Keywords Research for SEO

With the goal of the website and call-to-action cleared up, it's time to perform keyword researches. This section guides you on how to build a set of keywords for a website to serve SEO.

Ask Questions First

Before proceeding to derive a set of keywords, you must query quite a bunch of detailed data from owner at first. These includes:

  • what type of products people are searching for?
  • who is searching?
    • age?
    • gender?
    • demography?
  • when do they search the products?
    • all time or seasonal?
  • why people search the products?
    • Info, shop, specific demand?
    • specific to culture (specific market)?
  • where are the customers?
    • geographical
    • nearest store?
    • international market?
  • how are people searching for the product?
    • what words they use?
    • what questions do they ask?
    • which device to perform search?
  • how to provide best content about the product and cultivate community and fulfill all those people are searching for?

From these questions, you can likely discover the keywords along the ways.

Validate Keywords

Once done, you should validate the set of keywords.

Google Trends

Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US) is a good tool to geographically get data and insights about a set of given keywords. There, you can proceed to compete the website.

Moz Keyword Explorer

Mozilla Keyword Explorer (https://moz.com/explorer#index2) is an alternative tool for research. The caveat is that you are allowed to use 10 queries per month for free. To go beyond that, you need to pay for their service.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public (https://answerthepublic.com/) is another limited keyword search tools for research queries. They have fair use policy so that you only use within a limited time.

Understanding Long Tail

Depending on the keyword trending, you must understand how keywords long tailing works. Normally, short common keyword like "shoe" is usually occupied by big brand and starting a new shoe website to compete with them will take years. Therefore, you need to use long tailing technique.

Multiple Associated Keywords

Basically, long tails keywords means a long specific, and highly related keywords. Short keywords usually needs to compete with unclear intent (e.g. for "shoe", it's hard to determine whether the searcher is seeking information, buying, random browsing, etc). Long keywords however, can easily attract specific audience and covert easily. Here is an example for "shoe" seeking shopper audience:

  • Short - "Shoe"
  • Long tail - "Men black rubber shoe, 12-sized jogging"

Strategic Search Volume

Upon having a set of keywords, one should ensure they are competitive against competitors, applicable for season, and available by geographical reason. For that, you need to keep validating the keywords based on the queries. For example:

  • Information queries - "who sing Country Roads"
  • Navigational queries - "Google Security Blogs"
  • Transnational queries - "Singapore lowest price flight"
  • Commercial queries - "PS4 vs PS5 spec"
  • Local queries - "coffee cafe Puchong"

Refine Searches

Certain searches like "dresses" will pull in store carousel for refined researches. Depending on search engine, some will show refining options settings that allow searcher to specifically breaks down the search category like "formal gown, sport, casual, cocktail party, ...". The keywords must be compatible to those.

That's all for Keywords Research for SEO.