Keyword Research Tutorial for 2022

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the surfside ppc youtube channel today is going to be my keyword research tutorial for 2022 so i'm going to go over the exact process i use to do keyword research and how to come up with a keyword list where we can start targeting keywords and topics with our content so ultimately the goal of this video is to drive more conversions for our business by understanding what people are looking for on the internet when they go to different search engines so getting started i want to go through my step-by-step keyword research process basically just four steps here i usually try to find relevant keywords for my business and build a keyword list based on the products or services that i'm offering so you need to really understand what is it that my business offers next you want to organize your keyword list into topics and subtopics from there you want to understand search intent for the different keywords and topics that you've come up with and then last but not least obviously so we can rank in search engines and so we can target keywords with our ppc advertising campaigns through google ads and other advertising platforms we want to create and consistently improve website pages that solve for search intent so you might hear me say keyword intent or search intent throughout this video those are the same exact things it's basically just understanding what people are looking for when they do go to a search engine and they enter a set of keywords so next in order to find keywords what i like to do is go over some different keyword research tools that i like to use i'm not going to be going through any paid keyword research tools in this video there are paid services like scm rush there are paid services like ahrefs so there's a bunch of different options out there that you can choose from but i really want to go through some of my favorite free keyword research tools or at least keyword research tools that have free versions so starting at the top here the google keyword planner is my number one keyword research tool now it's not going to give you every single keyword that you're looking for it's not going to give you every piece of information that you need but using google keyword planner alone you can come up with an endless list of topics that your business can be targeting so that you're driving more conversions keywords everywhere is a chrome extension that i use you probably will see it throughout this video and i'll show you how to use it as well keyword surfer is another chrome extension answer the public comes up with a bunch of questions related to a specific keyword or topic that you enter along with a ton of different keywords as well suval so this is looking at some of the best searches on different search engines and then google search console is for after you've created content after you put out these pages you can see what keywords you are ranking for and where you can continue to optimize now five bonus tools in case you're looking for some additional information keyword tool dot io word tracker seo ability keyword tool dominator and uber suggest so i'm going to go through all these throughout the video and show you how i use them but what i want to do first is i want to get into step one here and with step one i want to show you how to find keywords and build your initial keyword list so the way that i do that is with the google keyword planner and today i'm going to be showing you this from my website farmhousegoals.com so on this website there's farmhouse decorations you can see bedding you can see furniture lighting rugs shelves so all sorts of different farmhouse type products basically anything you would put in your own home i'm trying to find things that are farmhouse themed so coming over to the keyword planner what you can do is go to this page directly if you've never used the keyword planner you will need a google ads account so create a free google ads account and from there what you can do is just click on go to keyword planner and this will open it directly i will put this link in the video description and i will also link to every single keyword tool that i talk about in this video in the video description so you can easily find them but if we open the keyword planner here and you can see i already have this open so if you do have a google ads account go to tools and settings and underneath planning you're going to see keyword planner and that will open up this page right here and usually what i do is i start with discover new keywords and i enter a list of keywords here that i want to expand upon for my own business so in my case for farmhouse goals let's just do farmhouse decor we could do farmhouse furniture farmhouse bedding farmhouse rugs and you can enter up to 10 keywords here usually i don't enter too many keywords we'll just enter five for right now now again you can always come back here and continue to expand your keyword list as you go so just using these seed keywords right here so these are all short tail really popular keywords it's going to help me find a ton of long tail keywords that i can start to target with my own website so you can enter a domain here to use as a filter so using your site will filter out services products or brands that you don't offer but you don't really need to do that so usually what i do is click on get results here okay so after we click on get results if we scroll down here you can see it gave me 8 000 different keyword ideas so that is a huge number of keywords obviously we're not going to target every single keyword and some of them are going to be a little redundant but you're going to see our keywords up at the top here you can adjust location targeting language targeting you can adjust the search engine here but usually i just keep these three as is because that matches for what i'm targeting and then it's going to show you the search volume from the