How To Do Keyword Research Free, For Beginner Bloggers and Beyond
The Google search bar is unbelievably the most overlooked and underutilised tool anyone can use for keyword research. When you start a website in your early days, you will be overwhelmed by all the things you have to learn. What is SEO, do you need SSL and how to build your website. Then you find out that every blog you write has to have keywords in it, and you have to research those keywords.
Keyword research can be done efficiently and effectively by only using Google’s auto-suggest. Type in the topic you want to write about and see the search volume of that topic. By doing keyword research like this, you will be able to judge two things about your keywords. The first is search volume, and the second is what people want answers for most. In this simple and effective way, you will determine which search terms are made more than others.
It may seem like a complicated task at first but it truly is not, and as time goes on you will easily be able to find the search results of your keywords. As with everything you will get better at it as time goes on.
This website has affiliate links that I earn a commission from without any extra cost to you. This means that if you click on a link and purchase something, I might make a little money. You will not be charged extra, and some of the affiliate links I use have discounts so stay tuned!
What is keyword research
Keyword research is when you type in a word, or more than one word into a search bar to see the analytics on how often the term is being searched on the internet. It is an important SEO technique that helps all website owners and marketers to rank better on search engines.
My website blogs are mostly evergreen topics that will be searchable for a few years. Still, many people have seasonal blogs like for example if you run a fashion blog you want to know what sweater style is trending now, not something that is out of fashion. Google will help you find out what are the most popular trends right now, on almost any topic.
Since it takes a year for each of your posts to reach their full potential, it is essential to keep this in mind when writing your blogs. Because your blog could look like it is not getting traffic, but it will start to get traffic in a particular season. Keywords will help you stand out and enable people online to find your website easily.
How keywords are not magic
Previously keywords were misused to fool Google’s algorithm. Bloggers would lace their post with a particular keyword for Google to identify what the post is about, and how relevant to a specific topic it was. Today using keywords is not important, because they will help you rank better due to the fifty keywords in a single post. They will not make Google crawl your site more often and in simple words, they are not some sort of magic ingredient for your blogging bolognese.
Google does not rank your pages according to the keywords density on your post page. Currently, your page is ranked according to how users surf your website. If a user comes to your site and reads the post till the end (which means they found helpful information on your site), maybe they read a related post, and then they stay on your site without leaving instantly that sends a signal to Google that your website is rank worthy.
The only reason you need to use keywords is that they will help you understand what terms your potential readers are typing into the Google search bar and consequently telling search engines what your post is about.
Alternatively, if a user lands on your site and they sift through it and then leave because they did not find what they wanted this sends a horrible signal to Google’s A.I. that means your site is not useful and thus not rank-able. Please note that users do have to repeatedly visit your blog post and leave quickly signalling to Google that your post is not helpful. If you satisfy your readers, you will, by default, satisfy Google and rank better.
How to do keyword research for free
Keyword research tools are quite costly; some cost 70 dollars each month. Of course, there are free versions of the paid tools, but they have too little data to analyse the market of your words correctly. Honestly, it is frustrating to do keyword research with free keyword research tools because all the good stuff is hidden from you.
To do it free, all you have to do is make a Google search for any term you are writing about in Google’s search bar. The search will almost always show you auto suggest for the term you are typing into it. I know it can feel like Google has just read your mind, but in fact, it is showing you what thousands if not millions of other people are searching for. The auto-suggest is real data shown to you according to all the information the algorithm of Google receives every second making it the best keyword research tool to have ever existed!
Google’s search bar is used like a FAQs (frequently asked questions) forum. Most people type question-based sentences to find what they are looking for, and all you have to do is format your blogs to answers specific questions. That is, after all, how you found this article.
Below you can see the term ‘how to bake’ is a broad search term that can be narrowed down for you. Moreover, look at this result and see what Google is showing you. The first result for auto-suggest is number one, but why? Yep, you guessed it; Google is showing you in order which search terms are number 1 and then all search terms descending from the number 1 spot.
So now you know that ‘how to bake cake’ is the most popular search term for ‘how to bake.’
