You enter a keyword in the search bar, you choose your country and then you will see which questions people ask about your keyword.

This tool gets its data from Google's auto-suggestion function. The great thing about this tool, from Answer The Public, is that it also provides valuable and useful data for the Dutch market. This is unfortunately not the case with all keyword tools.

Tip 10: Finding Keywords With Commercial Intent

This tool is ideal for finding keywords with a commercial intent. It pulls keywords from sites such as Ebay, Etsy, Amazon, Bing, and Google Trends.

It gives you the keywords that customers use when they want to buy something. Which is very valuable data for obtaining visitors that convert into sales.

Freshkey is a paid software tool. Fortunately, it is only a one-time payment and not a subscription you have to take out. The software costs 49.95 USD.

Tip 11: Finding Long Tail Keywords

A tool for finding long tail keywords is Hit Tail.

This tool generates long tail keyword suggestions based on the keywords on which you are currently getting your website visitors. The tool therefore gives you very specific long tail keywords that suit the audience of your website.

And that is the power of this tool. By analyzing your visitor data, the Hit Tail algorithm learns who your visitors are and what they are looking for.

Another interesting tool for finding long tail keywords is Long Tail Pro. The handy thing about this tool is that you can indicate how much search volume you want for a keyword.

For example, you can automatically filter out all keywords with a monthly search volume lower than 1,000 so that you only have to focus on the keywords that are worth your investment in time or money.

Tip 12: Finding Low Competition Keywords

A tool with which you can find keywords with a low competition is the keyword tool from Jaaxy.

This tool finds out for you how many websites already rank in Google for the keyword you want to target.

The tool also shows you how often your keywords are searched every month and what the expected amount of traffic is.

This tool also shows the "SEO power" of your competitors on the keywords. With this you can quickly assess whether it is possible to conquer the top position in Google.

Tip 13: Bulk Keyword Suggestions

If you want a software tool that can generate a huge number of keyword suggestions for you, Keyword Snatcher is the tool you are looking for.

Keyword Snatcher generates keywords by combining data from different sources such as Amazon, Google, Ebay and Yahoo. For example, I entered "low-carbohydrate diet" as a seed keyword in this tool and got back more than 10,000 generated keywords.

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However, this tool does not show you what the search volumes are for the keywords that are generated. You can find out the search volumes for the keywords by uploading the list in the Google Keyword Planner.

Tip 14: Keywords Based on Autocomplete Suggestions

As discussed earlier in this article, Google will show you autocomplete suggestions when you type something in the search bar.

One tool that combines the autocomplete data from Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing and eBay is Keyword Tool Dominator.

With this tool you gain insight into what your potential customers type in when they are looking for your products or services. This tool is also good for generating long tail keyword suggestions.

Tip 15: SECockpit

SECockpit is known as one of the most advanced keyword research tools.

You can use it to search for keywords with a low competition and you can, for example, enter what the minimum CPC bid in AdWords should be.

Keywords with a low CPC bid in AdWords are usually the keywords that convert poorly while the keywords with a higher CPC bid convert better.

SECockpit also uses the "Searches related to" which you find at the bottom of the Google pages so that you don't miss any keyword ideas.

Tip 16: Copying From Your Competitors

If you know a competitor is serious about search engine optimization, why not just copy them? They have already done the time consuming process of keyword research.

Fortunately, you don't have to hack their Google Search Console or something like that to look at your competitors. You can use software tools that give you a glimpse behind the scenes of your competitor.

At SEMrush you enter the URL of your competitor. Then choose "Pharse Match" under Keyword Analytics, after which you will see which keywords they receive the most traffic (and how much) they receive.

If you use SEMrush without a subscription, you will see the 10 best keywords of your competitor. To see traffic from all keywords, you need to upgrade to the paid version of SEMrush.

SEMrush not only shows how much search volume there is on the keywords, but also what the competition is on these keywords and what the average CPC in AdWords is for these keywords.

SEMrush also shows how many sites advertise in AdWords on these keywords. It also shows how many URLs it found in the organic search results for the keywords. The latter tells you a lot about the expected competition for the keywords.

To collect data via ahrefs.com you do need a subscription (you can purchase a 7-day trial subscription for USD 7).

To discover your competitor's keywords via ahrefs.com, enter your competitor's URL in the bar. Then choose Organic keywords under Organic search.

Then ahrefs shows you on which keywords your competitor's website is found.

The interesting thing about ahrefs, I think, is that they give an accurate indication of the number of visitors they get on the different keywords. This next to the position on which they stand in Google.

If a competitor is number 1 for a certain keyword that I also want to focus on, then I know exactly how many visitors I can expect if I succeed.

The number of visitors that your site actually gets differs (considerably) from the search volume that is on a keyword. Most keyword tools work with search volumes, but the actual number of visitors will be lower.

