How to do Keyword Research to Boost Your Website’s Traffic

If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance that up until now that you’ve been allotting a good chunk of your marketing budget towards running ads. And honestly, I don’t blame you.

Let’s face it… Paid ads are the quickest way to launch products and start generating customers and revenue as fast as possible.

And any startup trying to get off the ground is trying to do exactly that.

But what about when you’ve reached a certain point of growth and you face the reality of the rising ad costs…

Or you’re just a smaller, bootstrapped brand who doesn’t have thousands to spend per day on ads?

This is exactly when you should be looking into keyword research strategies to either complement your paid strategy. Or alternatively, help you generate organic traffic without costing you a pretty penny as a bootstrapped startup.

According to a recent report, 70% of marketers agreed that search engine optimization (SEO) is more effective than PPC.

But first, what is SEO? Let’s go ahead and get the elephant out of the room before we dive in…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): what is it?

Search engine optimization in its simplest form is getting free or what we call organic search traffic, from search engines.

You probably don’t need me to remind you how important this is, but I do want to remind you that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine.

Let’s say you were to type in ‘plant based protein powder’ into Google:

Basically, if you were to click on any of these results in the SERPs (search engine results pages) that appear, this is what we would call organic traffic.

Why? Because this is free traffic that you didn’t pay for, hence the term organic.

In an ideal world, when our target market searches for our keywords, they would find our website and become familiar with our brand, instead of our competitors’.

But I’d be lying if I said it were easy.

SEO is something that takes time, patience, and someone who knows what they’re doing.

So now that we know what SEO is…

Let’s get into the practicalities of keyword research for SEO so that you can start ranking and generating traffic.

Keyword research for effective SEO

Now before you scratch your head and start wondering why you aren’t already ranked in the first position in Google for your keywords…

Let me ask you this: do you even know your keywords? Believe it or not, this is not something you guess at or pull out of thin air.

Keyword research is strategic, which is how we’re able to generate a return on investment (ROI) through it.

So, let’s go over keyword research and why it’s the first (albeit crucial) step for your SEO strategy.

It’s important to realize that effective keyword research goes well beyond the obvious. What I mean, is, if you’re selling protein powder, you will have keywords galore that go beyond just ‘protein powder’.

For example, those who add blogging to their strategy are 13X more likely to see a positive ROI. and here’s why…

Let’s use ‘protein powder’ as an example. Here’s what we find when we type the keyword into Google (below the ads):

As you can see, the first result isn’t even a storefront. It’s a blog post from Healthline. What if that first result was a blog post from your store? That’s what we want here.

Below that first result, however, is what I consider a gem when mining for keywords.

You see, Google tries to help users find the answers they’re looking for as quickly and simply as possible. This is why it often shows the ‘people also ask’ snippets towards the top of the results.

Essentially, there isn’t much intent behind searching for ‘protein powder’ and Google tries to anticipate user needs as much as possible.

Are they looking to buy protein powder? Or are they looking for answers to their questions or even better, solutions to their problems?

These queries Google shows us are ones that users are regularly searching for. So let’s use the first one and try inputting ‘what is the best protein powder’ into a keyword research tool.

Now, my favorite keyword research tool to use is Ahrefs, but there are loads of them (both paid and free) that I won’t quite get into in this post.

For now, let’s take a look at the data:

We’re going to ignore the first section that shows keyword difficulty, as it’s best to manually gauge this yourself.

What we want to pay attention to is:

• Search volume
• Clicked percentage
• Percentage of paid vs. organic clicks
• Global volume

(Note that when I performed this search, I had it set to United States search results).

So looking at the search volume, we see that the keyword ‘what is the best protein powder’ gets approximately 1.2K monthly searches in the United States. And more importantly, 62% of those searches actually click on one of the results.

From this data alone, we know that this is a high-intent keyword, as people are actually clicking on the results for more information.

Moving on, we see that 79% of these clicks are on organic search results rather than on the paid ads. This is also a good thing, for those of us looking to generate organic traffic.

And finally, we see that the global volume comes in at 1.9K, with the majority stemming from the United States.

If your store ships globally, then you would note that the United Kingdom is the second main traffic source.

Now let’s take a look at the SERPs:

Do you see the first result that is ranking in the third position on Google? It appears to be a blog post from Healthline.

