Simple SEO keyword research

a very simple outline of general seo research tips to help you identify the best keywords for your Squarespace 7.1 website.

This video covers:

SEO research tools — free & paid
how to pick optimal keywords
how to ORGANIZE & use your keywords
SEO copywriting best practices

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

This video will break down the basics of SEO keywords and my top tips and practices for researching SEO keywords to use on your website.

 this is by no means meant to be a comprehensive SEO deep dive. There is so much nuance with SEO and there's so many resources out there. There's a whole industry of SEO experts that you can hire just to work on your site's SEO. But again, this is just quick and dirty best practices as a small business to boost your presence on Google and get found by people outside of your existing audience.

There are definitely a bunch of SEO tools out there, so play around with them and do your research to find ones that work for you. But of all the ones I've played around with, like SEMrush, Moz, or Keywords Everywhere, which is a plugin for my favorite is still Ahrefs.

I don't pay for my subscription all the time, I just purchase it for specific client projects, or when I need to deep dive on my own site SEO.

For me, their interface is just the most detailed and the most helpful, and it lets you do not only keyword research, but competitor research as well.

To get started, you can definitely use the free version and get comfortable with that, but keep in mind, it's only going to let you look at specific domains and the associated keywords. It's not going to let you do independent research on searching keywords in general. By the way, this isn't sponsored at all, and I'm not an affiliate. I just really like using this tool, and it's been really helpful for both my business and client work as well.

If you've only just launched your website, I do recommend just using the free option for now. And when your website has been active for six months or more, I recommend taking some time to devote to keyword optimization and then getting the standard package.

You can just get the lite version, but the reason I recommend standard is that it shows you six months of your overall ranking history,

it shows you how your for keywords has changed over time, and it also lets you run a competitive analysis so you can see what keywords specifically other people within your market are ranking for.

Again, there are a ton of resources out there for SEO best practices and Ahrefs specifically has so much content for teaching you how to use their tool.

So this is just quick, easy, best practices to get started. The first thing you're going to want to do when you're looking for keywords is researching other brands and businesses that exist within your space.

You should have a pretty solid idea of brands that are doing similar things that are "competitors". So you can Google those brand names specifically, and you can also Google related keywords. ,

the simplest way of doing this is just thinking about things that real people would be searching when they're looking for a product related to you.

For example, my potential clients are not necessarily searching for "Elo Creative Studio". They're probably just searching website templates or custom website design services. So start just jotting down general search terms that you think people would be searching related to what you sell and offer.

This is a perfect example of that. When we were doing keyword research for Enough Period, which sells a CBD balm specifically for menstrual cramps, it also helps with muscle aches and pains, I started just searching for general search terms that the average person would be typing into Google.

This gives you an idea of the related keywords that are going to pop up. So when we search topical cream for menstrual cramps, we get menstrual cramp relief cream, period pain relief, period cramp cream, natural solution to menstrual cramps. So these are already great ideas for keywords that you can start keeping track of in an Excel doc or a Google doc.

So this is the free, easy, do it yourself version of keyword research. If you're using the free version of Ahrefs, you can type in specific domain names and see the related organic keywords that they're ranking for.

If you're using the paid version of Ahrefs, you can go direct to the Keywords Explorer and start typing in random keywords and searching for them there.

This will give you an accurate snapshot of the actual search volume for keywords, as well as related terms and questions that are similar to the keywords you're looking at.

So once you've done research, and you have a master list of keywords, how do you actually know what keywords to pick?

This is where using a tool like Ahrefs, instead of just the free do it yourself keyword research option, comes in really handy. Ahrefs will show you specifically the average monthly search volume for a keyword, as well as the relative keyword difficulty. They also color code the difficulty, so it's really easy to visually identify what keywords you want to be paying attention to.

The key for picking keywords for your site is looking for the sweet spot between the search volume and the keyword difficulty.

For example, if I search for keywords rated by volume, we'll see that this keyword, for example, full spectrum CBD gets an average of about 8, 000 searches per month, which is amazing. The problem is that the keyword difficulty is 62, meaning that there's already a ton of really well established websites that are ranking for this particular keyword.

So if you're trying to get your website to rank on the first page of Google for this keyword, honestly, it's not going to happen.

What you want to do instead is look for something like this. There's about 2, 000 people searching for CBD suppositories with suppositories spelled wrong, but the keyword difficulty is only 24. Basically, you want to look for any keywords that are going to be this dark green or lighter green.

The problem with this, of course, is that we don't want to be misspelling words on our website, because even though it's a high ranked keyword, that is not going to look good on our website. This, by comparison, is spelled correctly. It still has a high search volume, and it still has a relatively low keyword difficulty. Ideally, when you're looking at keywords, especially when you're a brand new site just starting out, I recommend looking at keywords that have a difficulty score of 20 or less.

