Part 2: How to Find Keywords for Your SEO Project

In this part we will discuss how to find keywords for your SEO project

You can either watch the video from Websima DMCC or read this article for the Second part of this season.

We are looking for the most valuable keywords. But, keep in mind that the most valuable keywords wouldn’t necessarily attract the greatest number of visitors for our website.

We are looking for the keywords which brings the Best visitors for us, not the greatest number of visitors! In the other words, our main purpose is to recognise our audiences.

Let me show you some numbers:

• Google handles more than 3.5 billion searches everyday
• 92% of the total searches are on google
• 62% of the searches in US are with smartphones
• 84% of users, search in google more than 3 times in a day. (This number can be much higher for some people)

In a simple word, SEO means working through different mechanisms to make sure that Google match suitable customers to your website.

We are not supposed to have a good ranking for anyone who are searching anything in google. We are supposed to have a good ranking for users who are searching for our products or services.

We need some tools for that; There are many limits in these tools, anyway we have no choice but to use them

First one would be Google itself. It will help us to find:

• Popular Keywords
• Understanding the intent of the users
• Finding longer Keywords

The next tool that we will use is “Alexa”. That would help us to:

• Analyse our competitors
• Categorise our competitors’ websites
• Finding out good opportunities for link building (for the third one we won’t talk about it in this part)

And the third tool will be the keyword planner in Google ads that gives us:

• Approximate statistics of searches
• A report of the search changes in a year
• Mobile & Desktop searches statistics

Step 1: Initial List of Keywords

The first step to find keywords is to make an initial list of them. The best person to consult with in this part is the business owner because he is familiar with the keywords in that particular business.

We continue our session with an example so you can better understand it. Let’s assume that our project is for a car lease company in Dubai.

Our initial keywords would be like this:

Common keywords: Car, Leasing, price, buying a car, selling a car

Brands names: BMW, Volvo, Mercedes Benz, Huyndai

Car names: BMW X5, Mercedes S class, Volvo XC90

Services: leasing a car, buy a car no down payment, Instant loan for car

Combined ideas: leasing a BMW X5, instant loan for Volvo XC90, Price of Mercedes S class.

Now we need to filter some of the keywords with 2 rules:

Rule 1: Remove the short and common keywords

Why? If you remember, we talked about the “Zero-click searches” in part 1. These short and common keywords are most likely to be zero click keywords. Because the intent of the users in these kinds of searches is unclear. You may think that some of those keywords may be useful, but trust me they are not, just remove them from your list.

The second filter would be:

Rule 2: Consider its benefit

Ask this question from yourself: Can I get any benefit from this keyword? In this example: if someone is searching for BMW X5, does he want to get leasing for that? Most probably NO. so remove it, it doesn’t have any benefit for you. Or if someone is searching for Mercedes Benz wants leasing? 99.9% No. Just remove it

Remember that we removed the keywords, but we wouldn’t forget the ideas! BMW X5 is a good idea, but as a separate keyword, it cannot be useful. We don’t need too many words. If you have BMW X5, you don’t need to add BMW X6, it doesn’t add any new idea to our list.

Step 2: Find Google Suggestions

In step 2, we will use one of the tools we’ve mentioned before: Google! Google can suggest you good ideas. There are 2 areas in Google that can be useful. The first one is the Search Bar of the Google.

The second one is on the bottom of the search page.

What is the different between these two areas?

The search bar shows you the Hottest suggestions with your keyword while the bottom of the page shows you the related keywords to what you have searched. The hottest keywords can be different from a business to another. In news, the hottest keywords would be the most recent ones. But in lease company it is different.

Now we start with the initial list that we made in step 1. You can start with “price” or “leasing” or BMW X5. By typing these words, you can get new ideas from google which are the hottest keywords! Let’s check BMW X5. See the suggestions in search bar:

This is giving us a new idea; we can add the year of the car to our keywords! The concept of the “Used cars” can be also added to our keywords. By adding a letter and words to the search bar you can get many ideas. Try it.