That result alone underneath the featured snippets is generating close to 8K monthly traffic from that blog post alone.

While the keyword we researched was ‘what is the best protein powder’, it looks like they are generating a good chunk of traffic from its parent keyword, ‘best protein powder’, which gets 44K monthly searches.

Depending on your goals, I’d say the long-tail keyword could be a good keyword to target with less competition. This will allow you to rank for the more competitive parent keyword over time.

But it gets better…

One of my favorite things about Ahrefs is that it also shows you additional keyword ideas, like so:

This is all on the same screen without even having to do much digging yourself. In the left column is the keyword, followed by the monthly search volume.

Now you might think trying to rank for a keyword like ‘what is the best protein powder for weight loss’ is pointless as it’s MSV (monthly search volume) is only 200 searches per month, but I encourage you to think again.

If you type that into Google, here’s a few of the results you will see:

Now just think for a moment that you are the person performing that search query. Chances are that you have high intentions of making a purchase, and the content you find in this search is going to greatly impact your purchasing decision.

Let’s click on that first result from Women’s Health and see what we find:

As you can see, this blog post is reviewing ten of the best protein powders and includes links to purchase.

Now think… What if your blog was the one who wrote it and you included a link to purchase your protein powder as the first result?

First — yes, you can do that. And second, yes you should do that. I know what you’re thinking “why would I review my competitors?!” and there’s a few reasons:

• The chances will be greatly increased that a user has everything they need to go ahead and make a purchase. For instance, if you were only to talk about your own product, chances are they’ll have some additional searching to find what they need. You want their search to end on your site.
• To a regular user, it won’t be obvious that the blog post is coming from a store if you’re giving an unbiased review.
• It greatly increases your trustworthiness and credibility.

Recapping the keyword query

So we started out with ‘protein powder’ and here’s a list of possible keyword ideas we found in just a couple of clicks:

• Best protein powder
• What is protein powder good for?
• Best protein powder for weight loss
• Ingredients in protein powder
• Best whey protein powder
• Why whey protein is bad for you
• Best protein powder for women

Ok, my fingers are tired now, and that’s literally just a few of the many keywords we discovered with barely any effort.

So now that we’ve gotten the basics of keyword research out of the way…

How do you actually rank for these keywords after doing keyword research for your site?

I thought you would never ask.

First, you could consult an SEO expert like myself. Or alternatively, you could use the following tips I am about to share to greatly increase your odds and hope for the best.

Step 1: Have a strong site framework

Ideally, you would already have this out of the way as more of a pre-step going into keyword research. However, it’s important to mention nonetheless as all great things start with a solid foundation.

Basically, you want to make sure your site has a solid website structure, there’s no broken links or duplicated content, your site is mobile-friendly, and the page speed is up to par.

If you aren’t sure how to analyze and address these things, I’d suggest getting a technical SEO audit out of the way.

If you prefer to DIY, I suggest taking a look at the Webmaster Guidelines from Google themselves.

For page speed, you can use tools like GTmetrix and Page Speed Insights from Google. It’s important not to neglect this, as it’s one of the most critical aspects to ranking.

Another important element to ranking for your keywords is your domain authority (or DA).

In a nutshell, domain authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts your chances of ranking in the SERPs. It ranges from 0-100 and is calculated by multiple factors such as linking root domains and your backlink profile.

In plain English, this refers to the number of sites linking back to your site, their domain authority, and how many total high-quality backlinks you have.

For instance, sites like Wikipedia are on the high end of the spectrum due to having an extensive backlink profile. I mean, everyone cites Wikipedia these days…

But let’s take a look at Perfect Keto in Ahrefs as an example:

As you can see, their DR (domain rating — what Ahrefs refers to as domain authority) is 72 and they have over 900K backlinks, or websites linking back to them.

New sites start out with a domain authority of ‘1’, so building up domain authority is something that takes time, patience, and perseverance.

But believe me when I say it’s worth it. Just look at that nice 364K organic traffic visitors that Perfect Keto is getting, as a result.

To summarize this first step: at the end of the day, user experience is everything and should be prioritized. And according to Google, everything you do should be done for the end-user and not solely for search engines.