Now that you know how to judge your auto-suggest, let’s get picky. If you have a recipe blog and you want to know what sorts of terms are being searched when it comes to baking without an oven, eggs and so on, here is how to do it. The most common search is ‘how to bake without oven’ ( or how to bake without an oven ); the lowest search term is ‘how to bake without baking tray’. In this way, you can easily find out whether or not your topics are being searched and which keywords are used the most.
It is important to note that you should form your keywords around questions and not your ideas and opinions. An example of this would be to make keyword searches that are question-esque like ‘how-to’, ‘what is’, and ‘why does’. There are multiple ways in which you can format your question, and the best way is to think like you are the person searching for the topics you write about. If your niche is baking cakes, I would be more likely to find you making a Google search that is something like ‘how to bake a chocolate and coffee cake’ rather than ‘my favourite chocolate and coffee cake recipe’.
Why you should not use keyword research tools
It is simple; you see a research tool cannot and will not have enough data to assimilate the entire internet for any search term properly. Because a research tool is just a software that scans the internet, but it will never have the data of the entire internet to assess for a day to day study. When you compare it to an algorithm like Google, then you will quickly realise that Google is far superior when it comes to showing you the most frequently searched terms about specific and all topics.
Making searches on Google is free, and with millions of TBs worth of data, it is a reliable keyword research tool. Furthermore, you will find it easier to navigate through Google every day for keyword research. When I first stared keyword
How to find ready made keyword terms
Make any Google search and then scroll to the bottom of your page and read the “searches related to ‘how to bake without oven'”. Here is a lieu of more search terms ripe for the taking. You click on each search term to see how and if the term has been already used.
How to do keyword research effectively
If your blog is about baking and you have some awesome recipes just waiting to be written or a fantastic way to bake your cakes without standard tools, then here is what you should do. Make a list of recipes or techniques and do a Google search on each of the recipes or techniques. Look at what other people have posted before you and how well they covered the topic. Furthermore, if a topic is yet covered, then you can write about it thoroughly. If someone has written about it, you will have to write a better and more informative post to rank better than them.
What to do if your keywords do not have auto-suggest
If a keyword does not have auto-suggest, then it could mean multiple things. Two important reasons are that either your keyword has little to no search volume or you are badly phrasing your search term. Nonetheless, if a keyword of your choice has zero search results, it could be a jackpot. People often think that if a keyword has no search result, it is a bad keyword. If you write about a topic that no one has written about yet, then you will rank number one on the topic.
Things to remember:
- forming your phrase in the structure of a question
- type in just one or two keywords and see what the auto-suggest comes up with
- type in your keywords, press ‘enter’ and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to see what the related searches are
Sometimes the problem could be that no one is making the related search, or your post is too specific to your topic. To avoid this try writing for beginners, and not for professionals.
What to do if your keywords have already been written about
Nine times out of ten someones has already written about the very post you are writing about. It could be that you have a unique idea. In that case, ranking number one on Google should be simple unless no one from over eight billion people is interested in your unique idea.
In most cases, your topic has already been covered by someone online; this does not mean that you should not write about the topic of your choice. As long as you write better and more informative blogs, you will succeed. Please do read through my blog that will show you which popular blogs to avoid and why.
Keyword research for over-saturated topics
I have already covered this entire topic so you guys can check it out in the link above, but very quickly some niche topics have been written about to death, and this makes them difficult to rank with. The problem is that if people have already written a five thousand word post on an over-saturated topic, how will you write a better post?
For success with your website, you will be faced with two options. The first option you have is to do magnified keyword research on your topics, which means that you will have to do searches on the same keyword in many different ways. Always be objective and formulate the search term as a question. If after doing your keyword research in this manner, you find some good topics that are not yet written about properly, then write away. Do remember that you will have to spend a lot of time finding your keywords.
The second option is to change your niche topic to a less saturated topic. You can write about a hobby that you are currently learning and much much more. Always write about something you are interested in because blogging can quickly turn into something you hate.
Final thoughts
Starting a website is a learning curve for everyone. One has to understand SEO, Google and so many other blogging related conundrums. Just to make life more difficult understanding WordPress is no simple thing, still, just have a little perseverance and you will conquer the blogging game in time.