In this episode, Chrissy Rey breaks down the fundamentals of keyword research for beginners. Learn why keyword research is crucial for your website’s success, how to identify your target audience, and practical steps to start your keyword research journey. Chrissy shares valuable insights on using free tools like Google Keyword Planner and offers tips on selecting the right keywords for your content.
Listen to the Episode
Show Notes
In this beginner-friendly episode, Chrissy Rey demystifies the process of keyword research, a crucial foundation for SEO success. She guides listeners through identifying their target audience, brainstorming initial keyword ideas, and using free tools like Google Keyword Planner to analyze search volume and competition. Chrissy emphasizes the importance of finding keywords with high search volume and low competition, and provides practical tips for incorporating these keywords into website content. This episode equips listeners with the knowledge and confidence to take their first steps in keyword research and improve their website’s visibility.
Key Topics
- Understanding the importance of keyword research (0:03:05)
- Identifying your target audience and creating an Ideal Client Avatar (ICA) (0:05:09)
- Brainstorming initial keyword ideas (0:07:14)
- Using Google’s search features for keyword inspiration (0:08:54)
- Introduction to Google Keyword Planner (0:10:41)
- Analyzing search volume and competition data (0:13:06)
- Tips for validating keyword competition (0:15:31)
- Recap of main steps for keyword research (0:19:37)
Resources Mentioned
- Website Success Blueprint
- Website Success Action Plan
- Google Keyword Planner
- SEO Success Club
- Keywords Everywhere
- SEMrush
- Moz
- Website Success Lounge Facebook group
Transcript
[00:00:09] Hey everyone. Welcome back to Website Success. As always, I’m Chrissy Rey, and I’m here to help you make your website the best it can be.
[00:00:26] I recently asked my social media audience what their biggest pain point was when it came to SEO. And one of the top answers was “getting started with keyword research.” I know it can be a lot and it can be really tough for a beginner to even know where to begin. So I am going to make your life a little easier with this episode and give you some tips on getting started with keyword research.
[00:00:53] Now, if you haven’t even started thinking about SEO, you might be wondering, ” what the heck is keyword research anyway, and why should I care?” Well, I’ll tell ya. Keyword research is one of the foundations of search engine optimization. And it’s basically all about figuring out what words and phrases or keywords people are typing into Google or Bing or whatever search engine they’re using when they’re trying to look for information related to your website. Or basically when they’re looking for your business or a business like yours.
[00:01:26] But here’s the thing: when you’re just getting started, keyword research can be really, really overwhelming. I know when I first started with SEO, keyword research, just kind of muddled my brain. And it’s really hard to figure out where to start if you don’t already know. So that’s what I’m here to help you with. I’m going to break everything down into really simple steps that you should be able to follow. If you can’t hop into my Facebook group Website Success Lounge, ask questions in there and I’m going to be happy to answer them.
[00:02:00] And I also do want to mention that I am starting an SEO membership. It’s going to be called the SEO success club. So keep an eye out for my announcements about that. If you get in at the beginning, you’ll get the founding member price, which is really inexpensive. You’ll be locked in at that. And it’s a good way if you need some support with search engine optimization, it’ll be a good way to sort of slide into that and get some expert support.
[00:02:25] Now, before we dive into the keyword research part, I do want to mention that if you’re planning on doing organic SEO, which is what I usually talk about, and it’s sort of the free SEO, or pay-per-click, which would be search engine ads, you’d need to do keyword research for both, but it’s slightly different for each of them. But you still need to do keyword research because you need to know what people are looking for. If they’re just searching and they’re going to click on organic links. And also what they’re going to be searching for when it comes to something like your business, even if it’s going to be for paid ads.
[00:03:02] So this does apply to both of those.
[00:03:05] Okay. So first things first, I want to talk about why keyword research is so important. You already know what it is already mentioned that, but why is it important? If you think about, let’s say you’ve got an amazing website, you took hours and hours or weeks and months of creating this amazing, beautiful website, or you hired a developer to do it for you. And it’s out there. And crickets. Nobody is finding the website. Nobody’s going to the website. You’re not getting any clicks. You’re not getting any conversions. You’re just, it’s just there. And nobody’s going to it. So it’s kind of like having this beautiful, amazing store that’s in the middle of nowhere with no roads leading to it and no signs or anything like that. So that’s kind of what your website is if you’re not doing some sort of outreach. And keyword research basically helps you build those roads and it helps you put up the signs. To say, “Hey, I’m here. Look at my website!” And it sort of guides people directly to your website.
