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The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Finding Ultra-Strong Keywords

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The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Finding Ultra-Strong Keywords

Read time 23 min read
Competitor keyword research

Test your SEO in 60 seconds! Diib is one of the best SEO tools in the world. Diib uses the power of big data to help you quickly and easily increase your traffic and rankings. We’ll even let you know if you already deserve to rank higher for certain keywords.

Scan your website DA in 60 seconds! Diib is one of the best SEO tools in the world. Diib uses the power of big data to help you quickly and easily increase your traffic and rankings. We’ll even let you know if you already deserve to rank higher for certain keywords.

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So, you want to write high-quality content?

That’s like building a gingerbread house in the middle of Google’s search results. Without a tasty trail of breadcrumbs that picks its way all the way back to your masterpiece, would-be readers will never find your glorious creation.

Okay, okay, how do I drop breadcrumbs from Google back to my site?

Well—in a word—keywords.

Keywords are your first and last defense in the battle for organic traffic (or as we like to call it, attention on autopilot). Therefore, keyword research takes precedence in every SEO copywriting process. It’s also a huge cornerstone of any functional SEO strategy.

In this post, we’ll show you the no-pressure way to both research and use keywords to unlock profitable new doors in your business.

Ready to crush it with content?

Great! Let’s get to it.

What is Keyword Research

The object of keyword research is an extensive list of search terms for which you want your website to rank. To get this list, you must know your audience, they’re desires, and their interests.

Keyword research is the work you do to answer one question: which search terms does your audience type into Google when looking for products, services, or businesses that will solve their most debilitating problems. 

With those terms, you can create content that speaks the language of your customers.

However, language is ever changing. So staying competitive means keyword research is a never-ending journey.

FACT: With over 36% of SEO’s turning to keyword analysis, this is by far the most popular way to think of new content ideas.

Why is Keyword Research Important

It’s common for businesses to use one set of words to describe their product. Often these are technical terms used as shorthand within an industry. 

Meanwhile, their customers are using another set of words to find the same product or service and because of this, product sales are severely limited.

This mismatch in language is costly, especially for fledgling businesses. Many times, a website can find more traffic, more conversions, and more profit by just making the SEO customer-centric. Check out this graphic for a visual analysis of understanding consumer “micro-moments”:

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Competitor keyword research

(Image credit: slideshare)

Essential Concepts of Keyword Research

There are a few key terms you should know before we dive headfirst into the Keyword rabbit hole.

Focus Keyword/Phrase: A focus keyword or phrase is the specific word or phrase you want a page on your website to rank for on Google. Keyword research helps you to find the strongest focus words and phrases to anchor your webpages. For example:

Competitor keyword research

Long-tail Keywords: These keywords have less search volume than their counterparts, head keywords. Mainly because they are more specific and typically longer. They are primarily used to home in on a niche of a topic or industry. 

There’s a general rule of thumb for long-tail keywords that you should take advantage of: The longer and more specific a search term, the easier it is to rank for them, due to lower competition. Here is an example of long-tail keywords:

Competitor keyword research

(Image credit: reliablesoft)

While these words have fewer people searching for them, the people that are searching are usually much more willing to buy your niche offering.

Keyword Strategy: Your strategy is the most helpful course of action based on your goals and your research. A good strategy can give an insightful answer to each of these questions:

  • Will you focus on head or long-tail keywords first? Why?
  • What content will you create?
  • What content types will work best?
  • Where will you publish it?

Search Intent: This one is super important. Think of it as the key to keywords. Search intent looks at the underlying goal of a keyword or a search query. 

You’re looking at what a searcher wants to know, do, or buy. It gives you insight into the problem they’re having and to what degree they’re having it. All this makes it easier to create content that solves their problem. 

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11 Free Keyword Tools That Really Work!

If you’re just getting your feet wet with keywords, it’s always helpful to experiment with a free keyword tool. It also helps keep you focused. 

Many of the more expensive tools offer data and metrics that can be a little overwhelming for beginners. Once you’re ready for the deep end you can splurge on some fancy software, but in the meantime why not learn for free?

To make it easier for you, we’ve compiled a list of 10 free keyword tools to kick-start your research with no money down.

  1. Google Trends
  2. Keyword Generator
  3. Keyword Sheeter
  4. Answer the Public
  5. Keyword Surfer
  6. Keyworddit
  7. Google Search Console
  8. Questiondb
  9. Bulk Keyword Generator
  10. Google
  11. Ubersuggest

Let’s briefly explore each tool’s capabilities.

