If you don’t do keyword research right, you’ll end up creating content your audience doesn’t care about. Without focusing on the right keywords, you lose hope of ever making it to the first page of any search results.
In this post, we’ll help you side-step the blunders most people make when completing keyword research and uncover the most important areas to focus on. You don’t have to waste time and resources just because you’re new to SEO, especially if you use Mangools. It helps you find keywords, analyze them, learn from your competition, and see your rankings with ease.
Crazy Egg’s Favorite Tools for Keyword Research
Below you’ll find our Golden Eggs, our favored options among the many keyword research tools on the market today. They outperform the dozens of providers we’ve researched.
Mangools is great for beginners because it’s easy to get the hang of and affordable, yet still powerful. Get started on a 10-day free trial today.
AnswerThePublic builds off real user intent, helping see what real humans are actually searching for today on the internet. Start creating content people want to read by creating an AnswerThePublic account for free.
Semrush is an SEO resource made for serious keyword analysis, providing access to over 22 billion keywords in 130 countries. Grab your 7-day free trial today.
More Top Keyword Research Tools
You don’t have to spend a fortune to do great keyword research. We’ve rounded up the best free tools out there—plus some helpful advice on how to get the most out of them. Take a look at our favorite free keyword research tools.
Step 1 – Get Started with Mangools
Mangools is the best keyword search tool for beginners. That’s because it doesn’t matter if you’re a new blogger looking to build readership and drive organic traffic or an agency that wants to dominate the first page of Google for clients—you can wield the tool and glean powerful insights to give your websites a competitive edge.
Keyword research is easy on Mangools, with different functions split into five great tools. Each handles a portion of good SEO strategy, from keyword research and backlink analysis to rank tracking and competitor SERP analysis.
It’s also simple enough to get started. All you need is to enter your email address and create a password and you’re all set to take advantage of their 10-day free trial period. Use that time to get acquainted with what Mangools can do, play with it, and see how smooth the process is for finding quality keywords.
In no time, you’ll discover the power of learning what to focus your content on, knowing what your competitors are doing, and finding effective backlinks that will boost your authority online, even if this is your first time ever researching keywords.
Step 2 – Understand What Keyword Quality Means for You
Any time you type a phrase or a word into Google or any other search engine, that’s a keyword. That phrase or word helps you find what you’re looking for. The more people that search for that word or phrase, the more traffic that keyword gets, which is a key metric in any keyword research effort.
You want to track down, gather, and analyze the terms your audience is searching for, allowing you to tailor your content creation strategy to match these words and phrases people are using. It doesn’t matter if you’re reviving existing content, finding new content ideas, or curious about a niche. You’re going to need to understand search intent. The more relevant your content is to the needs of your searcher, the better your visibility in search results will be.
But what people are searching for is only half of it. Just because a keyword is relevant doesn’t mean it will be effective for you. There’s often a lot of competition over keywords, especially short and common ones.
If you want to find opportunities that don’t have a lot of competition to fend off, try looking into longer strings of search terms, also known as long-tail keywords. These tend to have less competition on them while also being more specific to what your desired audience searches for. That, in turn, gives you more opportunities to be found and become the problem solver that searchers need.
To find effective long-tail keywords, you need to know your niche. Read websites, online communities, and aggregators like Reddit, AnswerThePublic, and other forums to find unique words and terms real people use when looking for the type of content, products, or offerings that you produce. Homing in on those will catapult you up the first page of Google with less effort.
All in all, don’t limit yourself. You’ll want to gather up a diverse list of keyword targets with a healthy mixture of common (though competitive) search terms and long-tail keywords. At this stage, there are no bad ideas, because you’ll leave it to your keyword research tool to analyze them and tell you which ones are most worth your efforts.
Step 3 – Analyze the Quality of Your Keywords
Now that you’ve researched your target audience and found words, terms, phrases, and slang used in your niche, you’ll want to take your list and throw it into a keyword tool like Mangools to see which ones are worth making content for.
Keyword tools help you take that massive list of terms and see which ones get the most traffic, have the least competition, and hold the most relevance to your audience.
With Mangools, it’s pretty easy to do. First, you go to your dashboard and click on the KWFinder link.
Once inside that tool, type in your keyword candidates and wait for Mangools to analyze your results. You can tailor your search to analyze worldwide traffic or focus on a specific city or country, which is great for dominating local SEO. You can even change the language you analyze your keywords for.
