How to Do Keyword Research for Free in 2023 & Beyond

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Hey , it's Jack from Rang the one word press Seo plug-in that constantly strives to provide you with the fastest and the most cutting edge seo tools .

And on this channel , we provide you with the most up to date seo knowledge .

So if you're new to our channel , consider subscribing anyway to find good keywords for your blog or website .

There are two steps .

The first is keyword discovery .

I will walk you through what are the types of keywords and all the methods to find highly relevant keywords .

And then the next step is to verify if those keywords you found have search volume and an acceptable level of competition .

But for now , I need to assume that you are a beginner who doesn't understand the basics and the different types of keywords .

If you are familiar with it , great , you can skip ahead using the time stamps in the description .

But if you are new or want to keep yourself updated , let's start with the keyword basics .

Now when you write an article and you optimize your article based on one targeted keyword , your article never really ranks for just one keyword .

It ranks for a range of keywords that the search engines think are relevant to their searches .

So sometimes when you are doing keyword research , you will see keywords with different search volume .

But they all mean the same thing .

For example , how much can you make from youtube which has a search volume of 600 per month and then the keyword , how much can you make from youtube views has a search volume of 40 per month .

The same goes for how much can you make from youtube videos ?

But basically the search intent of these keywords are the same .

How much can someone makes from youtube ?

So you do not want to write one article to target this keyword and another article to target another keyword .

You want to write one article that targets one search intent .

And hopefully you can rank for all the other relevant keywords .

I hope you get the meaning because this is so important in terms of keyword research .

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Thanks for watching .

The next type of keywords is informational keywords .

People searching for this type of keywords want to get information or learn something related to your business or niche .

For example , if somebody types how to grill ribs , they're expecting a how to guide a step by step guide that will tell them that equipment , they need the ingredients sauces , how long to grill , the tenderness and basically everything .

People searching for these keywords want to learn something and they do not have a buying intent , but you may sleep some recommendations in the content in case they need them .

So if you are starting a blog for your BBQ retail shop , you'll be providing tips and techniques for grilling different types of meat .

And you may use internal links to link informational contents to commercial or transactional contents to maximize your profit .

And these are the next two types of keywords for commercial keywords .

They are something like BBQ gri reviews .

Best guess BBQ grills , BBQ grill , A versus BBQ grill .

B people searching for this type of keywords are in the research phase and depending on their purchase habits , some may research further and some may buy a product based on your recommendation .

And as for transactional keywords , they are something like buy BBQ grill , buy a specific brand of BBQ grill discount code for a specific brand of BBQ grill .

People searching for these keywords have gone through the research process .

They have made a decision on what product they want to buy and they are ready to make a purchase .

These are the two types of keywords that will bring sales to your business and the final type of keywords that will also bring sales to your business is the local keywords .

For example , if somebody wants to buy a specific product like Weber Q 1250 gas grill , but they urgently need the grill .

They may not want to buy it online and wait for the shipment .

They want to visit a local store to get that grill because they really need it right now .

So they will search for keywords like buy Weber Q 1250 gas grill near me , Weber queue 1250 gas grill for sale in San Francisco , et cetera .

So these are the five types of keywords .

But your next question may probably be since the transactional commercial and local keywords can drive sales to your business ?

Shouldn't we focus everything on these three types of keywords ?

The answer you shouldn't because you are limiting your reach , you should be using your blog as a way to build a brand .

Get people to know your business be the credible source of information for people interested in your business or niche .

It shouldn't be all about money .

So when you are building a blog for your business , should have a holistic approach and it should help your business grow in a way that is more than just revenue right now that we know the basics and the types of keywords .

Let me quickly go through all the long existing matters to find relevant keywords for your blog .

Before we talk about chat GP T if you don't know , Google provides a range of awesome keyword research tools , you just have to know how to use them .

The first of which is that Google also suggests or some veteran se os will call it Google alphabet soup .