previous 12 months so you have the option to adjust that as well over here on the right hand side you can refine keywords i usually start in the refined keywords here so you can see brand or non-brand i try not to target any branded keywords so i get rid of retailers here you can keep scrolling down they have other brands so a lot of these when people are looking for specific brands i'm not going to target them with my content i'm not trying to rank for when people are looking up amazon or home depot or anything like that i'm just looking for non-brand keywords so next you can adjust different products rooms styles colors and others here all i'm going to do right now is remove the branded keywords so that only got rid of so we went from 8065 to over 7200 so we'll click on x here and open this up a little bit and now what we can do is as we scroll down you can add some filters you can adjust by average monthly searches so i can just say okay show me the keywords with the most average monthly searches so you can start to see some of those here what i like to do is add a filter and i try to remove some where the average monthly searches and you might want to do something like greater than or equal to let's just say 200. now you can adjust this depending on how many keywords total you have you can go maybe down to 50 maybe you want to go up to 500 or a thousand and just focus on some of these really popular keywords at first and then as you go kind of focus on some of these smaller keywords i will tell you keywords that get less average monthly searches are generally easier to rank for just because you don't have as much competition for some of these long tail keywords so let's just go to 200 here and then the other thing i like to do is add another filter so sometimes what i do is keyword text contains and i'm just going to do farmhouse here just because i'm going to get a lot of keywords here that don't contain farmhouse and i really just want to focus on those farmhouse type keywords now i'm down to a little over 1200 keywords you can keep adding filters here so maybe you want to do less search volume or something like that but from here what i usually do is i will just download this so at the top right corner you can see here we can download this you can download it directly into google sheets i usually just download it as a csv file whatever you feel more comfortable working with and you can see here this is the file that we ended up with so in this first column here it's going to have all of our keywords currency it's showing you as dollars i usually just get rid of this and i usually get rid of all of these different columns here as well so if you're interested in some of this data you know how much search volume by different months and you can look at actually average bids through google ads for right now i'm not really concerned with any of that i'm just looking at keywords and average monthly searches now keep in mind if you're using the google keyword planner and you can't see the exact number of average monthly searches you need to run an active google ads campaign however you don't need to get too caught up on these numbers i would really just focus on if you do add filters such as over 200 searches per month that's fine and it will also already rank them by which ones have the most average monthly searches you're just going to get ranges of data which isn't a huge deal so we have our keywords here we have our average monthly searches and this is basically how i build a keyword list so i'm just going to the google keyword planner enter entering some seed keywords that i want to find some more ideas for and you can see these ones at the top have a ton of average monthly search volume so as we start scrolling down here a little bit you're going to get into these ones with about a hundred and you're going to find a bunch of different options here where you might not have nearly as much competition in search engines as you would for something like farmhouse lamps or farmhouse furniture for example farmhouse wine cabinet 480 average monthly searches so if i create a page on my website with the best farmhouse wine cabinets for sale some different themes some different colors maybe some different design ideas then it's going to help me rank much easier than just saying maybe i'm trying to rank for farmhouse cabinets so i know it's going to be tempting to say okay well you know something like farmhouse lighting gets over 12 000 searches per month i'm gonna go all out to just rank for that one keyword a lot of times you're better off focusing on some of these keywords at the bottom as well as these ones at the top because they're going to help drive as much traffic and you need a lot of keywords to drive a lot of traffic so coming back over here that's step one how to find keywords and build your initial keyword list now step two what i want to go over is how to create a list of topics and subtopics based on your keyword list so i've already started doing this so we're gonna kind of fast forward through this a little bit but i'm gonna close this out and i already have a spreadsheet open and you can see i've come up with some different topics and if we scroll down here you're going to see my keyword list right here so i've started to go through some of these main keywords and what i've tried to do is pull out some different topics so for example as we scroll down you might see something here like farmhouse front porch i don't really need to see that as its own topic that's a sub-topic as we come up here of farmhouse porch so if you see over here on the right-hand side i have farmhouse decor as one of my main topics and then within that you're seeing all of these different subtopics here as well so coming back over here you want to create a list of topics and subtopics based on your keyword list so if we come back over you're going to see over here on the left these are all different topics for my business now