The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research For Free in 3 Easy Steps

Only one word can make your website on the first page on Google or maybe the last one of all pages.

The secret of how to do SEO keyword research and how to choose the best-ranking keywords is the most important step in any SEO plan.

It helps the writer to select what the people are searching for, and it deserves the hard work to make sure your articles rank on search engines.

In this article, I will help you step by step to make effective keyword research easily, organized and give you completely free ways to find KWs.

But first, let’s see the different types of keywords to have a better understanding of what to focus on.

Types of SEO Keywords

1. Main seed KeyWords: These are the main keywords and usually consist of only 1-2 words with a high search volume (usually more than 1000 searches per month).
   Note that any web page should be targeting no more than 2-3 main seed keywords, and you shouldn’t be focusing on rankings for those keywords, but on the next two types of keywords.
2. Body KWs: Keyphrases that consist of 2-3 words with a medium search volume.
3. Long-tail KWs: Consist of 4 words or more with low search volume, which all web visits come from, and those keywords should be your main concern because they are less competitive and more specific.
   Imagine yourself searching for a photographer for your wedding in your area, you would write something like this in Google search “Wedding Photographer in Austin TX“.

What is Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential step in any SEO strategy which will help you to discover the words and phrases that people are using in search so we can later optimize the content of our pages around those keywords.

Free Methods to Find KeyWords

To find the right keywords you simply need to start answering these questions on an external paper:

• What does your audience want to read? 
• Why are they searching (search intent) are they searching for a wedding photographer services or are they looking for tips on how to make the best wedding photos?
• How can you help them (what are you going to provide for them)? 

After answering all these questions you now have a general understanding of your main seed keywords and you can find the best keywords to target using these free tools:

1. “Autocomplete” in Google and Youtube Search Suggestions
Start to write your main seed keyword in Google search and Google will give you some recommendations of the most searched phrases.
The same applies to youtube.

2. Keyword Surfer Extension
This is a free plugin for Chrome and Firefox that will suggest keywords while you are doing Google search, also it will give you some key metrics that will help you in your keyword research.

3. “Searches related to” in Google:
Try to enter one of your body keywords in google, then scroll down to the bottom of the page.
You will find two columns of “Searches related to (your search words)”, those are some other phrases that people usually use when searching.

4. “UberSuggest”
Another free, easy-to-use tool that helps you find more data about keywords like volume and competition.
Just type in one of your keywords or your biggest competitor’s website, and UberSuggest will give you 100s of suggestions that you can use in your article to cover more topics.

How to Choose the Best Keywords

Now you should have a big list of keywords, but how do you pick the best ones for your SEO campaign?

This task is done manually because there isn’t any tool that tells you what is the best keywords to target.

In order to do this, you need to shorten your list of keywords based on the following factors:

• Search Volume (the more people search using a keyword the more you can get traffic from it).
• Keyword Difficulty (to make sure your website ranks fast for your chosen keywords, you need to choose the keywords with less difficulty).
• Search Intent (choose the keywords that fit your content and the interest of your audience).

How Do I Do Keyword Research for My Clients

Using those free methods is great to find the best keywords for your next blog article or web page.

But SEO Experts use more advanced tools to dominate search results and get more traffic from every page published.

I personally use ahrefs tools to increase search traffic for my clients and research the biggest competitors to know why they rank high and what to do to outrank them.

If you want to get more targeted traffic to your website you can contact me for a free SEO consultation which includes free keyword research for your business website.