Step 2: Conduct keyword research

Once you’ve assessed your site’s framework and structure and gotten any technical issues out of the way, it’s time to move onto keyword research.

We’ve already covered this in detail above as I walked you through just a few of the ways I find target keywords.

However, here are a few additional tips to help you decide which keywords you should target:

• Choose keywords with a moderate search volume (around 1K-5K) for some quick wins. These may not bring you a ton of traffic, but they will bring you highly targeted traffic if you shoot for long-tail keywords like ‘what is the best protein powder for weight loss’. These keywords will be less competitive overall, giving you a solid chance at ranking.

• Use a tool like Ahrefs to assess the competition. The good news? Your competitors have already done the hard work for you, giving you a high chance of locating some solid keywords. Let’s use Perfect Keto as an example again:

These are their keywords bringing in the most organic traffic to their site. Spot any good ones? I know I do.

• Another (free) tool you can use to discover keywords is Ubersuggest:

And finally, let’s not forget going back to the basics when conducting keyword research…

• Scour places where your audience is actively hanging out online. Use social communities and forum sites to do some spying on your target market. Note what types of questions are commonly asked. This could include sites like Reddit, Quora, Twitter, Facebook groups, or niche forums. Let’s use the above example and search Reddit:

Not bad, right? If you happen to be selling protein powder, I’ve literally given you tons of keyword ideas in this post if you’ve paid attention ;).

Step 3: Implementation and execution phase

Now that you’ve done your keyword research, what are you going to do with it?

It’s officially time to implement and execute.

First, you need to decide how you plan to implement these new keywords. Is it going to be in product pages, infographics, blog posts, video, or a combination of these?

Next, who on your team is going to create the content and ensure it is optimized for SEO? Will it be an internal team member, a freelancer, or an outside agency?

No matter who the task if handed off to, you want to make sure they are familiar with SEO best practices.

If your site is on WordPress, I highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin to make your life 100X easier when optimizing pages and posts for SEO.

Remember that it doesn’t end with the keyword research. Sadly, it isn’t as simple as dropping the keyword once or twice into a post.

For example, you’ll want to ensure that the keyword is used in the title, meta description, first paragraph, and multiple times throughout the content depending on its length.

Just remember Google’s advice and write for humans, though, and not search engines. Content should sound natural and not stuffed with keywords.

Sharing and promoting your content

Sorry to disappoint, but the work still isn’t over after you’ve pressed “publish”.

Immediately after content is published, you want to be promoting it to as wide an audience as possible. In other words, the more eyes, the better.

Here’s a few ways you can accomplish mission exposure:

• Share your content to all of your social channels — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, and wherever else your brand and target audience lives online.
• Participate in link building — To drive links back to your content and gain referral traffic and link juice at the same time.
• Send it to your email list — Don’t forget your list! Those who are signed up to your email list should be your most warm and engaged audience.
• Include social sharing buttons on the post — In other words, you don’t receive what you don’t ask for, right? Make it easy for others to share your post without having to do any extra work.

Step 4: Tracking analytics

Assuming you already have your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account set up, the fourth and final step for this post is tracking analytics. If you have an account, you can also track your organic traffic and rankings with Ahrefs.

After all, we sure didn’t do all this work not to track the results, right?

If it passes the tests, then reanalyze the keywords you chose. Are they too competitive? If that’s the case, you’ll either want to try and target a lower competition/volume keyword, or work to build your authority so you can rank for it over time.

Step 5: Updating and re-optimizing content over time

As time goes on, you’ll want to manually go back in and update your content from time to time.

Why? Times change, people change, and algorithms change.

The best protein powder today may not be the best protein powder six months from now.

Maybe six months from now, there are some additional keywords trending that you should try and rank for with that content.

Not to mention, if someone finds your post on Google from two years ago, you want to make sure it’s still relevant. That’s what we call evergreen content.

Conclusion

We’ve gone over a lot when it comes to SEO and performing keyword research.

By this point, I truly hope you either:

A) Feel like a total boss when it comes to SEO and keyword research.

B) At the very least, don’t feel completely overwhelmed with this SEO stuff. Remember, you don’t have to figure it out on your own and can hire someone to make your life easier.

Got any questions about keyword research or SEO? Drop them down below!