In this Article, I will tell you how to do keyword research for you or your client’s blog using free keyword research tools. Hello, and welcome to Cluestipster Website, where you will get free SEO templates, guides, and tips. If you want to get updates, go ahead and subscribe to my website. Conducting keyword research for you or your client’s blog will help you determine what your target audience is searching for online at a difficulty that you can compete with. This will allow you to plan out a content strategy to attract users from all stages of your buyer’s journey will also increase your blog’s traffic, your brand awareness, and most importantly, your leads and sales.
Keyword Research with the Keyword Surfer Chrome Extension
So the first step to conduct keyword research for your blog is to start with a seed keyword for your blog. So this is just a general keyword that you’re gonna start with that describes your blog, your website, or your business. In this example, I’m gonna use a fishing blog. Let’s say that I wanna start a fishing blog that is gonna have some potentially informational content, as well as some affiliate content. So a fishing blog. So a seed keyword could be fishing rods. Let’s just type that in. What you want to do is before you start, based on if you have any localization for your blog. So if your blog is only targeting a certain audience or your target audience is from only a certain region, what I would do is go to the settings gear icon in Google, go see all settings, scroll to the bottom, and then make sure that the region that is selected is the region where the majority of your target audience is from.
So in this fishing blog example, technically I could sell to anyone in the world, but let’s say that I anticipate that the majority of my target audience is onna be from the US. So I’m gonna leave this on US. If you, your blog was targeting somewhere only in Canada or, the UK or other countries, you could choose that region in these region settings for this example, I’m just gonna leave it on the us. If your target audience is worldwide, I would just select whatever country is where the majority of your target audience is from. Then click save. What I would do next is make sure that you have the keyword surfer Chrome extension, downloaded and enabled. So I’ll drop a link to this tool in the below the Article, make sure it’s activated, you’ll see the icon on the top right hand corner of your browser. What I would also do is to remove any personalization from your browser. I would also open a new incognito window and I would do your keyword research in this incognito window.
So make sure that the keyword surfer tool is activated and then enter your seed keyword into incognito, Google. And if surfer is working, you will. Oh, once again, I would go to the settings. Once you moved to incognito and choose your region, once again, just like I was talking about. Okay, now you’re good to go. So what surfer will do is it’ll show you for the keyword, the seed keyword that you entered it’ll show you the search volume in the country that you selected, you can change your country in the tool. I’m gonna leave it on us for this fishing blog example. So the first number is gonna be the estimated search volume per month for the country you have selected. And then the second number is the cost per click from Google AdWords. For doing keyword research for your blog, because this is for organic SEO, I’m not gonna focus really on the, the second number.
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It’s really just gonna be on search volume and if the keyword is relevant or not, and what you’re going to do is if the keyword is relevant, you’re just going to click this star. And what it that’s gonna do is that is going to, move this keyword into the keyword surfer clipboard. So it’s gonna save these keyword ideas for you in one place. What you’re gonna do next is scroll down to the keyword surfer interface tool. And you’ll see that it’s giving you a bunch of other relevant keyword ideas to your seed keyword. So what you’re gonna want to do is to generate a lot of related keywords from your seed keyword to, for keywords that you could write about on your blog. You are going to go through this list and if anything is relevant to your blog and you think you can write a blog, Or some piece of content about it. You’re gonna go and click on the star icon to save the keyword to your list. You can play around with this. You can go to 20 results per page. I like to leave this on 10 and then just toggle through the list with these previous and next arrows. So for example, if I go through the list, the, any of these could be good keywords.
These are very generic, so high search volume, but typically what you want to do is, especially if it’s a new blog that you are doing keyword research for, you want more long tailed keywords, uh, because the competition is generally lower. So I’m gonna start scrolling through a little bit until we get keywords with more terms on them as they become more, more long tailed. best fishing rods. That might be a good one. Best fishing rod, real and rod combo, salt, water, fishing rods, spinning fishing rods. So what I’m gonna do is to get a little more specific. Let’s say I wanted to feature spinning fishing rods on my blog. I’m actually gonna click that. What will happen is it will automatically Google that keyword and then you can go back to the keyword ideas from surfer and do the same process. Go through the list. Best fishing rods for bass. That’s a great one. Best rod for bass. These are kind of all the same, but you can click them on fishing rod for salt water. That’s another great one.