[00:04:08] So, where do you start with keyword research? The first step is going to be, to figure out who exactly your target audiences. I know that sounds a little sort of counterintuitive. You want to start researching your keywords, but you need to figure out who your target audience is. You also need to figure out what your goals are for your website. And you also need to think about what it is that you’re offering on your website. So you really need to do some planning and think about those three things. But having the goals and the offer, the what you’re offering on your website, you probably already have that. You probably already have your target audience, at least sort of, at least in the back of your mind. But when you’re starting with your keyword research, I want you to put that at the front of your mind because in order to figure out what keywords people are looking for you need to know a little bit about those people. You need to sort of get into their minds and think about what would they be searching for on Google or DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whatever search engine they’re using.
[00:05:09] The first thing I want you to do is write down as many details about your target audience as you can. And even better, if you are able to create something called an ICA, which stands for ideal client avatar or ideal customer avatar. And I want you to create one or two of those, if you can. And if you haven’t done an ICA before, it’s basically a description of a fictional person from your target audience.
[00:05:36] So you need to know who your target audience is. And then pull an individual person out of that target audience and just describe them. So include things like their name, like actually give them a name, their age, their gender, their marital status, their education profession, personality. It’s also going to include things like their goals. What are they looking for? What do they need? What do they want? What are their challenges, when it comes to that? What are their pain points? What objections might they have to what you offer? And there’s a whole bunch more information.
[00:06:09] If you’ve used my Website Success Blueprint, then you’ve probably already done this exercise. If you haven’t, you can go get that in the resources section at websitesuccessacademy.com, download that, and it actually walks you through the things that I’m talking about. So it walks you through deciding what your offer is or identifying what your offer is, creating some goals for your website, and then also defining your target audience and creating an ICA. So it walks through all of that, walks through a lot more than that, but those are the things that you absolutely need to get started with when it comes to SEO.
[00:06:44] So after you get into the minds of your target audience and you have a really good idea of who they are, what they’re looking for the next step is going to be to brainstorm some ideas. So grab a pen and paper or if you’re a digital person, like me, open up a Google doc or a Word doc or a text file or something like that, and start writing. Write down every word or phrase that you think relates to your website. We’ll call this your keyword ideas list.
[00:07:14] So don’t overthink it. Just let those creative juices flow, write down as many words and phrases as you can. For example, let’s say that you run a small bakery. Your list might include things like cakes, cupcakes, birthday cakes, wedding cakes, gluten-free desserts, cookies, custom cookies, and so on. Remember to add the words and then variations of the words. And don’t worry about being too specific right now. You can refine this list later.
[00:07:44] Once you’ve got that initial list, it’s going to be time to put yourself in that ICA’s shoes. Try to think like someone who might be looking for what you offer on your website. And again, if you created that ICA, you know what their goals are, what problems are they trying to solve? What are their pain points? What questions might they ask? Going back to our bakery example, you might come up with phrases and the phrases can be questions if you want them to, but they might be things like how to order a custom cake, best bakery near me, last minute birthday cake ideas, best cookies for toddlers. And these are going to be longer phrases in a lot of cases, and those are what we refer to as long tail keywords. So they’re a little bit longer than the one or two or three word keywords. And by the way, when I say keyword, A keyword can be a phrase. It’s not necessarily just a single word. But anyway, back to long tail keywords, they are usually going to have a little bit less competition than the shorter keywords, because they’re going to be more specific. So take all of those questions and those longer phrases and add those to your list.
[00:08:54] Now another cool trick , you can actually use Google to help you brainstorm even more ideas. So if you type your keyword or one of your keywords, one of those shorter keywords into Google don’t hit enter. You’re going to see a list of popular searches that include that keyword that are or, that are related to what you’re typing. And these are absolute gold because they’re based on what people are actually searching for. So do that little trick, add some of those keywords to your list.
[00:09:24] Another great place to look for keywords in Google, so we’re starting our keyword research here with Google, is in the people also ask section, that’s going to usually appear on the Google search results. So if you type in your search, hit enter, then you’ll see if you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see a list of questions and it’s usually like four questions, but if you expand one of those questions, it’ll add four or five more. And those questions again, are things that people are asking Google. So, they can again, give you some really good insight into the information that your potential customers or people looking for your business or the keywords that you’re brainstorming. These are things that people are looking for.
