How to Do Keyword Research for Free in 2023 & Beyond
The entire blogging industry has changed
so much and is changing rapidly, even right now! What used to work in terms of keyword research,
or some of you might call it topic research, may not work now
and maybe not in the future. It is either you adapt
or you get phased out. And if you are using expensive keyword research tools, maybe you can start
considering reducing your expenses. So in this video, we will share with you the keyword research strategies
that are free and they still work, and we are also going to talk about
the newest method to do keyword research that is much faster and more
efficient than the existing methods. Any idea what that method is? It's ChatGPT and holy moly! You're going to love what you see. And finally, once you've identified those keywords, I will share with you
methods to validate them, so you know you're starting your blog
on the right foot that will lead to massive traffic growth.
Let's go! Hey, it's Jack from Rank Math, the one WordPress SEO plugin
that constantly strives to provide you with the fastest and the most
cutting-edge SEO tools. And on this channel, we provide you
with the most up-to-date SEO knowledge. So if you're new to our channel,
consider subscribing. Anyway, to find good keywords for your
blog or website, there are two steps. The first is keyword discovery. I will walk you through what are the types of keywords and all the methods
to find highly relevant keywords. And then the next step is to verify if
those keywords you found have search volume and an acceptable
level of competition. But for now, I need to assume that you are
a beginner who doesn't understand the basics and the different
types of keywords. If you are familiar with it, great! You can skip ahead using
the timestamps in the description.
But if you are new or want to keep yourself updated, let's start
with the keyword basics. Now, when you write an article and you
optimize your article based on one targeted keyword, your article never
really ranks for just one keyword. It ranks for a range of keywords that the search engines think
are relevant to their searchers. So sometimes when you are doing keyword research, you will see keywords
with different search volume, but they all mean the same thing. For example, "how much can you make from YouTube", which has a search
volume of 600 per month. And then the keyword,
"how much can you make from YouTube views" has a search volume of 40 per month. The same goes for "how much can
you make from YouTube videos". But basically, the search intent of these keywords are the same, how much
can someone make from YouTube? So you do not want to write one article to target this keyword, and another article
to target another keyword.
You want to write one article
that targets one search intent and hopefully you can rank for all the other relevant keywords. I hope you get the meaning because this is
so important in terms of keyword research. You've got to read between the lines. And when in doubt,
do a Google search on similar keywords and see if the top ten
results are almost similar. Next, we're going to talk about
the different types of keywords. Now, assuming that you are a BBQ retailer, which means you sell BBQ equipment like
grills, smokers, etc. In your blog, when you find new keywords
with the methods I'll be sharing later, you've got to know which category each
of those keywords belong to so that you can craft the right content
to serve the right search intent. First, we have the "Navigational keywords". These keywords are when someone is trying
to find a specific page on your site.
For example, if your BBQ retail shop is named "Smokeys" and someone wants to know
if you have a refund policy, they would type "Smokeys refund
policy" in the search engines. So people who are searching for this type of keywords already know what
they want from your website. You wouldn't need to do keyword
research on this type of keywords. With some business sense, you should
be able to identify what those are. The next type of keywords
is "Informational keywords". People searching for this type of keywords want to get information or learn something
related to your business or niche. For example, if somebody types, "how to grill ribs", they're expecting a how
to guide, a step by step guide that will tell them the equipment they need,
the ingredients, sauces, how long to grill, the tenderness
and basically everything.
People searching for these
keywords want to learn something and they do
not have a buying intent. But you may slip some recommendations
in the content in case they need them. So, if you are starting a blog for your BBQ retail shop, you'll be providing tips
and techniques for grilling different types of meat and you may use internal
links to link informational content to commercial or transactional
contents to maximize your profit. And these are the next two types
of keywords. For "Commercial keywords", they are something like "BBQ Grill reviews", "Best guess BBQ Grills", "BBQ Grill A
versus BBQ Grill B". People searching for this type of keywords are in the research phase and depending
on their purchase habits, some may research further and some may buy
a product based on your recommendation.