Don't worry about getting into crazy volumes like multiple thousand per month, because think of it this way, even if we're getting our website in front of 450 people, that's still way better than zero, and it's only a six for keyword difficulty level.

Meaning that if we want to rank for just the word enough, we have a pretty high chance of doing so. And in this case, you can see that. If someone is just typing the word enough into Google, which presumably they're just misspelling the actual word enough, enough period is still showing up as number six on Google.

Ideally, of course, you always want your actual brand name to be ranking for number one, meaning that when anyone types in your brand name into Google, you of course want your website to be the very first thing that populates.

Again, this is why I recommend if you're going to prioritize your SEO, purchasing the standard plan from Ahrefs that will let you do a ton of keyword research and competitive analysis.

Once you've found a bunch of keywords that will work for your site (I recommend finding anywhere from 100 , to 200 keywords), you'll want to export everything so that you have it all categorized in an Excel sheet. From there, you can start picking through and deciding what keywords look like they could potentially work for your site and figure out the difficulty versus volume.

As you can see, I do this in a quick and janky way. After I've added everything to my spreadsheet, I simply create a filter to search by difficulty. I then color categorize all of the easy ones, so everything that falls under 30, everything that falls above 30 becomes yellow, and all the difficult keywords become red.

Then I can also search by volume as well. And what we're looking for are these ones in the middle. So you'll see all the ones that I've highlighted in green are based on having a relatively low difficulty, but a relatively high search volume.

Once you've identified the best keywords, I recommend segmenting them based on category. And this is going to look completely different for each individual business.

For my website, for example, I categorize keywords based on website design, website templates, Squarespace related keywords, and copywriting related keywords.

This gives you a perfect starting point to figure out which keywords will be appropriate for which pages. In general, you want your homepage keyword to be the most relevant to your overall business.

For Enuf period, for example, that's CBD for menstrual cramps. Which has a search volume of about 700 a month, but a difficulty of 17.

Once you've decided on the keywords for each individual page on your website, you'll want to pick some related but different keywords that you can also plug in, and then decide on your page title, including your focus keyword, and write a meta description that includes that keyword and or related keywords.

Of course, you'll also want to weave in keywords throughout your site copy, not just your site title. Your most important keywords should be added to your H1 headings, followed by your H2 and H3, and then body copy should have related keywords. Adding your most important keywords to your headings helps Google sort and categorize what the page is about.

Again, I know this is a little bit overwhelming. It was totally overwhelming the first couple times I did this, and it definitely takes some time.

And again, when you're writing copy for your website, always prioritize great storytelling, readability and genuine language over just SEO keyword stuffing. If your website copy sounds weird and stiff and robotic, it's ultimately going to hurt your business.

Another note if you're a location specific business is to use location specific keywords. So if you have a brick and mortar location or you serve clients in a very specific area, this is going to be where you'll want to plug in your city or town name.

For example, for an interior designer client, we added keywords to her site specific to Sedona Interior Designers because she only works in Sedona and serves clients in Sedona. This is also where setting up your Google My Business profile with your address and contact information is going to help you rank in Google's business listings.

Lastly, don't forget about random, long questions or more niche keywords that are related to what you do or the services that you offer. For example, one of the things I found when researching for Enuf period was that there was a lot of questions about the differences between full spectrum versus broad spectrum CBD, CBD isolate, and general Confusion about the industry.

We actually created an entire page on her website that's filled with keywords related to this specifically. It acts not only as a super keyword dense page on her website, but it's also very educational for people that are searching for this information. Remember, at the end of the day, Google's main focus is delivering search results that are the most helpful for people.

So if you're writing high quality content that's genuinely helpful for your audience it's also going to build trust and authority for your brand.

A little tip, FAQ sections are really helpful for adding keywords. Think how often you search for questions on Google. FAQs are a perfect spot to add those specific Googled questions directly onto your website.

This is also a perfect example of why blogging is so important for SEO and how blogging can really help your SEO rankings.

All of the weird niche keywords or questions people are plugging into Google are perfect things that you can address through blog posts. Anything that's super helpful, informative, engaging, educational, will help bring site traffic. Some of my most frequently visited pages are actually blog pages, and blog posts account for most of top Google search results. Again, think about it. When you're Googling things, regardless of what the topic is, how often do you actually end up on blog pages for the answers to your questions?

I would hazard a guess it's pretty frequent.

For more on SEO blogging strategy, I'm actually diving into that in a separate video. So if you have the bandwidth and time to build out a blog, I highly recommend checking that out because it'll help you build a strategy and decide exactly what you should be writing about to help you rank on Google.