Best fishing poles, bass fishing, rods, casting, a spinning reel. That’s another good one, spinning rods versus casting rods. So as you can see, I’m not gonna bore you going through this whole list, but you want to go through the list and select relevant keywords to your blog to save to your keyword list. You can always see your keyword list by clicking on clipboard. And then you’ll see the list here along with the monthly searches. You can go ahead and delete them. If you ever want to remove one. What I would also do is to utilize Google’s keyword research abilities with keyword surfer, for any of your seed keywords or any keywords you have up in the Google search bar, I would click on them and you can take advantage of Google’s auto suggest. So best spinning rods. That’s another great one. So I would click through onto that select that as well. Then I would go back to keyword surfer in the interface and do the same process. Go through the list and select relevant keywords.
Whoops, for your blog. And then I would also go back to Google auto suggest again, best spinning rod and real combo. That’s another great one. I’d click on that. Make sure to select it and then go through the process again, go through this list. and another item you can utilize from Google is Google’s related searches. So for any keyword that you’ve searched for, I would just go to the bottom of the search results page and look at the related searches. You can also utilize these for more great ideas. This is a great one best spinning rod and real combo for trout. And as you can see, these are getting more and more long tailed. So the search volume’s gonna come down. Yes. But these keyword’s are gonna be a lot less competitive. So I would click on that as well. It says zero, but I would still save it to the list. And then this just becomes an iterative process.
Go through the list again and select relevant keywords. You can also go back to Google’s auto suggest, maybe click on this one. This one says zero as well, but I’ll click. go back to the related searches again, best ultra light rod and real combo for trout. So click on that. This is a good one. Click on that. Save it to the keyword list. So like I said, this just becomes an iterative process. Use the combination of Google’s auto suggests from your seed keyword, the keyword ideas from keyword surfer, as well as Google’s related searches at the very bottom. And then what I would do next is if you’re satisfied with your keyword list for your first seed keyword, if you have a second seed keyword, so let’s say you, you do some keyword research and you want to do another seed keyword of ultra light rods. I would just start with that as a seed keyword and then repeat the whole process again.
Go through the keyword ideas and surfer, go through Google’s auto suggest keywords, that they give you based on your seed keywords, scroll down to the bottom and then use the related searches as well. So you, from this method, you can come up with a pretty long list of keywords in your clipboard when you’re ready to export them, click on this three button toggle. And then export as a CSV file, and then you can save all your keyword ideas in one place in a Google sheets file or an Excel file. That’s a great place to keep them all in one place. Um, stay till the end of the Article I, I will share a free keyword research template with you, where you can keep all your keyword ideas in one place, and it’s gonna help streamline your keyword research process for your blog. So for example, if you. Uh, open the CSV file that you downloaded. You can take that keyword list, copy it, and then paste it into one place. And like I said, I will share this keyword research template with you at the end of the Article, and it will help keep all your keywords in one place.
Keyword Research with the SEO Minion Browser Extension
So another great way to come up with more keyword ideas for your blog is to use another Chrome extension that I really love, called SEO minion. So I’ll drop a link to that in the description below the Article, make sure you’ve downloaded SEO minion, and activated it. You’ll see this icon in the top right hand corner of your browser. I would just continue with the incognito browser that you already started with. And what I would do is I would go back and start with your initial seed keyword. So I think we started with fishing rod. So let’s start with that, Google that again. And then what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna see in the SEO minion tool that comes up, um, on the right hand side of your browser, you’re just gonna go to. You’re gonna go to this all organic results, toggle click on the down button, scroll down a bit. And as you’re gonna see, they’ve got a PAA section. So what this stands for is people also ask. So as you can see in a lot of Google SERPs these days, there are this little box that comes up that’s called people also ask.