And as for "Transactional keywords", they are something like "Buy BBQ Grill", "Buy
a specific brand of BBQ Grill", "Discount code for a specific
brand of the BBQ Grill". People searching for these keywords
have gone through the research process. They have made a decision on what product they want to buy and they are
ready to make a purchase. These are the two types of keywords
that will bring sales to your business. And the final type of keywords that will also bring sales to your
business is the "Local keywords". For example, if somebody wants to buy a specific product like "Weber Q 1250 gas
grill", but they urgently need the grill, they may not want to buy it
online and wait for the shipment.
They want to visit a local store to get that grill because they
really need it right now. So they would search for keywords like "buy
Weber Q 1250 guest grill near me", "weber Q 1250 guest grill
for sale in San Francisco", etc. So these are the five types of keywords, but your next question may probably be
since the transactional, commercial and local keywords can drive
sales to your business, shouldn't we focus everything
on these three types of keywords? The answer? You shouldn't! Because
you are limiting your reach.
You should be using your blog as a way to build a brand, get people to know your
business, be the credible source of information for people interested
in your business or niche. It shouldn't be all about money. So when you are building a blog for your business, you should have a holistic
approach and it should help your business grow in a way that is
more than just revenue. All right, now that we know the basics
and the types of keywords, let me quickly go through all the long
existing methods to find relevant keywords for your blog before we
talk about ChatGPT. If you don't know, Google provides a range
of awesome keyword research tools. You just have to know how to use them. The first of which is that Google auto suggests or some veteran SEOs will
call it Google Alphabet soup. How it works is that you will brainstorm
a keyword that is relevant to your business or blog. And using the same BBQ example, we can start with a keyword,
say "Best BBQ Sauce", and then you will start typing
the alphabet one letter at a time. As you type, you will notice
some keyword suggestions.
These are the keywords that people are
searching for on Google and they may be important to your blog,
so you want to jot them down. You can also add an underscore,
let's say "Best _ BBQ Sauce", and you will see these relevant keywords
that are probably important to your blog. Using this Auto Suggest method,
you can add as many keywords into Google and have Google tell you what
people are searching for. Then the next tool is
the "People also ask" section. Every keyword that you search for on Google may have this
"People also ask" section. And as the name suggests, these are questions that people
are asking on Google.
As you expand each of the questions,
more relevant suggestions will appear. You want to jot down those keywords or
questions that are important to your blog. When you're doing keyword research,
you want to expand as many questions, and when you can't find any relevant
question, go back up to expand on questions that are related to your blog
and more relevant suggestions will appear. And when you think you've exhausted this
section, go to the search bar and search for another keyword and go
through the same process. We are pretty sure you will find
a lot of keyword suggestions.
And do you know, as you scroll down the Search Results
page, you will see this "Related Searches" section which may provide
you with more keyword ideas. Now the next Google tool is
the "Google Keyword Planner". To get this tool,
just do a search on Google, click on the button and provide some
information about your business. Basically you're creating a Google Ads account, and from there
you can access the tool. If you already have a Google Ads. Account, just go to the
"Tools and Settings" tab. Under planning you will see
the keyword planner tool. You can discover new keywords by clicking on this and enter a seed keyword,
let's say "BBQ Gas Grills". Get Results and it will provide you with a list
of keywords related to the seed keyword. It will tell you the search volume of each
keyword so you know there are people searching for the keyword
you are targeting. Now, I won't go into detail of how to use
Google Keyword Planner to do keyword research, otherwise this video
is going to be very long.
So if you want to learn more about it,
you can check out this page. The link is in the description. Now the final Google Tool you can use for keyword research is
the "Site Colon" method. This works very well if you want to know what topics your
competitors are targeting. Let's say that this barbecue website
amazingribs.com is your competitor. What you want to do is to copy the site
address, go to Google, type in "Site:", and paste the URL of the site
without any spaces. As you hit Enter, google has found
many index pages on this domain. As you scroll through the results, you will pick up some very useful
topics that may apply to your blog. On top of that, say you want to know your competitor's articles that contain
a seed topic, for example, "Gas Grill". So on the search bar, hit Space and add the keyword or seed
topic and this will pull articles from your competitor's site where Google
thinks are related to the seed topic.