Once you’ve added your keywords and any filters, you can start digging through the results with glee. Get data on search volume and trends for each keyword, plus ad-related metrics (such as cost per click), SERP data, backlinks, and more.
The great thing about Mangools and other keyword research tools is they save you a ton of time. You can plug in hundreds of keyword ideas and analyze them, plus get additional keyword recommendations, in one click.
And, just like any other keyword tool, you can run KWFinder searches for both your own keywords and those of your competitors. This delivers data that can give you an incredible advantage.
But what are the top things you should focus on in keyword research?
There are three areas to really home in on. Search volume is the first and most obvious. This tells you the bulk amount of traffic over a span of time ranging from the last three months to the last year. You can use shorter spans to spot emerging trends and year-long traffic to a baseline of popularity.
Mangools’ KWFinder results also include a score for keyword difficulty (KD). That’s a score cooked up by Mangools based on a few different factors which tells you how tough it will be to break through to the first page of search results for that keyword.
A green score represents a lower difficulty, while yellow and red scores are more challenging. When you find a phrase or term with a low KD, it could be a great topic to explore in your content.
Last, you’ll want to check the section on SERP overview, which gives you a wealth of information. Results there are presented in the same order as they currently appear on Google’s first page for your keyword search. Pay special attention to the LPS column—that’s a score comparable to KD that tells you how tough it will be to compete with that URL for their SERP for the same keyword.
You’ll also see scores for domain authority and page authority, plus metrics for backlink quantity and quality, Facebook shares, and estimated monthly visits.Each piece of information can be used to help you make better decisions.
The key here, in the end, is to gather these metrics on your keywords and look for opportunities. Those could result from a low KD for a search term, a low LPS for a competitor’s domain on a keyword, or a low CPC or PPC if you’re considering a paid ad campaign.
If you’re mostly focusing on keyword research for content marketing (without leaning hard on paid campaigns), a good start is to look for keyword suggestions that have a low KD for the amount of traffic they’re receiving. Those may represent areas that your competitors are ignoring which you can seize upon.
Step 4 – Deploy Keywords in Your Content Strategy
Once you have good keyword opportunities identified, you can start building content around them.
Start by identifying your best opportunity—a keyword with good traffic potential that doesn’t have too high of a KD and isn’t crowded with competitor domains that are tough to supplant.
Now, to craft content around it. There is a good rule of using one focus keyword per post. You can use it again on another piece of content, too, just don’t try to stuff more than one keyword to focus on into a single piece of content.
Whether you’re crafting a blog post, web page copy, whitepaper, or anything else, take this focus keyword and use it in your headline, as well as throughout the written copy within it. Use a light touch: place the keyword into your copy organically and when relevant, don’t overdo it.
A good tactic is to take the approach of having a pillar post with supporting content that branches out from it and supports it. Make your pillar post a potent piece of material for your audience, whether that entails a guide on how to do something, a thought leadership piece, a review of products, or anything else. Then, fill in knowledge gaps and keep whetting your audience’s appetite through your supporting posts, which each also use your focus keyword properly in title and main copy.
Above all else, always write thoroughly, completely cover the topic, and don’t write just to fill in keywords. Write naturally with a mindfulness of the keyword you’re targeting.
Then, just rinse and repeat for all of your target keywords that are worth pursuing (based on your findings from Mangools’ analysis). This step takes the longest and, in a way, is never fully completed. You’ll want to keep going back to your keyword research tool to get the most up-to-date information on your keywords and make adjustments as necessary.
Which leads us to the last step.
Step 5 – Educate Yourself Further
Here’s the thing, this article is a great place to start, but your work in conducting keyword research and implementing findings in your content is never truly done.
Beyond the cyclical nature of this work—researching keywords, finding opportunities, crafting content around those, then starting from step one again—you’ll be well-served by continuing to educate yourself on this part of SEO.
SEO is a broad topic and can’t be covered in one blog post, regardless if it says it is the ultimate guide. And there are a lot of advanced tactics and strategies that you may want to learn after you’ve grown in confidence.
Spend time with your keyword and SEO tools of choice, read about best practices, and come up with your own workflow. This will take time, effort, testing, and patience. But in time, you’ll have a smart approach to keyword research, supported by an SEO tool you trust (like Mangools), and a process for continuing to identify new target keywords and refine your content creation for persistent keyword opportunities.