So these are common questions that people are also Googling for or searching for that are related to this keyword that you entered. So these are also great informational questions you can put on blog posts in your blog because it’s, it’s related to your niche and your seed keyword, and it helps satisfy search intent because you’re giving the searcher what they want. These are common questions that searchers are asking and searching for who are interested in fishing rods. So if you can answer them in, in certain blog posts or on affiliate pages, These are great ways to satisfy search intent. And these are typically more long tailed because they’re, they’ve got more terms in them. So these are also usually very low competition. So I really suggest using SEO minion to mine the people also ask section. So like I said, what you can do is go to the SEO minion interface, scroll to the bottom, and you have several options here. You can use the PAA. You can go two levels, which only takes five seconds.
You can go all the way to eight levels, which takes about six hours. So that’s a long time. What that means is if you go to the people also ask section, if you click on this toggle button, what it does is it expands, Google expands it and gives you even more People also ask suggestions. So the more you click, The more you get, see the tools spitting out even more and you can keep doing this as much as you want. And it just spits out more and more ideas. So that’s what SEO minion is referring to when it says different levels. It’s just eight levels is more keyword questions that have been expanded out in the people also asked section. Uh, compared to only two levels. So I think eight levels is probably too much. What I like to do is go somewhere in the middle five levels is usually pretty good. If you’re more patient, you can go six, if you wanna wait that long. But usually I like to go five levels. And then what you want to do is just click go.
And what SEO minion is gonna start doing is it’s just gonna start mining this people also ask section. And it grabs all the keywords up to five levels. And it’s gonna generate a list for you of really good question keywords that you can use in your blog. So I will let the tool do its thing. So once the tool has finished, you’ll see how many people also ask questions that it downloaded. You can also click on view the tree, and what this will show you is a visualization of all the keywords that it came up with. If you’re a visual person, you may like to do this and go through it this way. I don’t really like this. You can also save the png file. What I like to do is just make sure that this is toggled on download. Download, click, go. Sorry, you actually don’t even need to, click on that. Once it’s done, it will automatically download which you can see it is already done in my browser. So go find that CSV file. So once you found the location of that CSV file, you can just pull it up and this is what it will look. So the first column will be the people also ask question keyword and then it breaks it down into parent text, the URL, the URL title. Really, all I care about is the keywords that it mined from the people also ask sections. So I’m just gonna copy all of these and then I’m gonna paste them into my keyword research template.
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And then what you want to do is once you have them in some sort of an Excel file or Google sheets file, or your keyword research template, you’re just gonna have to spend some time going through the list. And I would just mark a yes or a “y” next to any keyword that is relevant to your blog. So. what are the three types of fishing rods that might be a good informational post for your blog. What size of fishing rod do I need? That’s a good one. How do you pick a good fishing rod? This is another good one. What is the best all round round or fishing rod. This is another good one. What is the best fishing rod for beginners? That’s great for an affiliate marketing piece of content. So I’m not gonna bore you going through the list, but you just need to spend some time. And mark a “y” next to all the keywords that are relevant. And then what you can do is you can just select the list, go to data sort range, advance range, sorting options, go to column C. And then you can just sort it from a to Z. And what that will do is bring all the keywords that you marked with.
Y it will bring it to the top of the list. So you know that these are the relevant keywords that you potentially want to target. Um, anything that’s not relevant, obviously you don’t care about, and you can just leave in the list untagged. And then what you want to do is you can take these keywords and then move it over to an overall target keyword list. If you have one. and then there, you have them all in one place. And obviously with the SEO minion tool, you’re not gonna get the search volume with these. So what you could do is if you don’t have a very long list, you could just copy them and then go back to, um, Google type it in. And then with the, the keyword surfer extension, you can find what the search volume is. If you want to. However, a lot of times you’re gonna see that the search volume is actually zero, but I typically for people also ask questions. I typically ignore this. And I, if it’s relevant to your blog, I still want to keep it in my target keyword list.