Google Trends

Google trends is great for looking at the search volume of a keyword over time. For instance, a word like costume may only rise in ranking every October. Here is a visual example of this feature:

Competitor keyword research

How is this information useful?

It’s useful for two reasons.

The first is you can plan your content calendar around the spike of certain keywords in your industry. 

If the costume keyword is most popular in October, then planning a blog post about the top 10 celebrity costumes in September/October is a good way to get a piece of that traffic. 

The second reason is you can avoid keywords that don’t have consistent search volume if they don’t suit your business.

Keyword Generator

Keyword Generator is a great tool for brainstorming. It can generate over 100 keyword ideas for each term entered. Let’s say you like “diapers” and you enter that into the search bar. 

The generator will spit out over 100 keywords and phrases containing “diapers” along with their approximate search volumes.

Competitor keyword research

Keyword Generator also gives you a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score for the first 10 keywords. The scoring system runs from 0 to 100, with 100 being the most difficult to rank for.

Awesome, right?

Keyword Sheeter

Keyword Sheeter rips the most popular keywords right from Google’s search bar. It takes Google’s autocomplete suggestions. 

This makes it ideal for brainstorming keywords. It generates 1000 of them per minute and allows you to export them at the click of a button for free. Here is that website:

Competitor keyword research

Answer the Public

Answer the Public makes it easier to find questions your target audience needs answered. If you’re looking to be a thought leader in your space, this tool is a godsend. Check out this cool graphic:

Competitor keyword research

Answer the Public seems to use Google’s Keyword Planner and autosuggest to populate its results, which are all fully exportable for free via CSV file. 

Keywroddit

This crafty little tool mines Reddit threads to find up to 500 keywords at a time. If you’re just getting started in an industry or niche, this tool makes a phenomenal research companion. 

Competitor keyword research

Other than that, Keyworddit also estimates the monthly search volume for every keyword, giving you an idea of the overall popularity of a topic or subtopic. 

Google Search Console

This shows you all the data you’ve never seen about the keywords for which you currently rank. By that, we mean it helps you track your site’s organic search performance.

Competitor keyword research

For instance, if you’ve been dying to know which keywords were sending your website the most traffic, Google Search Console will tell you.

Questionb

Similar to Answer the Public, Questionb is another tool that tells you what questions a particular audience is asking about a particular topic. The difference is where it sources those questions from. 

While Answer the Public pulls its questions from Google’s Keyword Planner, Questionb siphons it’s questions straight from Reddit’s almost infinite threads.

With Questionb, you’re free to sort the questions by both popularity and topic, giving it an edge over Answer the Public. You can also export all results for free.

Competitor keyword research

Bulk Keyword Generator

Bulk Keyword Generator is a tool that creates keywords based on your specific industry. This is great for finding keywords unique to the products and services you offer. 

Competitor keyword research

Google

Google’s autocomplete feature is still one of the best ways to do keyword research. For some searches Google also provides a box titled “People also ask” which savvy SEO writers take full advantage of when possible. 

Competitor keyword research

Ubersuggest

Similar to Keyword Sheeter, this tool also scrapes Google’s autosuggestions. Since digital marketer, Neil Patel acquired it, he has expanded the tool’s set of features significantly. 

Competitor keyword research

What’s a Keyword Competition and How Do We Win It?

All keywords have an inherent level of competition.

We use that competition to measure the difficulty of ranking for a specific keyword or phrase. Usually the popularity of a keyword and the industry it’s in have huge effects on its difficulty. 

That’s why it can take months or years to achieve top rankings for some keywords and just weeks for others.

All keywords are not made equal.

An even better question is how do we judge the competitiveness of a keyword?

That brings us to keyword analysis—the process by which we discover which keywords are right for us and which we shouldn’t bother with. 

How Do We Find Keywords That Make Us Money?

Keyword analysis is to search marketing as heat is to cooked food.

No, really. It’s that important.

Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of keywords and phrases turns a website into a profitable asset rather than a liability. 

By understanding the words your desired customers type into a search bar, you heighten your chances of meeting them in the search results, which heightens your ability to monetize that interaction.

Marketing has always been analytic. That goes double for search marketing. You’ll find that keywords will dictate all of your search marketing campaigns. For this reason, analyzing them should be your initial focus. 