[00:10:06] So by now, you should have a pretty nice long list of keyword ideas. These potential keywords. The next step is figuring out which ones are actually worth targeting. And this is going to be where we start to dip our toes into some basic keyword research tools. And there are some free ones out there. So that’s what I’m going to talk about in this episode. There are also lots of paid ones. I use paid ones cause I do this professionally and they give you a little bit more insight, but you can start with free. You don’t need to go out and invest a lot of money in keyword research tools.
[00:10:41] So the one that I want to talk about is Google’s Keyword Planner. And it’s free. It’s absolutely free. You do need a Google ads account to use it, but you don’t actually have to create any ads. So you just need the account. So go to Google ads, which is ads.Google.com. And create a free account. You can just click on start now. And then after you create the account, you’re going to go into the tools menu on the left side. If you’re on a computer, I usually do this on a computer. It’s kind of hard to do it on a mobile device, but go into the tools menu, expand that. And then if you look under the planning section, you’re going to see the keyword planner in there. So just click on that and that’ll open up the keyword planner. And then you’ll see a menu item there, or a big button that says discover keyword ideas or something like that. And you will click on that and then just enter in the space provided, enter one or more of your keywords. You can just type them in, separate them with commas, or you can type it in, press enter and add a bunch of your keywords. You don’t have to add all of them. Just add some keywords.
[00:11:46] A really cool feature of this tool, if you haven’t already gotten enough keyword ideas, once you enter some keyword ideas into the tool, it will give you more suggestions. So additional related keywords that you might not have even thought of. And you can add those to your list.
[00:12:03] Another really cool feature of the keyword planner is that you can limit the data to a specific span of dates. So it’s one of the features when in the search results for the keywords, you can limit the data to certain dates.
[00:12:17] You can also limit it to a specific geographic area. And that’s really useful if you’re a local business and you need to do work on local SEO because the things that people are searching for in your local area and the results that you’re going to get, the data that you’re going to get while you’re doing your research could be very different for local searches versus statewide or Countrywide or even worldwide searches.
[00:12:43] So now you’re going to create a second list, and we’re going to call this the keyword plan. And you create this list in keyword planner by saving the keyword. So you check off a keyword and you’ll see an option at the top of the keyword planner to save to keyword plan. And if you want, you can do this on paper. I usually do it in the keyword planner, but again, it’s called your keyword plan.
[00:13:06] Now, when you’re looking at the data in the keyword planner, so after you do your search for some keywords in there, you’ll see a whole bunch of numbers and the two that I want you to really pay attention to are going to be the search volume and the competition. Search volume is going to tell you how many people are searching for that term each month and the competition is going to give you an idea of how hard it’s going to be to rank for that keyword because of how many other people are also trying to rank for that keyword. But I do want you to keep in mind that the competition value in the keyword planner is specific to Google ads. So it’s based on the number of advertisers that are bidding on each keyword. And that does sometimes correlate with the competition for organic search, but sometimes it doesn’t. So you got to kind of take those numbers with a grain of salt. But basically the more results the keyword has, the more competition for those first few spots that are in the search engine results page there’s going to be.
[00:14:08] But the thing that you’re going for here on that keyword planner, the results that you’re looking for with those two numbers is going to be a keyword that has a good search volume. Your minimum is going to vary, but I would say at least a hundred. Depending on what you’re trying to search for, you might want to say at least a thousand and you can sort, you can filter the results. Or you can sort the results by any of the columns in there. But you want to find the ones that have a relatively high search volume, but a relatively low competition. So if the competition is listed as low and you’ve got a million of the search volume, then that’s probably a good keyword. And those are going to be your sort of golden opportunities as far as the keywords, because they’re words that a lot of people are searching for, but not a lot of other websites are targeting.
[00:14:58] When you find a keyword that has a good combination of the two, check it, add it to your keyword plan. So any keywords that have a high search volume, low competition, and that are relevant to the content that you’re going to create and your offer, you’re going to want to add that to your keyword plan.
[00:15:16] Now I do know that looking at all those numbers can be a little overwhelming, but don’t stress out. The goal here is not to become an overnight expert, but to start to understand the landscape of everything.
