Keyword research is the first and most important part of your SEO strategy. The SEO keywords will inform the direction of your content, ensuring that the content produced will be relevant and easily searchable on Google.
For executing your keyword plan, follow these detailed step-by-step guide to find the good keywords.

1. Study your niche: Learn more about your topic or niche, it can give you out-of-the-box ideas and help discover angles to your marketing and SEO strategy that you might not have thought about before. Talk with your existing customers and get to know them better. Find out the terms that they use when describing your brand, company, product or service. Get involved in your topic or niche’s online communities, like forums and social media networks. Read the discussions and find out any pain points that are mentioned regarding your niche.
2. Define your goals: You need to specify what is your brand’s mission. Do you want to increase the number of subscribers? Or do you have a sales target by a certain date? It’s important to define your goal because it will provide a direction for your SEO strategy and plan. Your goals will also inform the purpose of your SEO copywriting and content.
3. Make a list of relevant topic: Make a list of all the topics related to your brand that you want to rank on Google. Think about what type of topics will your target audience search for on Google? These topic buckets can then later be broken down to keywords that are related to those topics.
4. Create a list of focus keyword: Focus keywords, are important as they will become the foundation of your keyword research. They define your niche and identify your competitors. It’s very easy to find focus keywords of your brand or product. All you need to do is describe your offering as simple as possible and brainstorm how other people might search for it on Google.
5. Use keyword research tool: Once you have identified your goals, topics, and a list of focus keywords, it’s time to use keyword research tools to further refine your search terms. It will give you a lot more details and help you narrow down on the right direction for your search terms. On top of that, it can also give additional ideas on related keywords.
6. Study the search intent: Search intent is defined as the intent or reason behind why people search for a specific term. There are many driving factors behind people’s search habits, such as Why are they searching? Are they searching for a specific website? Are they searching because they want to buy something or want an answer to that question? Once you have a good idea of the search intent behind potential readers or customers, you will be able to use it to fine-tune your keyword research.
7. Identify long tail keywords: keywords are often shorter search terms that are closely related to your brand’s main topic or category. Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are more descriptive and often related to your brand’s smaller buckets of sub-topics. Matching your target audience’s search intent to long tail keywords is far easier compared to seed keywords. Long tail keywords get a higher conversion rate.
8. Find out your competitors: You also need to be aware of what your competitors are doing. This will be better for your SEO. Having knowledge of competitors you will be able to find keyword opportunity gaps.