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How to Pick the Right Keyword
A good keyword selection is the first step to attract organic traffic to your site.
In this lesson, we will outline a process to identify useful keywords you need to target using NeuralText.
Keyword research is a powerful tool because it lets you to understand the language of your target audience and what are their common questions.
If you train the keyword research muscle enough, you will also be able to identify various stages of your customer journey.
To start your investigation, you should define some “seed keywords”. Seed keywords could be some high-level topics you would like to cover with your site.
Coming up with 3-5 seed keywords is a good starting point.
If you are a blogger, this kind of operation is simple: just check what you are writing most about.
Otherwise, try to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers: what kind of search terms they would use to find you on search engines?
For example, if you own a pet shop, some of these high-level topics could include:
- puppy food
- dog chew toys
- dog beds
If you have a blog about ..
NeuralText uses the Google search predictions to discover the most popular search terms from real people.
The keyword discovery engine works in this way: we pick your seed keyword and combine it with dozens of query modifiers (why/when/where/numbers/letters and so on).
In this way we make sure to pick always:
- popular keywords (because real users are searching those search terms)
- updated keywords (because this calculation is done in real time every time you create a keyword report)
- relevant for the current geography (because we simulate searches from your region of choice)
Pro tip: NeuralText supports the wildcard (*) in the keyword research.
The asterisk is a placeholder for one or more words.
Here you can find some keyword results for the seed keyword "can you * to android":
- can you install android on ios
- can you airdrop to android
- can you facetime to android
- can you facetime to android from iphone
- can you upgrade to android version
- can you connect airpods to android
- can you pair airpods to android
- can you transfer android to iphone
- can you send imessage to android
This is how a keyword report looks like:
- 1.Relevant Terms This table will give you an idea of the most common terms found in the keywords. If you click on one of these terms, you will see only the keywords that contain that term on the right table.
- 2.Search bar Filter the table by search term.
- 3.Download button Export the current keyword report as CSV.
- 4.Search term
- 5.Search Trend This chart will show how popular the keyword is in the last 12 months.
- 6.SERP Widgets Search engine results pages can include any additional elements that enhance the format of a search result. It is helpful to spot the intent behind a keyword on the fly and the possible content format to satisfy the search intent.
- 7.Search Volume A rough estimate of the number of times the keyword is searched each month on Google.
- 8.Keyword difficulty This score will help you estimate the difficulty to rank in the top-10 organic results for a specific keyword. The score ranges from 0 (easy) to 100 (extremely hard).
- 9.More options Clicking on the three vertical dots will show you a menu with two items: - See the current keyword on Google Search (in a new tab) - See the current keyword on Google Trends (in a new tab)
Every keyword research report will cost a credit.
For years, putting in high volume keywords to boost rankings for a page worked like a charm. Nowadays, things aren't that simple. Google's machine learning algorithms check search terms against users' queries to find out what a user is searching for.
Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in.
We define search intent as to why a person searches for a term. This can include several factors, including:
- What is the purpose of their search?
- Is the reason they are searching for an answer to a question?
- Is there a specific website that they are looking for?
- Buying something is the reason they search?
Type in the keyword you're targeting into the Google search bar and see what results appear.
A good keyword list should have both shorter and longer search terms.
Long tails keywords are more descriptive than seed keywords and for this reason it’s easier to identify the search intent.
These high intent keywords could bring fewer visitors, but they usually convert more.
Pro tip: Sometimes you could notice that a lot of people append “Reddit” at the end of the search queries. To target this type of keywords you can create a curated article with a title like “The best according to Reddit” and insert links to original threads or just screenshots to original replies.
For example, you can add those keywords to existing articles in a heading.
Usually this trick can let you rank faster for those keywords with lower competition.
But how you can say if a zero search volume keyword is worth the effort? It’s simple: check the SERP for that keyword and check the age of results. If ranked pages are too old, it might mean that the keyword it’s not very popular and that’s why you can ignore it.
Researching the right keywords for your business is crucial for any online business.
Search terms are a way to understand your target audience and its behavior on the internet.
Our keyword engine basically expands a seed term using different patterns called modifiers.
This allows us to generate always a list of keywords that reflects the current searches from real users, leveraging the power of Google suggest feature.
Last modified 10mo ago