Ahrefs also shows you the Google AdWords CPC bid and the Keyword Difficulty. A value that indicates the level of competence for a keyword.

What I also find interesting about ahrefs is that they show the landing page where your competitor receives traffic for a certain keyword. By studying your competitor's landing page, you can get an idea of ​​the content that will be needed to outperform your competitor.

Tip 17: Determining the commercial intent of keywords

My first website had more than 1 million visitors per month. I'm not saying that to brag, because I'm not proud of it. I only earned 200 euros per month from those million visitors. At the time, hosting was still very expensive and I paid so much money for the hosting of the website that I only just got off the costs.

I had made a huge beginner's mistake. I had only focused on keywords with a lot of volume and not on the keywords that have a commercial intention.

The keywords I focused on had an informative character. The visitors to my website were looking for information. They weren't looking to buy anything, nor were they looking for a solution to their problems.

Currently I have a website with which I earn an average of one euro from every visitor. Unfortunately, this website doesn't have a million visitors (if only true), far from it. But the visitors who come to this site convert because I focus purely on keywords with a commercial intention.

The question is how you can recognize and value keywords with a commercial intention.

The most interesting keywords are the keywords from which it is clear that the search engine user wants to buy something. The keywords that are used literally a few minutes before the purchase of something. The keywords used by people who have sat behind the computer with their bank card.

These are search terms in which such words are used:

• Order product name
• Buy product name
• Product name discount
• Product name delivered for free
• Product name delivery time

Below follows a category of keywords that show that they intend to purchase something. You are still in the orientation phase. These are keywords such as:

• Product name prices
• Product name costs
• Product name quotation
• What does product name cost
• Compare product name (or product group)
• Rate professional group
• Replace product name

If one has already decided to buy a certain product, keywords such as:

• The specific product name
• The specific product name + review
• The specific product name + ratings
• The specific product name + experiences
• The specific product name + cheap

These are also search terms with a commercial intention.

Informational keywords don't generally convert very well. A strategy to get sales from informative keywords is to entice your visitors to sign up for your newsletter. By regularly sending out a newsletter, you stay on the retina until people have a concrete need for your products and are ready to order.

As discussed earlier in this article, the Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool to determine the commercial intent of keywords.

The recommended CPC (Cost Per Click) bids reveal whether a keyword is commercially interesting. Logical, because advertisers will have more money for keywords that lead to a high conversion.

Tip 18: Quick Way to Determine the Competition

If you have found keywords with commercial intent that you want to target, it is important to determine how much competition there is on your keywords.

The Google Keyword Planner will of course give you a nice indication for this. The higher the CPC bids, the tougher the competition will be. But what you want most is to find out exactly how strong your competition is in the organic search results.

There are several ways to do this. The tools from SEMrush and ahrefs give you an indication of how tough the competition is. However, these are relative values ​​that they themselves have given to websites.

If you really want to know how strong your competition is, you can do a number of things.

You can enter your keyword at Google and analyze the websites that you find in the top positions. You can do this for example with the ahrefs software.

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What you will need to investigate to determine the extent of your competition is the backlink profile of your competitors. The more backlinks they have, the more difficult it will be to steal the top positions.

To be able to estimate the competition for a keyword at a glance, you can use the MozBar. This extension for the Chrome browser shows in the Google search results what the PageRank of the websites are, the Alexa rank and the number of backlinks this site has.

The PageRank value of a website nowadays does not say much anymore because it is not or hardly updated anymore. Therefore, the MozBar shows proprietary values ​​which they assign to web page to express the authority of a web page in a value. This lets the MozBar be as PA and DA value. Where a PA and a DA value of 100 are the highest and best values ​​that a web page can achieve.

If you want to rank for a keyword, you are looking for low PA and DA values ​​on the first page of Google for your keyword.

I am in favor of also judging the competition based on the content they have on their landing page for a certain keyword.

If a competitor has a lot of backlinks while he has a lousy piece of content on his landing page, then I dare to compete. In that case, they owe their top position in Google purely to the amount of backlinks they have.

However, a good ranking is the result of several factors in which, in addition to backlinks, good content is an important second ranking factor. I will need fewer backlinks for my website if I make sure that my content is simply much better than that of my competitor.

To estimate the value of the content, you can look at the number of words of content that your competitor has on its page.

If your competitor only has 300 words of content, you can, for example, write 1000 words on this topic. Furthermore, the readability and quality of your content is of course also important and not just the number of words. However, this is not measurable (can only be assessed).

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You can also look at other on-page factors that may be weak for your competitor. Maybe their site loads very slowly or they are not making good use of page titles and meta discriptions. These are all points where you can easily outperform your competition.

Finally on 18 Tips for Google Keyword Research + Top Tools

Finally, I am very curious about the methods and techniques you can use for keyword research. Share it with us, below in the comments.