in terms of farmhouse decor farmhouse furniture it's all going to be product based searches for the most part now there are some people looking for design ideas and things like that so that's where search intent will come in which is step three but we're not going to get there yet so as we come down here i'm going to be doing a lot of examples on farmhouse porches because i haven't created any content on my website about farmhouse porches so i'm going to show you how i would go about targeting that keyword however before i do that the way that i do come up with topics is i'll look at my keyword list and i've gone through a lot of these already so for example farmhouse tables for sale i don't view this keyword any different than farmhouse tables now something like farmhouse decor you could see farmhouse fireplace decor that would be a sub topic for me within farmhouse decor but i would create it's my own separate page of content specific for fireplace decorations farmhouse ottoman that's its own topic in my opinion now something like joanna gaines farmhouse mantle decor i'm not going to target that keyword because it has a brand in there however something like farmhouse baker's rack here that's going to be its own topic so i've actually set a separation here and you can see so i've done a lot of these up top here but as we come down so farmhouse lanterns i would consider that its own topic now it would be within farmhouse lighting that would be basically the topic above this but this is why it's important to come up with topics and subtopics and you're also going to have additional subcategories as well so farmhouse lanterns now you're going to see farmhouse leather sectional so that would be within farmhouse sectionals in terms of topics so i would go up to the top move this keyword up there for right now i'm not going to be doing that so we'll keep coming down okay so we'll keep coming down here and you're going to see a lot of different people looking up dining tables people looking up coffee tables again those are sub topics within a larger topic but farmhouse bathroom accessories that's going to be its own topic so farmhouse bathroom accessories and we'll do a few here so we'll keep coming down so farmhouse office desk that's going to be its own topic and these are going to be pages that i kind of view as i need to create my own separate page of content to make sure that i'm solving what people are looking for somebody looking for farmhouse lanterns is looking for something completely different than someone who's looking for farmhouse chandeliers or farmhouse bathroom lighting so hopefully that kind of makes sense as we go through this because you're going to see things like modern farmhouse desk so i don't view that as i need to target this keyword separately too i would view that as i need to target this keyword when i'm targeting farmhouse desks i need to make sure i have a solution for people who are looking up modern desks so we'll do a few more down here so farmhouse shelf decor i would want to put within farmhouse decor right here farmhouse accent table so i consider that its own topic keep coming down farmhouse mantle so that's another one that i can consider its own topic and again you're going to see coffee table decor dining room chairs recliner so recliner i would consider its own topic and then as i do this i basically just move these topics to the very top so as we come up here all my topics here and we'll just paste it so these are all individual things that i want to make sure i target with my own content but i can also understand you know something like farmhouse fall decor would fit within my farmhouse decor category so hopefully that all makes sense i mean you're not just looking at all these individual keywords and saying okay i need to target this one with a page i need to target this one with a page i need to target this from the page because what you're going to end up doing is creating too many separate pages of content when it's not really necessary for some you can kind of look at it as an overall page that's going to kind of cover a lot of different keywords and i'll show you why in a little bit but for right now step two create a list of topics and subtopics based on your keyword list so what i try to do is go through my keyword list and pull out keywords that i think have should really have their own page that should really have their own solution so it again this is going to vary based on exactly what it is that your business offers because if i come back over to the keyword planner and let's just say i look up keyword research so in the google keyword planner i look up the keyword so i want to make sure we get rid of our filters here i get rid of them in a second but let's just say i'm targeting keyword research i click on get results i need to get rid of these filters so x out okay so i'm looking up keyword research you can see they give me some different things to broaden my search but as i come down here so we're looking at these keywords by average monthly searches so google keyword planner i would consider its own topic within keyword research as we come down here keyword research tools that would be again its own topic but something like google keyword search i probably wouldn't say okay i need to create a page about that as we come down here semrush login i'm not going to create a page about that keyword finder so you might say okay let me create something about keyword finder which is a specific tool that people are using now if we come over here and we just look at keyword by relevance you might see something like keyword tool keyword research tool that's the same exact topic you don't need to create separate pages for all of those keyword finder that's again a tool that would be completely separate so suvil that's one of the tools that i'm going to go over here google keyword search again nothing i would target separately semrush pricing nothing i would target