And the reason for this is because these are typically, um, long tailed keywords. The search volume will be probably pretty low, but a lot of times the keyword surfer tool or any other keyword research tool, although it says zero, the search volume is not zero it’s, it’s something low, but it’s because they’re long tailed and low competition. And they’re easy for something that you can put onto a blog post or fit into a blog post, I would typically keep them. So what I do is in the notes usually is just type PAA. So, you know, whoops, sorry. So you know that these are people also ask questions. Um, so if you have no search volume in the column, that’s okay. I would just keep these and know that these are good keywords to use on your blog.
Get your keyword difficulties
So once you’ve got all your relevant keywords in one place or in one list with search volume for the ones you got from keyword surfer, as well as the keywords that you mined from SEO minion from the people also ask sections. Now you’re ready to start getting the SEO difficulty or the competitiveness of all these keyword. So that you can start to filter these keywords by, or sorry, sort these keywords by search volume and difficulties. So obviously keywords with higher search volume. Typically they’re more competitive, so they have a higher SEO difficulty. So unless your blog has a lot of authority, you’re not gonna want to go and try and target a lot of these keywords. You’re gonna want to target some more lower search volume ones that have a difficulty that you can compete with. And usually these are a little bit more long tailed keywords, but so this, in this example, in this keyword list, these are just random keywords.
I pulled from the previous steps we talked about for my fishing blog example. So by no means, is this a complete keyword list but once you have a keyword list that are relevant to your blog, that you’re satisfied with, you can start doing the steps. So that’s getting the search volume, which you already have, and next would be the, getting the SEO difficulties for all these keywords. So a tool that you can use to get the SEO difficulties of your keywords in bulk is SEO review tools. I will drop a link to that in the description below this Article, and this is their keyword difficulty checker tool. So like I said, I’ll drop a link to that in the description. So if you go to that website, what you can do is you can see. Make sure you’re on the keyword difficulty checker tab. And you can add up to 10 keywords at one time and using it uses the SEM rush API. It’ll give you the competitiveness or the SEO difficulty of all these keywords. So if you have a larger keyword list, this may take some time to go through them, cuz you can only upload 10 at a time, but this is a free tool.
Unfortunately when you use free tools, sometimes you have to take a little bit more of the long road, but that’s okay. As this tool will work perfectly fine. So if we take our first 10 keywords, copy them and then paste them into the tool. Oh, and once again, you’re gonna wanna select your country in this tool. Depending on where the majority of your target audience is for my fishing blog example. I am assuming that the majority of the target audiences from the us. So I’m gonna leave it on this, but you can select other countries as well. Click the I’m not a robot captcha and then click perform check. Once the tool is done, you will see your keywords along with the keyword difficulties. So. What it’ll tell you is the keyword difficulty from on a scale of zero to a hundred, a hundred being extremely competitive. Those are the most difficult keywords to rank for zero being the least competitive. Um, and the way SEM rush groups them is, I believe it’s anything lower than like 50 or 60 is categorized as easy. Uh, Anything from 60 to 80 is medium.
And then I believe 80 to a hundred is hard. What you can do is you can export these results to an Excel file. So once you’ve done that, you want to go get your CSV file. So go find that CSV file. And then what you can do is you can just paste the keyword difficulties into the SEO difficulty column. So once you’ve got all the SEO difficulty metrics for each of your keywords in your list and put them into your spreadsheet, like I have here, you’re ready to start sorting this list by search volume and then choosing keywords based on difficulties that you can compete with. Just a note for the people also asked, keywords that you mined from SEO minion, the reason I wanted you to put the PAA or the people also ask acronym in the notes section is because typically I don’t even try and get the search volumes of these question keywords or the difficulties, cuz a lot of times tools will just tell you that the search volume is zero.
