Ultimately, your SEO goal is to improve rankings for keywords vital to your business. Ergo, finding profitable keywords, creating a keyword set, and improving your rankings for those keywords are crucial measures in any SEO strategy.
So today, you’ll learn how to identify relevant keywords by conducting keyword research and how to use the Keyword Planner to store and manage your keyword set. Also, we’ll explain how to tell whether a keyword is any good. By the end of this guide, you will have a finalized keyword set to track and optimize your rankings for.
How to Start Keyword Research?
How to Use cPanel SEO for Keyword Research
How to Add Keywords to the Keyword Planner
Separate the Sheep from the Goats: Keyword KPI
Finalize Your List: Categorize & Group Keywords
How to Start Keyword Research?
The first step of keyword research is quite simple. All you need is a blank sheet. Start by identifying your main topics and categories. Those are usually so-called Focus Keywords. Then, think about the products or services you provide and where you provide them. In a nutshell, list
- Product or service categories
- Best-selling products or services
- Branches and locations
- Terms or wordings (prospective) customers would use (see below)
For example, if you run a pet shop, the main categories like dog food or cat toys would be your Focus Keywords.
Know Your Audiences
Remember that your (prospect) customer searches for products and services like yours, using their terminology and not necessarily yours. If you want to be found online, you need to cater to their language. Ask yourself: Who is your target group? Are you catering to other businesses (B2B) or customers (B2C)? What wording would they use to find products or services like yours?
To identify those words and phrases, speak to anyone in direct contact with your customers: Customer service and employees at your Point of Sale come to mind. Or, better yet, ask your customers. For example, conduct polls to find out.
Find Similar Terms
Search engines are of great help when looking for keywords. Start typing in your Focus Keywords. Google’s auto-suggest will, well, suggest frequently searched-for phrases.
Also, check out Related Searches at the foot of a result page.
Add keywords to your list that cover your topics and product or service portfolio, and head to cPanel SEO’s Keyword Research.
How to Use cPanel SEO for Keyword Research
With more than 53 million keywords at your disposal, cPanel SEO is a powerful tool for keyword research. Keyword Research is where you want to start. And it’s super easy to use, too. Simply type an item from your list (for example, a product or product category) and hit the search button.
Past searches are saved in a table to pick up where you left off easily.
Understanding the Keywords Table
For your research, focus on Keywords — the table lists matching keywords for your topic, sorted by relevance. They come with metrics like Search Volume, CPC, and Competition to help you identify potentially interesting keywords. Also, Position shows your website’s ranking, as long as it’s within the top 100.
In this phase of keyword research, you can ignore those metrics; we’ll explain and use them in a later step. Instead, focus on finding keywords that might be of interest to you.
Collect And Organize Your Keywords Using the Keyword Planner
For keyword research, we recommend you add keywords to the Keyword Planner. It’s an excellent feature for keyword research. It allows you to add and organize keywords by creating groups of your choice (e.g., Keyword Research, Product X, Topic Y).
Create a keyword research plan and start adding keywords.
How to Add Keywords to the Keyword Planner
In Keyword Research, simply drag and drop any potential keyword to the Keyword Planner.
For every other keyword table in cPanel SEO, flag the respective keyword’s checkbox, click Select Action, and Add to Planner.
Once you’re done with your initial research, return to the Keyword Planner to sort through and group your keywords and decide which you want to focus on.
You’ll find the Planner here: Keywords → Keyword Research → Tab Keyword Planner.
Check Your Rankings
Another great way to find profitable keywords is to check which keywords you are already ranking for. Take a look at the Rankings and Hot Keywords tables. Add any keywords you might want to use later to the Keyword Planner.
Check Your Competitor’s Rankings
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Check out your competition — what keywords are they ranking for? Among other things, Domain Comparison lists keywords your competitor is ranking for, but you are not (yet!).
To do that, compare your domain with your fiercest competitors, but place theirs first. Simply drag and drop domains to change the order. We recommend comparing your domain to one competitor at a time.
Setting your competitor’s domain first allows you to filter for keywords the first domain (your competitor) ranks for but not the second (you). To do that, add the Comparison Mode filter and set it to Only first domain must rank.
Specifically, look for keywords of shared topics and product or service portfolio and add them to the Keyword Planner.
Separate the Sheep from the Goats: Keyword KPI
So now you’ve got a long list of potential keywords in your Keyword Planner. The next step is to decide which keywords are worth keeping. In other words, you want to find out whether investing resources in a keyword is profitable or not.
