How to Do Free Keyword Research for SEO Using 6 Steps

With competition almost cut-throat in online marketing, whether it’s a start up or an established business, it’s very crucial for your brand to gain maximum traffic on search engines. What you need, is a strong keyword game. Here’s a checklist of things you would want to go through before starting keyword research for SEO

Step 1

Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business:
Think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You'll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you'll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.
Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas -- what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? If you were a company like HubSpot, for example -- selling marketing software (which happens to have some awesome SEO tools ... but I digress ... you might have general topic buckets like: "inbound marketing" (21K) "blogging" (19K) "email marketing" (30K) "lead generation" (17K) "SEO" (214K) "social media marketing" (71K) "marketing analytics" (6.2K) "marketing automation" (8.5K)
This data allows you to gauge how important these topics are to your audience and how many different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful with that keyword.
 

Step 2

Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it's time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.
 

Step 3

Research related search terms:
If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, go to Google.com and take a look at the related search terms that aappear when you plug in a keyword. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
 

Step 4

Check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords in each bucket:
It's important to check that you have a mix of head terms and long-tail terms because it'll give you a keyword strategy that's well balanced with long-term goals and short-term wins. That's because head terms are generally searched more frequently, making them often (not always, but often) much more competitive and harder to rank for than long-tail terms.
Think about it: Without even looking up search volume or difficulty, which of the following terms do you think would be harder to rank for?
-how to write a great blog post
-blogging
If you answered #2, you're absolutely right. But don't get discouraged. While head terms generally boast the most search volume (meaning greater potential to send you traffic), frankly, the traffic you'll get from the term "how to write a great blog post" is usually more desirable.
Why? Because someone who is looking for something that specific is probably a much more qualified searcher for your product or service (presuming you're in the blogging space) than someone looking for something really generic. And because long-tail keywords tend to be more specific, it's usually easier to tell what people who search for those keywords are really looking for. Someone searching for the head term "blogging," on the other hand, could be searching it for a whole host of reasons unrelated to your business.
 

Step 5

 See how competitors are ranking for these keywords:
Just because your competitor is doing something doesn’t mean you need to. The same goes for keywords. Just because a keyword is important to your competitor, doesn’t mean it's important to you. However, understanding what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for is a great way to help you give your list of keywords another evaluation.
If your competitor is ranking for certain keywords that are on your list, too, it definitely makes sense to work on improving your ranking for those. However, don’t ignore the ones your competitors don’t seem to care about. This could be a great opportunity for you to own market share on important terms, too.
 

Step 6

Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to cut down your keyword list:
In Keyword Planner, formerly known as the Keyword Tool, you can get search volume and traffic estimates for keywords you're considering. Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality. But you can make up for it a bit if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.
Use the Keyword Planner to flag any terms on your list that have way too little (or way too much) search volume, and don't help you maintain a healthy mix like we talked about above. But before you delete anything, check out their trend history and projections in Google Trends. You can see whether, say, some low-volume terms might actually be something you should invest in now -- and reap the benefits for later.