There are some websites which provide this service for you, so you don’t need to try each keyword on Google. You just need to list your keywords on that  website, and they show you the result right away. One example is https://keywordtool.io/ .

Now we go to the bottom of the page suggestions. If you search for “car lease Dubai” you see this:

Here you can get new ideas again. Like “Long-Term” lease as a keyword.

Step 3: Find Competitors Keywords with Alexa

Let’s talk about the second tool that we mentioned before, ALEXA. For new websites or old websites which don’t have a good achievement in SEO, Alexa would be significantly useful. We will talk about two features in Alexa, “Audience overall tool” and “keyword matrix”

Alexa has a feature in its website named “Audience Overlap Tool”. In this feature, if you type a domain, it gives you the similar websites to that domain which have many users in common. If you have an active website with visitors, you can use your domain. Otherwise use your famous competitor’s domain to find related websites. In this example we have used https://www.payperkay.ae/ and https://www.speedydrive.ae/ to find the competitors. (You can put up to 10 websites to get data)

Look what Alexa gave us:

In this data, Alexa introduces us many related websites. From these websites you should figure out your competitors. There are some features in Alexa so you can narrow down your competitors to what you want.

After Finding your competitors, it is time to analyse them. For that purpose, we use another tool from Alexa which is called “Competitor Keyword Matrix”. In previous section, you found your competitors, here you enter your competitors’ website to get the data from Keyword Matrix. You can put up to 10 websites. We did in our example and here is the result:

It gives us different useful data but now we are focusing on suggested keywords. If you can see, it suggested us 700 keywords which is a Good number.

It also gives us filter. We can get rid of unwanted keywords or focus on some keywords by that. In this example we don’t want “Rent” and “Hire” to be in our result because it is a different concept.

So, we exclude the rent and hire in filters and get the filtered result:

You can see that by applying that filter, our keywords reduced from 700 to 310. But these keywords are the ones that we were looking for. This can be a great source of keyword for your project.

Step 4: Build your Keywords Cloud

In the next step, we create a cloud of the keywords by organising the keywords we found from the last two steps with Google and Alexa. In this section we try to determine the main keywords for different bunch of keywords. It is a little bit complicated, but you will understand it in our example. Look at this excel sheet:

We’ve divided different concepts from keywords. Each concept is like a cloud for its keywords. For example, car lease Dubai, long term car lease Dubai, Dubai car leasing and the rest will be all covered by the “Car lease” as the cloud.  It is same for different keywords like BMW, Mercedes, Volvo or Kia. You can make more clouds with related keywords for your project with the keywords you’ve found in previous steps. Categorising our keywords by this method would smooth our next steps in the project.

Step 5: Checking our keywords in “Keyword Planner”

Next step would be checking our keywords in “Keyword Planner” (Which is a tool in Google ads). This step helps us to:

1. Find our central keyword
2. Prioritise our clouds and keywords

We continue with our example:

In keyword planner, you should be careful to choose your location correctly, which in this example would be UAE. After that we insert a list of keywords from ONE of our clouds into this box. And then we click on “Get Results”.

It gives you option for chart results. You can get the chart by “Search Volume Trends”, “Locations” or “Platform”. In this example if you get it by location, you will find out that Dubai is much more important than the other cities.

It also gives you statistics of the keywords and come up with a lot of new ideas for new keywords however not all of them are useful.

You can see above that “car lease dubai” is searched 2900 times (it is a monthly average). Can it be our central keyword? We should check that whether it is related to our business or not. The answer for this case is yes, it can be our central keyword. In some cases, the most searched keyword may not be fully related to your business and you need to pass it and go for the next keyword.

So, till now we have found our central keyword. Next step would be prioritising our clouds based on the data that Keyword Planner provides.

Step 6: Gathering and organising all the keywords in an excel file based on its priority

You need to have all the useful keywords in an excel sheet for your later reference and it is better to organise it based on what we have talked in previous steps.

You are done, you have found keywords for your SEO project now and you are ready for next step.

We hope you enjoyed this part and we are sure you are  goanna follow the next part.

In part 3 we’ve investigated the meaning of the keywords and try to find out the reasons behind the searched keywords.