As you’ve already seen, SEO tools like cPanel SEO provide additional data for every keyword, so-called Key Performance Indicators or KPI. Use them to sift through your list and identify keywords you want to focus on in your SEO strategy.
Let’s take a look at what those KPIs are and what they’re telling you. Afterward, eliminate redundant keywords and prioritize those you keep based on how important/profitable they are for your business.
Search volume
Search volume is the average number of monthly searches for that keyword. In other words, search volume reflects the users’ interest in and usage of this term.
Rule of Thumb: The higher the search volume, the more profitable the keyword. After all, a high search volume implies that many users use it. Good rankings for such a keyword will bring a lot of traffic to your website.
But: Your competition is likely to try and get good positions, as well. That’s why rankings for well searched-for keywords are highly competitive. You may need a lot of resources to gain top positions. Also, keywords with a high search volume are often quite generic, making it hard to identify and satisfy the users’ search intent.
Takeaway: Ideally, a keyword is the perfect mix of a relatively high search volume and clear user intent.
Competition
Initially, Competition is a Google Ads metric reflecting the “number of advertisers worldwide bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google.” It means that highly competitive keywords may require higher bids for advertisers to be placed in good positions.
Rule of Thumb: A popular keyword amongst advertisers should also yield qualitative traffic for organic search results. Thus, ranking organically in good positions will most likely bring conversion-happy traffic to your website.
But: For sure, your competitors will try to gain good organic rankings — given that they’re doing SEO, too. However, that might make it harder and require more resources to get good rankings.
Takeaway: Ideally, your keyword has high Competition, but organically your competitors haven’t made much of an effort yet.
CPC - Cost Per Click
CPC is a performance-based billing method that shows the market price for a click on a Google ad placed in search results of the respective keyword. Usually, high competition and high CPC go hand in hand.
Rule of Thumb: A high CPC implies a lucrative keyword and good chances for conversions; why else would advertisers place relatively high bids to get their ads placed? If it’s a lucrative keyword for SEA, it’s lucrative for SEO, too.
But: Where’s money to be made, you will most likely have to compete against well-established websites and brands. So it might take some resources to gain top rankings.
Takeaway: Your competitors focus on SEA instead of SEO with any luck. That would give you an opening to swoop in and establish good organic rankings quickly.
User Intent
User intent is not a metric but a crucial factor in determining how much effort you want to put into ranking for a keyword and what your content should look like. A keyword’s user intent reveals what kind of action a user intends to take and what type of content they will expect. For example, the keyword’s wording might indicate whether users intend to buy a product or service or whether they’re looking for information, instructions, or navigation, for example.
Rule of Thumb: Always identify and note down user intent for your keywords.
But: There are no buts. Do it.
Takeaway: User intent will help you prioritize keywords and create helpful content for them.
Finalize Your List: Categorize & Group Keywords
To keep your list easy to use, categorize and group your keywords. In your Keyword Planner, create plans for every (product) category and, within them, fitting groups. Then, move keywords to their respective groups.
For example, if you run a pet shop, you want to create plans for dogs, cats, birds, etc. For dogs, you might want to create groups to sort your keywords into, such as:
- Dog Food
- Beds & Baskets
- Leads & Collars
- Kennels, Flaps & Gates
- Grooming
- And so on
You can also create plans and groups for keywords you would cover in your blog, for example. These would be keywords of an informational nature perfect for how-to guides or articles providing background information for your users.
The Keyword Planner allows you to assign URLs to keywords. Specify the URL of the page you want to rank for this keyword. It does not matter whether you provide a live URL or a future URL of a page you still need to create. Assigning URLs helps you make sure that each keyword is covered by exactly one page.
What Now?
You’ve done your first keyword research, congratulations! A well-researched keyword set is a basis for future SEO measures. It defines which keywords you want to rank for and which keywords or pages you want to focus on first, depending on their KPI or your page’s rankings.
The next step is to add crucial keywords to the Rank Tracker. There, you can keep track of important keywords’ or pages’ rankings and track their development over time. Learn how to add keywords, customize tracking, and monitor and analyze your rankings.
Also, use your keyword set to
- Strategically improve rankings, decide which keywords/pages you want to focus on first
- Decide what kind of content is required for each keyword
- (Keyword) Optimize existing pages/content
- Create new pages/content
- Prioritize your work
To help you optimize a page and its text, we recommend you use the URL Analysis and Text Optimizer. Check out our Text Optimization Guide for step-by-step instructions on how to use the two to improve a page's rankings.
Also, don't forget to fill in your keyword in strategic spots across your page. Learn all about keyword optimization here. Make it a habit to keyword-optimize every page you want to rank in search engines.
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