What, or it says it’s pretty much next to nothing. even though that’s not true, Google actually was telling you from the SERPs that people. that are interested in fishing and fishing rods are actually searching for these questions as well. So because Google’s telling you that I typically just ignore the search volumes and difficulties, and really what I use as a deciding factor If I’m gonna target these keywords, is are they relevant enough to my blog that I feel I can throw these into content that I create. So typically the people also ask keyword questions are questions that’ll just slip into various blog posts or different affiliate marketing posts. If I feel like I can fit it into the, the blog post, if it’s, if it’s relevant enough, uh, to be fit into the content.
Sort Your Keyword List by Search Volume and Difficulty
So what you’re gonna wanna do next is select your keyword list. And then you’re gonna wanna sort it by, search volume. So let’s go to column C and then I would just go Z to a, and then that’ll bring your highest search volume keywords to the top and your lowest ones at the bottom. So obviously, like I said, typically the higher, the search of volume, the higher difficulty, the higher, the difficulty, which is usually the And as the search volume goes down, the difficulty gets easier. As you can see, that is the trend. those are the trend for most keywords. These keywords follow that trend as well as you can see from this list. So if we are a brand new blog, if this fishing blog was a brand new blog and I was starting from scratch, I would not want to go for any of these difficult keywords. So I would want to go for ones that are more in the green.
So like, Twenties or the thirties, if there’s any of those. And it looks like there are so I’d want to go for keywords, like these ones, best fishing rods for bass, best rod for bass fishing. So these are all related to best rods for bass fishing. So it seems like that’s a good topic to start with. These are also good ones, best spinning rods, spinning rods, first casting rods, casting, a spin reel. So it seems like these are all related to spinning rods. Ultra light. Ultra light rods. That’s maybe one I would target, spinning rod and ultra rod real combo for trout. So it looks like there are some high search volume keywords that are also slightly lower difficulties. Now if you’re in existing blog, what you want to do is find out the types of keywords that you’re currently ranking for. On the first page of Google and find out the SEO difficulty of those keywords.
And then you’ll have a baseline for knowing what keywords you can rank for. And let’s say you’re able to rank for keywords in the 40 to 50 difficulty range. Then, you know, you can maybe go a little bit higher, but if you’re unsure, I would just always try and go with the, the lowest difficulty possible. So for this set, like I said, I would choose the ones that are like in the 20 to 30 range. So we do have some good options here, but that’s the next step. Once you search or, sorry, this is what we’re doing in this step, search the list or sort the list by search volume and then find out what difficulty you compete can compete with, uh, for your SEO difficulties.
And then that’s how you’re gonna start choosing target keywords. So for example, In this example, I would just write here target keyword, and I would go through the list and choose all the ones I think I compete can compete with based on difficulty. And then for your people also ask questions. If you think they’re relevant enough, because we don’t have search volume or difficulty and you think you could slip these into a blog post or, or a section in your blog. I would just also mark them down as a target keyword if they are relevant enough. So just go through the list and do that and mark your target keywords.
Conduct a SERP Analysis for Your Target Keywords
So now that you’ve chosen a preliminary target keyword list from your keywords based on search volume and difficulty, the next step is to conduct a SERP analysis. Now the reason I said preliminary target keyword list is because you’ve only in this list. You’ve only chosen keywords based solely on keyword difficulty as well, search volume, but a crucial step before you actually do decide to go and target that keyword is to do a SERP analysis. So that is analyzing the Google SERP for that particular keyword to see if it’s even worth targeting, based on the types of results that are already ranking for that keyword and whether or not that aligns with the type of content you want to produce. Or if you can even compete with those, the pages that are ranking in the Google SERP. I know we’ve already looked at the keyword difficulty metric, but a lot of times you may Google a keyword and then you’ll see that there’s a lot of really big brand.