[00:15:31] If you find a keyword that is relatively low competition in the keyword planner, if you want to verify for organic that it is still relatively low competition, you can take that keyword and plug it into Google. So just open up Google, type it in there. See how many results come back. If you get millions or billions of results, which some keywords are going to have, then that’s a pretty high competition keyword, because there are millions or billions of results that are coming up. So the chances of you getting on the first page of the search engine results page are really, really low. If the search results come back and there are thousands or hundreds, then it’s probably a pretty low competition keyword. So again, you can sort of validate that competition that is specific to the ads by doing the search in Google.
[00:16:25] So that’s, that’s basically it. Once you create that keyword plan, you have your keywords, the keyword plan that you create in the keyword planner, you can export it to a CSV file. You can save it to Google sheets and you can work with it. And what I do recommend if you’re just getting started and you’re doing that sort of validation where you’re searching in Google for the results, and then you’re going back and I would put those numbers, I would create the Google. The keyword plan and then plug those numbers into a Google sheet.
[00:16:53] So you have that information.
[00:16:55] So that’s, that’s pretty much it. There are other keyword research tools out there. Once you sort of get started with the basics, you feel really comfortable with keyword planner and doing the brainstorming and everything, then some other keyword research tools you might want to add to your toolkit. Are going to be paid tools. There are tools like Keywords Everywhere, which is a browser extension. I use it in Chrome and it really gives you additional information. Uh, additional stats about the keywords. And then there’s also. SEM rush or SEMrush. However you want to call it. Uh, and Moz, which is what I use.
[00:17:35] I also use AI to help me with my keyword research and I am going to cover that in a future episode. I let the AI know as much as possible about my target audience and my services and everything. And then I have it give me suggestions for keywords that I can then research.
[00:17:53] So, what do you do after you find a bunch of keywords? Well, then it’s time to actually start using them in your content, but I’ve already covered a lot in this episode and I don’t want to overwhelm you at this point. So, if you are curious about using those keywords after you find them, writing content with those keywords, doing what’s called on page SEO and optimizing your individual pieces of content for those keywords, once again, check out the SEO Success Club that I mentioned earlier. You can go to websitesuccessacademy.com. If you go on the resources, there’s actually a resource there for the SEO success clubs. So click on that. It’s not totally public yet. I, I, I guess it is public ’cause I mentioned in this episode, but it’s not 100% ready yet. I’m still building up the content in there. I’m taking my SEO action plan and I’m making videos for every single task in that action plan. And I’m still working on that. So it’ll officially be official in, probably in late August, but if you’re listening to this now, this episode is coming out in late July, you can still sign up for it, check it out and you can get access to the stuff that’s already in there. You’ll also get access to a members only community. And I also do monthly Q&A. I hope to eventually make those weekly Q&A, but for now they are monthly. So if you get in now, you’ll get the founding member price, which is going to be really inexpensive. Uh, just because you’re sort of previewing it and you also be able to help me figure out what content to add. What’s going to be useful. So again, go to a websitesuccessacademy.com and then go to resources to sign up.
[00:19:37] All right before we wrap up, I do want to recap the main steps that we covered.
[00:19:41] So the first thing is going to be to identify everything you can about your business and about your website, so your offer, your goals and your target audience. If you can create an ICA. Then I want you to brainstorm your initial keywords list. Then try to think like your customer and expand that list. Then you’re going to use Google’s tools like the “people always ask” and the suggested searches. Then you’re going to use Google’s keyword planner to get ideas about additional keywords and get data on those keywords. When you’re doing that, you’re going to look for keywords that have a good search volume and lower competition. And then final step is going to be to start incorporating those keywords into your content. So that’s, that’s pretty much it there. I think I listed seven steps.
[00:20:30] Now, if you’re feeling inspired after this episode to dive right in and start doing your keyword research, I got a little homework for you. I want you to take 15 minutes this week to brainstorm your keyword ideas. So start on that, that, well, before you do that, figure out your target audience, but after you’ve done that, I want you to brainstorm some keyword ideas for your business. And don’t worry so much about the data just yet just get your ideas down and then next time you’re working on your website. See if you can naturally incorporate some of those keywords into your content.
[00:21:01] That’s all I’ve got today. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this helpful, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. I’ll continue doing additional beginner, friendly SEO tips and all kinds of really good information about making your website successful. If you have questions about keyword research, feel free to reach out, make sure you’ve joined my Facebook group Website Success Lounge, ask questions in there, but until then, Happy researching.
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