separately so as you come down here you're kind of looking for okay youtube keyword research that's a completely different topic to me than just keyword research because we're just focusing on one search engine keyword search volume so again that's a little bit different that might be something you want to go after within your overall keyword research topic page so by breaking these down into more of topics and subtopics you can kind of get a better understanding of how you're going to organize your content and how you're going to organize your pages so that you are actually solving for the different types of search intent that you're going to come across as you continue to grow your business so next is going to be number three so number three to continue on to kind of what we're just going over understanding search intent for your keywords and topics so i'm going to go through some examples here and let's just say we're talking about the home depot so the home depot has a ton of different keywords that they target if you just come here to all departments you can see all of these different keywords here so they have everything from appliances electrical flooring area rugs paint plumbing so all of these are completely separate so their keyword research process will probably take weeks or even a month or more because you need to find all of these different categories and subcategories and let's just say for example i have a website where i'm selling dishwashers so within appliances i'm selling just dishwashers so what i would probably do is try to target all the different types of keywords that people are going to use as they go through the process of buying a dishwasher it might start with somebody who doesn't know what a dishwasher is what is a dishwasher so you create a page going over exactly what a dishwasher does how it works why it's beneficial now somebody might be looking up best dishwashers so you're going to see 10 best dishwashers 2022 and a bunch of different articles that are very similar to this now people might be looking up specific brands bosch versus kitchenaid dishwasher again bosch first kitchenaid dishwashers reviews and top picks so maybe someone's just hooking up the best bosch dishwasher the seven best bosch dishwashers of 2022 so you can see it's hard to kind of create one page of content that targets all of these different keywords so understanding what people are actually looking for and you might even see something somebody comes down to a specific product bosch 300 dishwasher reviews and you're going to see the top ranking page are customer reviews on the best buy website for this specific dishwasher so the more people kind of get down the process of the keywords they're searching based on what you're offering you need to make sure you have solutions on your website for all of those different keywords so that's step three is understanding search intent for your different keywords and topics so as you come across different keywords kind of knowing what exactly people are looking for and how you can solve some of their problems even if for example someone looking up what is a dishwasher this might not be an ultra valuable keyword for you but maybe you drive 10 20 people to your website a month that are looking up more information about what a dishwasher actually does and maybe they eventually become customers the more that you can target the more that you can kind of solve your customers problems all throughout the entire process the more conversions you're ultimately going to drive so understanding search intent where people are in the buyer process which keywords actually go to help you drive new sales versus which keywords are actually just trying to give people some more information getting people to your website so all these can be very valuable for your business and you want to make sure you're focused on all of them because the more information you cover the better ultimately it's going to be in search engines and when you're targeting for ppc advertising campaigns so the next thing i want to go through is step four is using topics and subtopics to create pages that solve for search intent so this is an important one because we've kind of come up with a bunch of our different topics and it's like where do we go from here so the example i'm going to be going through here is we're going to scroll back up is farmhouse porch so i don't have really any content on my website about farmhouse porches so let's just say how i would go about targeting this keyword and coming up with some subtopics related to farmhouse porches now the first thing you might want to do and this is we're going to go through some of my different keyword tools here is just search the keyword directly into google if you come to the bottom you're going to see some different keywords people are looking up and it's going to help you expand the content you're building now a couple of the different keyword tools that i went over the first one is going to be keywords everywhere so keywords everywhere you can just go to keywords everywhere.com install for chrome install for firefox it is an extension that's going to show up on the right hand side as you're searching it'll also show on youtube and other search engines as well but let's just say we come to google every time i search a keyword they're going to come up with a list of related keywords so these are some of the most related keywords based on google these are the ones that we just saw at the very bottom we also see people also search for so some of the different ways this search is used and then my favorite part is long tail keywords ideas swing decor lights furniture columns so what i can do is copy this list and then what i'll do as i'm creating content is create a separate sheet of my excel spreadsheet whatever one you're using and let's just say i do farmhouse porch and then we're going to paste all these keywords here so we'll get rid of this row right here