Domains ranking, or the pages from those domains ranking in the Google SERP. And that may steer you away from this, this keyword, or you may punch it into Google and find that what you thought was an informational post isn’t it’s more commercial intent. So a SERP analysis helps you find if you can actually compete for that keyword, if the type of content that you want to create aligns with what’s ranking. As well as if you can satisfy the search intent of that keyword. So I’ve got a Article that I did on how to conduct a SERP analysis for your target keywords. I’m gonna drop that in the link. I’m gonna drop that as a link in the description of this Article. Um, check that out. If you wanna know how to do a detailed SERP analysis, but I’m gonna quickly go through how to do one really quickly here with one of these keywords as an example.
So let’s use this keyword as an example, best fishing rods for bass. So I’m gonna go ahead and Google that keyword. Once again, I would use an incognito window. and this is how you do a SERP analysis. So just look at the, the top results that are ranking. So the best bass fishing rods on the 2022 market top picks for best bass fishing rods. So these look like review, like affiliate marketing, review articles, but let’s quickly look at these, some of these page. as you can see, this is definitely a commercial intent, um, review article for the best types of fishing, fishing rods. Same with this one. So really quickly to summarize, if you were intending on ranking a purely informational article for best fishing rods for bass, it’s not gonna rank. The buyer or the user who’s searching for this is further down the customer journey or, or down the funnel.
The it’s, it’s more commercial intent behind the, the search intent of this keyword. The buyer already knows some basic information about, fishing rods for bass, and they’ve narrowed it down to. You know, maybe their top 10 or 20 picks and they just want to make a decision based on that. So you’re looking at like review listicle style articles, that are more commercial intent. So once again, check out my SERP analysis Article on how to conduct a SERP analysis for your keywords. That’ll be the next step. And once you do that, you can figure out what the search intent of all these keywords are. And you can decide if you want to keep these as target keywords. Uh, for your blog.
Map your target keywords to your blog
So the last step to doing keyword research for your blog is selecting your final target keyword list and then mapping your target keywords to pages on your blog. So I’ve also done a Article very in depth on how to map your target keywords. Through the use of a keyword map. So I’ll drop a link in the description below this Article, to that Article, check that out to help with your keyword mapping, but just to really quickly go over the process. What you’re gonna do to map your target keywords, to pages on your blog once you’ve selected target keywords. You wanna figure out what keywords you can group onto one page. So for example, best fishing rods for bass, best rod for bass fishing, best rods for bass fishing. These are pretty much all the same, and they’re gonna share the same search intent. So likely you’re gonna be able to group all of these onto one page, casting a spinning reel, spinning rods versus casting rods.
Those are probably gonna be on two different pages. really quickly. If you want to know what you can do is open up a incognito window, Google the keyword, just duplicate this tab. Copy the other keyword. That’s in question about whether or not you wanna map them to the same page, Google that keyword as well, and then you just wanna see if the results are similar. So this one has a Article result at the beginning or at the very top, Article search features. So the first ranking page is from, art of Manliness than a Wiki Hal page. This one doesn’t have any Articles. It has a shop carls.com. Sport fishing buddy. So it looks like these are completely different search intent because the Google SERPs are not the same, the same pages and the same SERP features are not ranking or being shown on the Google SERP.
So you can safely assume that these have different search intents and should be mapped to different pages on your blog. So that’s a really quick and easy way of figuring out what keywords you can group together on, on pages on your blog. And if you check out my Article that I just talked about that keyword mapping Article, I’ll also give you access to a free keyword mapping template, that will help you do this.
Free keywords research template
Check out my free keyword research template Article to help you keep all your keywords from the various steps we just covered all in one place and help you streamline your keyword research process for your blog. I’ll drop a link to that free keyword research template below this article. Check that out if you want access to the free template. In this Article, you’ve learned how to do keyword research for you or your client’s blog, Using free keyword research tools. This will help increase your blog’s traffic, your brand’s awareness as well as leads and sales. If you found this Article useful, hit the thumbs up button below as it helps me keep my website going. If you want to get updates from me, go ahead and subscribe to my website. So you don’t miss out on any of my free templates and guides. Leave a comment below if you have any questions. Thanks for Reading.