Analyzing keywords allows you to: 

  • Spot trends: knowledge of search volume for specific keywords and phrases allows you see patterns in market behavior that you can apply to your strategy.
  • Increase traffic and conversions: identifying high-converting keywords and using them in your messaging is the best way to create ROI for your content.
  • Optimize budget: double-down on the highest performing keywords and cut funding to any that are not getting your business the results it needs.
  • Find new leads: expanding your long-tail efforts and using more niche-specific terms can help you discover new leads that convert higher than most others.

For all its benefits, marketers often overlook and even neglect keyword analysis. While it is pivotal to increasing conversions, it also demands careful consideration and time-consuming deliberation to get ahead of your competition.

This where tools come into play.

After you’ve learned the basics about keyword research and you want to harness the power to ramp up your web presence, tools can help you do it in a systematic and time-efficient way.

Wordstream is an outstanding example. 

It eliminates the need to shuffle spreadsheets and graphs all day just to spend weeks more mining them for data. 

Wordstream and other tools like it streamline the entire process and help prioritize the right actions to improve your search marketing efforts. 

Competitor keyword research

It even shows you how to research competitors keywords, which brings us to our next point…

How to Research Competitors Keywords

It isn’t enough to know what keywords word for you. You also need to know what your competitors are up to as well. 

Here, you’ll need a competitor keyword research tool.

There are many ways to conduct this kind of research, but the quickest way is to use a capable competitor keyword tool. Most of the most robust keyword tools also specialize in competitor website keyword analysis. 

Here are a few the best programs that double as an amazing competitor keyword tool:

  • Wordstream’s free keyword tool
  • SpyFu 
  • SEM Rush
  • Buzz Sumo
  • Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
  • Adwords Auction Insights

Using a competitor keyword research tool is the best way to stay on top of your competition’s strategic movements. They’re so useful that no competitor website keyword analysis should be attempted without one.

Keywords That Pack Some Muscle

There are no shortcuts in SEO.

In fact, the typical complaint spurs from the overwhelming amount of things that you must do to make SEO work well enough to meet your goals. 

Most lists of SEO best practices found on Google can range anywhere from a meter to a mile long.

There’s one thing you cannot skip ever—that’s right, keywords. Low competition keywords, to be exact. This is a tactic most sites don’t take full advantage of when they get started. Here’s one example:

Competitor keyword research

Here’s the reality of the situation, if you’re just jumping onto the SEO train you’re not likely going to beat the bigger sites that have been doing this for years. 

So, for your site to win in the search engine page results (SERPs) you have to be great at one thing—punching at your weight.

Basically, you need to find low competition keywords your website has a fighting chance of ranking for. They need to apply to your business, topic, or niche. Make this the foundation of your SEO strategy. 

Once you’re winning at this level, you can target higher competition keywords that tote higher search volumes. 

Let’s Talk About Off-Page SEO

There are two sides of the SEO coin. Off-page and On-page (which we’ll get to later).

Off-page SEO refers to any efforts taken outside of your website (or off page) to achieve higher rankings. 

The main (and sometimes most frustrating) difference between the two sides is that you don’t have full control over everything in Off-page SEO.

If you’re ever unsure of whether a tactic belongs to Off-page SEO or On-page SEO, ask yourself if you have complete and utter control over the tactic or the outcome. If the answer is no, it’s an Off-page tactic. 

We hope that you found this article useful.

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So If We Can’t Control It, Can’t We Just Ignore It? 

Nope.

It’s tough to rank on the glory of your content alone. Just as in life, what you know isn’t as important as who you know. 

Or in this case, who knows you. 

Google takes a lot of Off-page factors into consideration when deciding to rank websites and individual web pages. Backlinks get most of the credit, and while they may be the most critical factor, there are two lesser-known others.

Let’s explore a few below:

  1. NAP Citations: Collectively known as NAP (Name, Address, Phone), any online mention of your business that includes your name, address, and phone number Google classifies as NAP Citations. 

Competitor keyword research

  1. Brand Mentions: Brand mentions are trickier. There’s two distinct types, linked and unlinked. Linked brand mentions are those that leave links back to your business, which makes them valuable for SEO. Unlinked mentions are different. They factor into Google’s ranking algorithm, but don’t result in as much referral traffic.