and now you can see farmhouse porch ideas swing decor lights furniture so it's just another way to kind of come up with a bunch of different subtopics for our main topics now the next thing we can do is if we come back over to google is another one i like is keyword surfer so this is going to come up with more keyword ideas and some of them are different than keywords everywhere i would say i use keywords everywhere the most but what i do like about keyword surfer is this gener generate article outline so if we click on generate article outline and we scroll down here you can see they have some different things here of things we might want to cover as we go try to target this keyword so 21 of the prettiest farmhouse style porches for your inspiration 35 welcoming and beautiful farmhouse porches so these are basically just headline ideas but what i like about this is it's showing me exactly what people are looking for by giving me some different solutions for how to solve it so someone who goes to google and looks up farmhouse porch as we can see from all these google search results is going to get a bunch of ideas and designs so that's ultimately what people are looking for when they're targeting this keyword so that's why i like using this article outline because it's going to tell you this is what people are looking for when they search this specific keyword now on the other hand someone who goes to google this one's pretty obvious but google's farmhouse porch signs you can see from the images it's signs that would be on your porch a farmhouse themed porch and some of the different signs and now this one you're going to see completely different results so amazon etsy kind of more of shopping results so if i'm targeting farmhouse porches i need to make sure that i'm doing a bunch of design ideas if i'm targeting signs i need to make sure i have a list of products for sale so understanding that intent as you're targeting keywords is really important and it really helps as you kind of come up with okay which ones am i going to write their own separate pieces of content about and for these it's going to be i would probably write a piece of content for porch and porch ideas this would be the same thing this would be separate this would be separate this would be separate furniture would be separate and then what i would do is create a really good page of a lot of my favorite farmhouse porch furniture and then i would link this page to my farmhouse porch ideas because ultimately what i'm trying to do is show i have covered the topic of farmhouse porch to its fullest fullest extent so if someone is looking up farmhouse porch swings if someone is looking up modern farmhouse porch it's someone's looking up some ideas for farmhouse porch railings all of these different things i have it covered on my website so when someone searches for farmhouse porches they might say okay farmhouse goals has this topic completely covered we're going to rank them on the first page so hopefully that makes sense going from keyword research to actually your content that you want to rank and help you drive conversions for now coming back over here and kind of to finish off the videos i just want to go over some of these different keyword tools and how they're used i've gone over the google keyword planner i've gone over keywords everywhere and keyword surfer now let's do soovle real quick because this is a very easy one to go through so if we go to suval all you have to do here is enter a search term so we'll do farmhouse porch and they're going to give us google amazon yahoo bing youtube and then answers.com over here answers.com not always the greatest but you can see here in google so ideas lights swings decor christmas decorations columns railing furniture railing ideas just looking at this i have about eight different pages that i can create on my website coming over here amazon i can see what people are actually looking for to purchase so signs furniture pillows swing bench yahoo with yahoo bing and google you're going to get a lot of the same ideas but what you can do is click right here and download all this information and then use this as well as you come up with your topics and subtopics so the next one is going to be answer the public so same thing you only get a few searches per day for answer the public it's either two or three but usually i don't use it too often but if i'm doing something like farmhouse porch okay they gave me 188 results you can download this as a csv file as well so they have this visualization here so i kind of tend to look for just the data so they'll look at different ways that people have asked questions related to farmhouse porches so who when where why how not a ton here some different prepositions so porch with rocking chairs with swing on double wide with beams so you can find a lot of different keywords here my favorite is at the very bottom so right down here the alphabeticals so you can kind of go through this and see some of the different keywords people are searching so as you're trying to go over a topic it's a great way to really understand what people are looking up the most and then last but not least some of the most related keywords here so just looking at this it's pretty obvious the different types of subtopics i would need to create pages of content about for example lights swings decorations railing christmas decorations and then really if i'm trying to target the specific keyword of farmhouse porch it's just going over some different design ideas so this is kind of how i go through the idea of okay i'm coming up with this keyword i want to target and how am i going to rank in google by solving this topic completely so that's ultimately what your goal is and it's not easy especially the larger your website is it's why it's very hard to rank for these popular keywords but if i want to rank for farmhouse porch i need to make sure i have all these different things in my website so that