Plus, if you want Google to find articles from your competitor's site
that contains a particular keyword, all you need to do is to add quotes around
the keyword and Google will find articles from your competitor's site
that contains the exact match keyword. Using this method, you will definitely
find lots of keywords for your blog. If you have exhausted one of your competitors keywords, use this
method on another competitor. That's all the Google tools. And since we're on the topic of finding competitors keywords,
here's another method. Now, the alternative to the "Site:" method is to find keywords
in your competitor's sitemap. Most of the sites will have
a publicly available XML sitemap. For example, this site. This is the URL. Let's add "/sitemap.xml". Some sites will have "/sitemap_index.xml" so if you don't find one under "/sitemap.xml",
you can try "/sitemap_index.xml".
But do note that some sites do not
have a publicly available sitemap. Now, as you hit Enter,
if the sitemap is public, you will see something like this go
through the sitemaps and based on the text in the URL you can find
keyword ideas from there. By the way, if you want to learn more about Sitemaps and how it can benefit
your site, do check out this video. The link is in the description. Answers.com works a little like Quora
where you can ask a question and other users on the site can
answer your question. The site is very good for discovering
informational keywords. Just enter a seed keyword like "how do I safely handle and store raw
meat before and after grilling?" And it will show you the best answer. And if you scroll down further,
you will find related answers. Click on them and as you scroll down and you will have some
relevant keyword ideas. Just a note answers.com doesn't
work well on some niches.
You've got to try it out yourself. Now, Answer the Public is another useful tool to discover keywords
related to your niche. But take note that you are limited to three free searches
per day on the site. Enter a seed keyword,
select the country and hit Search and it will suggest questions
related to your seed keyword. It will provide you with "proposition
keywords", "comparison keywords", "in alphabetical order"
and "related keywords". It's just that simple. Now, Ahrefs is a paid tool, but they do provide several free tools
to the public with no strings attached. For example, the keyword generator. On its keyword generator,
enter a seed keyword like "BBQ Tips" or any keywords related to your business or
niche, and it will suggest a bunch of related keywords with its search
volume and keyword difficulty.
For the keyword difficulty, the higher
the number, the harder it is to rank. You can use this as a keyword validation
tool, which we'll talk about later. This is definitely a very handy
tool for keyword research. Personally, out of all the existing keyword research methods,
I would say that the Google tools and the Ahrefs keyword
generator are the most useful. What do you think? Do you have any other existing
keyword research methods to share? Do leave them in the comments. Now, let's finally talk about how
to use ChatGPT for keyword research.
Before everything else, you might have questions about
whether you should use ChatGPT to write an article for you to be
published and rank on search engines. And the answer is no. It goes against Google's Guidelines. ChatGPT should be used as
a guide and not an end solution. With that said, ChatGPT is
an amazing keyword research tool. It has learned and absorbed a lot of information on the web and it
is a very good assistant. Just to put it into context,
if you are an expert in a particular industry or niche,
ChatGPT is just one level below you, which makes it a highly qualified
assistant to be helping you with tasks. But they shouldn't be doing
all the work for you. The best part is you can treat
ChatGPT like a human associate. Let's check it out. Now, there are no fixed commands
to tell ChatGPT to do certain things. You should tell it to do certain tasks, like you would dedicate
tasks to your assistant. Let's take the BBQ retail
shop as an example again. First, I would treat ChatGPT like
a new employee of my business.
So I would say, "assuming you are a business owner of a BBQ
appliance store trying to start a block to sell your products,
please provide me with a list of underserved block
topics in the BBQ niche." As you hit enter, it will start to write
out a list like you have instructed. Now, this is interesting because every new
chat, it comes up with different ideas. But don't you think these can be
the top categories of your blog? They definitely can. Right now, I haven't gone
into researching keyword ideas yet. In this approach,
I'm going the top-down method. I'm researching the top
categories and then I'll go deep. It is as though you are building
out an entire site structure. I will show you a bottom-up method later on.
And by the way, if you want to learn more about building a good site structure
for SEO and higher rankings. You can check out this video right here. The link is in the description. Back to this. Let's say that you don't want ChatGPT to
stop at eight topics and you want more. So I would say, "please provide me with a full list instead of stopping at eight." You see, it is providing you with even
more top level topics that are potentially the top level
categories of your blog. Don't you think this is amazing? To me, it is.