So how do you get linked brand mentions? There are a few options you can take, here:

  • Podcasting
  • Writing Guest Posts
  • Blogger Outreach
  • Creating Viral Content

Here is an example of a guest blog brand mention:

Competitor keyword research

On-Page SEO—The Other Side of The Coin

On-page SEO is optimizing your individual web pages to achieve a more favorable ranking and higher traffic from search engines. 

The name comes from the tweaking of internal, on-page factors and elements as opposed to Off-page SEO, which is all external. 

FACT: 57% of marketing executives say on-page content development was the most effective SEO tactic. 

What are the factors of On-Page SEO 

On-page factors are a great way to heighten your rankings if correctly optimized. The factors that hold the most leverage are:

Content: Your content is ultimately what makes your website worthy of search ranking. It’s what visitors come for and hopefully what they’ll continue to come back for.

Therefore, content is the star of the show, which means it has to be good. The problem is good is subjective.

How do you really know if your content is good? Will it sparkle after you’ve written it?

No, nothing quite that dramatic. Fortunately, there are just two very achievable things each piece of content must do for Google to consider it good.

  1. Meet a Demand: You don’t need a microeconomics course to see the law of supply and demand applies to information just as it applies to business. Largely, the best content supplies and satisfies the largest demand for information. Whether you want to be considered good, great, or best, your content will have to meet a demand.
  2. Be Linkable: Let’s think about your content in terms of SEO. Google sees absolutely no difference between horrible content and great content if neither is linkable. If no one can link to it, search engines can’t rank it. If your content can’t rank it won’t be able to drive traffic to your website.

It might as well not exist.

See the theme here? Good content works well for both people and Google. It offers information that meets a much-needed demand for us non-machines, but also makes that information easy to index for the search robots. 

Title Tag: for importance, these are next in line after content. It refers to the HTML element most easily described as the title of a webpage. We find title tags on SERPs, they’re the clickable blue headline that takes you to the content you’re looking for. 

Competitor keyword research

URL: We nerds affectionately know it as a Uniform Resource Locator. Most people just call it a web address. From an SEO perspective, the structure of this slender line of text can be important. One of the biggest problems with URLs is that many of them don’t make the page hierarchy clear.

Take this URL, for instance: www.seo.com/keywords/factors-of-keyword-research

This URL displays the hierarchy of information on the page. Google uses that information to determine the relevance of any given webpage.

How about this one: www.seo.com/title/tt0486596.

Imagine having to deduce whether that URL has useful information relevant to a particular search query. Can you take an educated guess what’s going on that page?

Yeah, Google can’t either. 

So the URL won’t rank.

Ready to Write?

Remember, the key to keywords is to know which ones your audience uses. This is the shorthand used to express their needs, desires and dreams—and to find the products that best fulfill them.

If you have such a product, strong keyword research is the best way to do it justice.

Now, here’s the hard part. Once you have your long list of keywords you want to rank for, you need to write articles and blog posts based on each one. It’s a timely project, but it’s worth it. You can be sure of that.

Now all you need to do is write.

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FAQ’s

An easy way to find these types of keywords is through a simple Google search. After you’ve searched your primary keyword, scroll down to the bottom of the SERP page to find “searches related to”.

The quickest and easiest way to optimize your website is to add keywords to HTML pages. Either add meta keywords in your head section of code. Then add a list of relevant keywords into your meta tag.

This is a keyword that was used to attract free traffic rather than paid traffic. Organic traffic is usually achieved through effective search engine optimization.

First off, be sure and use your main keyword within the first few sentences in your content. Use this keyword and variations of it throughout your article.

This price can vary greatly depending on the competition level and industry you’re in. That being said, they range anywhere between 50 cents to $50 PER CLICK. Which can add up really fast.

While this number can largely be dependent on your budget, for best results with your average small to medium sized business, we recommend targeting around 5 keywords (with a monthly search volume of 100+ words.

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Daniel Urmann

Author Bio:

Daniel Urmann is the co-founder of Diib.com. Over the past 17 years Daniel has helped thousands of business grow online through SEO, social media, and paid advertising. Today, Diib helps over 150,000 business globally grow online with their SaaS offerings. Daniel’s interest include SMB analytics, big data, predictive analytics, enterprise and SMB search engine optimization (SEO), CRO optimization, social media advertising, A/B testing, programatic and geo-targeting, PPC, and e-commerce. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) focused in Finance and E-commerce from Cornell University – S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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