when people are searching for it google and other search engines look at my website as a place that has a great resources for people who are looking up those keywords so this is kind of most of these keyword tools here so the last but not least is google search console and i'll go through these five tools very very quickly but google search console once you have some of this data you can see how many clicks impressions you've driven your average position in search results and your average click-through rate so i'm hoping to really improve these numbers this year for goals.com but if we scroll down here you can see the actual search terms that are driving the most impressions for my website so not always farmhouse keywords specifically but you can see a bunch of different keywords here that are driving impressions and there are thousands of keywords from my website that are driving impressions and then if we come to the top here i can see which keywords are driving clicks so some people just looking up the brand and then other people as we come down here all these different keywords you can tell a lot of them have farmhouse somewhere in the keyword because that's what i'm targeting and then as we come up here a little bit the other thing you can do is click on specific pages so this is really where i like to get to is i'm trying to rank better for some of these betting keywords so i click on this individual page and i can actually look up the search terms that are driving clicks and impressions for this page so it might help me say okay let me break out some of these into their own topic so that i can rank higher for them but for right now this page is ranking pretty well it helps drive clicks to it and ultimately helps drive sales so that's where all these keywords come into play is you need to target a lot of them unless you're ranking really high for these popular keywords which is difficult you need to make sure you're targeting a lot of these long tail keywords that people are looking up whether it's farmhouse christmas porch decorations so i create a page like that then next christmas maybe i can drive some sales that's kind of how your outlook has to be when it comes to keyword research and going from keywords to conversions so last but not least these other keyword tools so keyword tool.io you can look up some information for different search engines here but i just entered farmhouse decor and you can see they give me some of the top keywords here related to farmhouse decor and then it starts getting into alphabetical now with this you can come up with a lot of different ideas that people are looking up and sometimes i like to use this for example if i do the farmhouse porch idea if i enter that keyword in here you can find a lot of different keywords that people are looking up and it just gives you some different ways to target that keyword now they do have a pro version and that will give you some more data as well word tracker they give you 50 keywords every time you enter a search and you get 12 searches per day so you can see i enter the same keyword here and you can see they give you search volume competition i don't focus as much on competition because the main way that i like to look at competition is if we're looking at our average monthly searches you usually have more competition the higher up you are here so for something like farmhouse furniture if you go to the first page of google for farmhouse furniture it is major major companies like amazon like wayfair so it's really hard to actually compete with them for that type of keyword so as you come down here and you start targeting some of these long tail keywords farmhouse dining room wall decor if i put together a great page just about dining room wall decorations which i have it does help drive more people than some of these short tail keywords so competition isn't something i focus on too much because it's really hard to measure but if we come back over here so this is wordtracker.com they'll give you some different information as well seo ability so they'll give you three different keyword searches per day and i just entered farmhouse decor and you can see all these different keywords they've given me next is keyword tool dominator same exact thing so you're going to see a lot of the same keywords here but all of these different search tools that i'm giving you will give you a lot of different unique ideas and you might find something here that will help you you know farmhouse decor gift ideas so that's something i don't have my website so that might be something where i say you know let me do 100 farmhouse decor gift ideas and we'll see how that page does last but not least uber suggests they give you three free daily searches as well all of these different tools have pro options but their free versions do give you a good amount of information so again if i enter farmhouse decor i could see search volume they give you some difficulty scores so kind of helps when you are looking at competition but keyword ideas here if i do view all keyword ideas they'll give me a lot of different options here and i do like uber suggests they used to be basically my favorite free keyword research tool but i know they ended up making a pro version which actually works pretty well too but really just wanted to focus on the free versions here so finishing off the video find relevant keywords build a list of keywords come up with the topics you want to rank for and then come up with that list of subtopics and really what you're trying to do is understand search intent and create content that solves search intent and as you consistently do that you are going to rank higher and you are going to create pages that will do much better if you are running google ads campaigns so if you have any questions about keyword research please leave them in the comments section thank you for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the surfside ppc youtube channel