4 Ways To Do SEO Keyword Research
Doing your SEO keyword research is going to help your ideal clients find your business on search engines!
SEO is something that used to first make me confused, then make me super anxious, then make me feel like “k, whatever, do I really even need this?”
When I first heard about SEO it sounded so foreign to me, you may as well have been speaking French to me!
Also to be perfectly honest, I actually didn’t even know about SEO when I built my first website for my previous business. I had used a beautifully designed template but I didn’t know what content I needed to add to my site and I sure as hell did not know what SEO was or how to use it!
I want to make sure you feel confident in SEO because it really helps put your website on Googles (and other search engines) radar.
And I think these days, as a society, we underestimate the power of being found on Google. We put so much importance on Social Media, but I am telling you, good ol’ fashion search results is just as important (if not more).
If you have hired someone to build your website for you or you have put in the work yourself – you want to make sure people can find your website, otherwise what good was that investment? And the way to get found is through SEO – Search Engine Optimization!
If you are familiar with Social Media, a simple way to understand this concept is that Social Media uses “algorithms” to determine what content is shown to someone vs. search engines use “search engine optimization” to determine what content is shown.
To better help you understand this whole concept, I’m going to share directly from the Moz website
“Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines”
Keywords fall into two categories:
Head – Shorter keywords with a larger search volume, such as photographer, shoes, and ceramics. These target a wide audience, and are usually more difficult to rank for.
Long-tail – These are more descriptive, multi-word search terms, like engagement photography nyc, red women’s shoes, and glazed ceramic vases. These target more specific queries, and may be easier to rank for.
Source: Squarespace
And SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It is the process used to improve the ranking of your website’s search results.
4 places to do SEO keyword research for your website
As I mentioned in the quote above, your ideal clients are typing what they are looking for from your industry directly into search engines like Google.
Your clients have questions and you need to provide them with answers to help build trust and a relationship with them.
When someone goes to Google and searches something to do with your industry they are using “keywords” in the search bar. The terms most searched for will pop up automatically as recommended searches or suggested search terms in Google.
All you have to do is open up Google in your browser and type in your industry into the search bar.
The recommended search options will start to pop up – this is what your ideal clients are most often searching. These are your Keywords from Google.
Let’s do this together, for example if you are a hairstylist just type in hairstylist and see what pops up.
In this image you can see the following keywords:
- Hairstylist recommended shampoo and conditioner
- Hairstylist near me
- Hairstylist Vancouver
- Hairstylist jobs
- Hairstylist noc
- Hairstylist salary
- Hairstylist resume
- Hairstylist apprenticeship
- Hairstylist Kelowna
The words next to “hairstylist” are your keywords.
Related searches for SEO keyword research.
You can see in the image above, if you scroll down to the bottom of your Google search results, there are “Related Searches”. Use these keywords as well!
I know all of these won’t be relevant to your website as a hairstylist. A lot of the keywords here are related to my location, when you type in hairstylist from where you are – your locations will pop up.
Location is huge for any brick and mortar business so you would definitely want to use your location as a keyword throughout your website.
And as you can see, the terms “Hairstylist recommended shampoo and conditioner” pops up. If someone is asking this question you can share the answer on your website so Google can connect you to this person.
You want to do the same thing with Pinterest. Some people still refer to Pinterest as a Social Media platform, but Pinterest is a very powerful search engine, similar to Google.
Here you can see the most commonly searched for keywords on Pinterest related to Hairstylist:
- Hairstylist outfits
- Hairstylist aesthetic
- Hairstylist tattoos
- Hairstylist quotes
- Hairstylist instagram content
- Hairstylist photoshoot ideas
These are terms you can use throughout your website, only use them where they make sense.
And you can directly use these keyword searches for content ideas on your website. You can literally do a post about Hairsytlist outfits, aesthetic, quotes, photoshoot ideas.
Use these keywords to help guide what content you are creating because you want to make sure you’re creating content people are actually searching for.
And of course you are not limited to these keywords. You can even give these search engines a little nudge towards what you are looking for. For example if you want to do how to tutorials, type in “hairstylist how to” and see what comes up.
You can literally use these search results as ideas for your how to videos. Kind of brilliant, you’re not only doing keyword research you’re also brainstorming content ideas, you’re welcome!
Moz Keyword Explorer
You can use this website to search for keywords and see how many times each of the words/phrases are searched on average.
The great thing is there is a free version of Moz which is what I use. You are limited to how many searches you can do in a week but if you’re just searching for yourself this is more than enough! Just create a free account and start searching!
You want to use keywords/phrases that are within 100-1000 searches. Think of these kind of like hashtags, you don’t want to use hashtags that have millions of views because yours will just get lost in the noise, same thing with keywords. You want them to be ranking but also not in a category that is overwhelming!
You can see here I searched for “hairstylist how to” again and these are the results of what people are searching and how many searches for each keyword/phrase.
Again, use these results as ideas for what type of content to create as well!
Answer the Public
Answer the public is going to show you what people have been searching for in Google and then break it down into different sections.
You can use a free version of this as well which is always great!
You are going to get a lot of great content ideas here and of course – keywords!
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