2. Coming Up With Your First SEO Keywords
- Aditya Shankar Growth & Marketing Leader, xto10x
The preparation phase of any SEO effort begins with finding the right set of keywords.
The way to find keywords is not going to Google straight away or not or going to, like, let’s say, an SEO tool like SEMrush or Moz.
The way to start finding keywords is brainstorming. Sit with yourself or your core team and clearly state out your ICP. Then start asking what kind of content fits around them.
Before you go to any tool, sit down, really sit down, and write down those 5 to 10 seed keywords that come to your mind. Then, the next step is to go to one of these tools and feed these keywords into the tool to see the kind of output it gives you.
This is more tactical and not technical at all. If you’re already investing in performance marketing, then you already have a Google Ads account with inbuilt Google Keywords Planet. This should cut it for you if you want a very basic level of keyword planning.
You can use this to go find keywords related to the ones you’ve thought of. You can also add your website domain and the tool will tell you what keywords you should be working on.
But if you want more nuanced information, you will have to go to one of the SEO tools: SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs. You don’t need all three. Just pick one. I use SEMrush, but Ahrefs is also a very decent tool.
The third step in keyword research is analyzing competitor keywords. This is a very quick way to understand what kind of keywords you should go after. It works especially well if you are in an established category that has market leaders who are already running sophisticated SEO engines.
Reading their content is an excellent way to get started reviewing competitor content. You can also go to Google Keywords Planet, where you just put up their domain, and Google will give you a set of keywords for which they’re ranking.
And if you go to one of these tools, SEMrush Moz or ahrefs, it will provide you with both the organic and paid search set of keywords they are ranking for.
With this work done, you are ready to start executing on your SEO plans, but remember the first step is to brainstorm.