And if you want even more, just ask ChatGPT like you will ask the
human assistant, "are there more topics? Please provide me with everything." And it goes on with even more ideas. And of course, you can probe even more. You can just type "Are there more?" But for the sake of this
video, let's move on. Now, based on all these top level topics, let's say that this topic is
something that is related to my business and I want to know what are
the underserved keywords related to it? I would ask ChatGPT
what are the questions people asked about the topic and it will
go on to generate the questions for you. These questions can be
keyword ideas for your blog. Kind of cool, right? If you want more, just ask "Are there more?" And you can go on and on and it's practically giving you all the questions
within the top level topic, which makes it easy for you to build
topical relevance for your site. I don't know about you, but I think this is really a game changer
when it comes to keyword research.
Now, these are the informational keywords. You can go on to ask about
other types of keywords. For example, I want to know if there are
commercial keywords in this top level topic I would ask please provide me
with questions that have buying intent and related to the topic and it
will list them down for you. As you can see, some of these keywords are keywords that you've probably
never think of and it is awesome. Now, in case you want local keywords,
you can ask, "assuming the BBQ retail shop is located in San Francisco,
can you provide a list of questions with buying intent that locals
will ask on Google?" And Voila! It would start listing
those questions for you.
Stay with me because we are going to use another method for keyword
research with ChatGPT. Now, what if you want to do keyword
research from the bottom-up perspective? Let's start afresh. Let's give a comment like "provide a list
of keywords in the BBQ niche", and it will start to generate
a bunch of keyword ideas. Now, these are all one word keywords
which are highly competitive. So if you think this list is not helping,
you can adjust your command.
Let's say, "can you provide
long tail keywords instead?" And it will go on to get
you those keywords. How cool is that? Of course, when it's done you
can definitely ask for more. But for now, let's say that I want
to group this list of keywords. Into top level categories so that we can build a good site structure. I would give a command, say "From the keywords above,
please group them based on their semantic relevance", and it will start
grouping them like a pro.
And with this you can build a really good
site structure for your website or blog. As you can see, these are top level
categories that your blog can adopt. So there are no set commands or rules. Just ask the right questions,
the right probes, and make sure that the questions you ask are
understandable by a human, and it will provide you with the most
phenomenal information you want. And honestly, don't you
think this is mind-blowing? You no longer need to spend
a lot of time researching. If you aren't getting value from this, can you do us a favor and smash
that thumbs up button. We really appreciate that. And now that we've found a bunch of keywords, let's verify them to see
what we should focus on first. Now, the old SEO advice is to avoid writing articles on topics that are
highly competitive. And that still stands true. But it doesn't mean that you
should avoid them completely.
Just put yourself
in the position of Google. What is their mission statement? It is "to organize the world's information and make it universally
accessible and useful." And to make sure that the search
results are useful. They want to make sure that the
information they rank highly is credible. And to do that, they have
to analyze many data points. And one of the data points is if a website has covered most or all of the important
keywords in the industry or niche. And did they do it well? Let me give you an analogy. Let's say that you are Google,
and I'm a guy who is covering a lot of SEO information, and I made
them publicly available. Then comes another guy who claims
that he's an SEO expert.
He's not known anywhere,
he doesn't publish much content. Who would you trust as Google? I know you want to trust the other guy,
but you are Google. You can only judge what you see. So most likely you will trust me, right? But does it mean that I'm more
of an expert than that guy? You never really know, right? Maybe that guy is really an expert. So applying that even if a topic is highly
competitive, you should still cover it as long as it is an important
topic to your blog or business.
I hope this makes sense to you. With that in mind,
all the keywords you have found that you think are important to your
business or blog are good keywords. But you have to verify if
there are people searching for it. And depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, you want
to prioritize them accordingly. One of the tools I recommend to know if there is a search volume
for a keyword is Google Trends. So we are on Google Trends. Let's plug in one of the
keywords we have found. Say "best BBQ safety tips".
When you search for it, nothing is found. Let's change this to worldwide. If your target audience is in a particular
country, feel free to change this. Then let's adjust the data
range to the max. Still nothing?
That's fine. When you put in exact keywords, sometimes you will not see any results. But that doesn't mean that it
has no search volume. Let's remove "best" and leave
just "BBQ safety tips". Even when we remove "Best",
the search intent stays the same. Let's search for it. So here we have some data. Whenever you see a graph with no data,
you see this has data, if there are no data, and it doesn't matter if the graph is
trending upwards or downwards, it means that there is a search volume,
maybe 200 searches per month or more. Graph with data like in this example, signals that the search
volume is 500 or more. No graph, but with data signifies
about 100 searches per month.
I will show you some proof in a while. Essentially, this is what we are saying. This is the closest gauge. So if the exact keywords you found do not have any data,
try to adjust it to a generic keyword, and you will have a gauge
of the search volume. This requires some skill, but information is more accurate than
any keyword research tool you use. But if you want to use an easier method,
it is to use the Ahrefs' keyword generator. Now, there are some limitations
to the data from Ahrefs keyword generator because you can't filter worldwide data,
you can only assess country specific data.
Let me give you a real example. So we are on the Ahrefs' keyword generator, and we're going
to research this keyword "Best bamboo toothbrush". Let's select the United States data, perform the search, and you will see the
search volume at 350 searches per month. If we visit Google Trends using only the United States data,
you can see that it is signifying about 200 plus searches per month,
which is pretty close. But if you filter the Google Trends results by worldwide, you can see that it
signifies 500 searches or more per month. And if you visit the Google search
console, we can see that for this keyword, under the Impressions, it is getting
about 600 plus searches per month. This is the global data. Let's adjust it to the United States data,
and you will see that there are about 171 searches per month for the keyword
in the United States.
So it suggests to us that the results from Ahrefs is pretty decent, but it is
limited to the country specific data. And if your website is targeting worldwide
traffic, if you rely only on the US. Data as a gauge for the worldwide data,
you are missing out on a lot. And that's why I would prefer to use
Google Trends to verify the search volume, especially when it comes
to targeting worldwide traffic. Alright, once you have identified that a particular
keyword has search volume, let's determine the competition level
to prioritize what keywords to focus on first.
To do that, I will install Chrome extensions like the Moz bar, Ubersuggest,
or any extensions that will tell you the domain and page authority
of each search result. For this case, I will use
the Ubersuggest Chrome extension. Let's do a search of the key phrase "BBQ Safety Tips",
and we can see that the top results are with Domain Authority of 83, 68, 71, 93,
which are relatively high.
If you see sites that have a domain authority of more than 50 across the first
ten results, it is highly competitive. And if you see super high authority sites
or government sites ranking for that keyword, that is not
a keyword you want to target at all. Let's do another,
say "Sustainable swimwear". From this, we can see that the domain authority of the top ten
results are 56, 29, 17, 38. This is 89, 43. So, as you can see, there are a lot of sites with domin authority
of less than 50 ranking for this keyword. So this keyword is competitive,
but at an acceptable level. So we will target this keyword first. The key is you need traffic coming to your site for it to get noticed
and to grow in authority, right? If you are targeting all the highly
competitive keywords at the start and you don't rank at all, nobody would come to
your site and your site would never grow.
Does this make sense to you? So, to recap, the first step to finding
good keywords for your site is to use one of the keyword discovery
tools I've mentioned. I think ChatGPT is a game changer
as it will save you a lot of time. Then the next step is to verify if
the keywords have search volume. I would prefer to use Google Trends to do the research as the information I get
is more complete on a global scale. The final step is to determine
the competitiveness of the keywords so that you can prioritize the low
competition keywords first to gain some search visibility, traffic
and eventually build authority. When your site is more established, you want to target the more
competitive keywords. I hope this makes sense to you. So with all that we have shared, we hope that you can formulate your own
keyword research strategies to find highly relevant keywords that will
bring high quality traffic to your site.
If you are getting value from this, we hope that you can smash
that thumbs up button if you haven't done so,
and if you haven't subscribed to our channel yet, do consider doing
so to keep yourself up-to-date on the right SEO knowledge. This is Jack from Rank Math. Stay awesome! And I'll see
you in the next video..