How it works is that you will brainstorm a keyword that is relevant to your business or blog and using the same BBQ example , we can start with a keyword , say best BBQ source and then you will start typing the alphabet one letter at a time as you type , you will notice some keyword suggestions .

These are the keywords that people are searching for on Google and they may be important to your blog .

So you want to jot them down .

You can also add an underscore , let's say best underscore barbecue sauce .

And you will see these relevant keywords that are probably important to your blog using this auto suggest method .

You can add as many keywords into Google and have Google tell you what people are searching for .

Then the next two is the people also ask section every keyword that you search for on Google may have these people also ask section and as the name suggests , these are questions that people are asking on Google .

As you expand each of the questions , more relevant suggestions will appear .

You want to jot down those keywords questions that are important to your blog .

When you are doing keyword research , you want to expand as many questions .

And when you can't find any relevant question , go back up to expand on questions that are related to your blog and more relevant suggestions will appear .

And when you think you have exhausted this section , go to the search bar and search for another keyword and go through the same process .

We are pretty sure you will find a lot of keyword suggestions .

And do you know as you scroll down the search results page , you will see this related searches section which may provide you with more keyword ideas .

Now , the next Google tool is the Google keyword planner to get this tool .

Just do a search on Google , click on the button and provide some information about your business .

Basically , you are creating a Google ads account .

And from there , you can access the tool .

If you already have a Google ads account , just go to the tools and settings tab under planning .

You will see the keyword planner tool .

You can discover new keywords by clicking on this and enter a seed keyword .

Let's say BBQ guest grills get results and it will provide you with a list of keywords related to the C keyword .

It will tell you the search volume of each keyword .

So you know there are people searching for the keyword you are targeting .

Now , I won't go into detail of how to use Google Cuba Planner to do Cuba research .

Otherwise this video is gonna be very long .

So if you want to learn more about it , you can check out this page .

The link is in the description .

Now , the final Google tool you can use for keyword research is the site colon method .

This works very well .

If you want to know what topics your competitors are targeting , let's say that this barbecue website amazing ribs dot com is your competitor .

What you want to do is to copy the site address , go to Google type in site colon and paste the URL of the site without any spaces as you hit enter Google has found many index pages on this domain .

As you scroll through the results , you will pick up some very useful topics that may apply to your blog .

On top of that say you want to know your competitors articles that contain ac topic for example , gas grill .

So on the search bar hit space and add the keyword or C topic .

And this will pull articles from your competitors sites where Google things is related to the seed topic .

Plus if you want Google to find articles from your competitor site that contains a particular keyword .

All you need to do is to add codes around the keyword .

And Google will find articles from your competitor site that contains the exact match keyword using this method .

You would definitely find lots of keywords for your blog .

If you have exhausted one of your competitors , keywords use this method on another competitor .

That's all the Google tools .

And since we're on the topic of finding competitors , keywords , here's another method .

Now , the alternative to the site caller method is to find keywords in your competitors .

Site map , most of the sites will have a publicly available XML site map .

For example , this site , this is the URL .

Let's add slash sitemap dot XML .

Some sites will have underscore index .

So if you don't find one under sitemap dot XML , you can try sitemap underscore index dot XML but do note that some sites do not have a publicly available site map .

Now as you hit , enter , if the site map is public , you will see something like this .

Go through the site maps and based on the text in the URL , you can find keyword ideas from there .

By the way , if you want to learn more about site maps and how it can benefit your sites do check out this video .

The link is in the description answers dot com works a little like Cora where you can ask a question and other users on the site can answer your question .

The site is very good for discovering informational keywords .

Just enter a see keyword like how do I safely handle and store raw meat before and after grilling ?

And it will show you the best answer .

And if you scroll down further , you will find related answers , click on them and as you scroll down and you will have some relevant keyword ideas , just a note answers dot com doesn't work well on some niches .

You've got to try it out yourself .

Now answer the public is another useful tool to discover keywords related to your niche .

But take note that you are limited to three free searches per day on the site .

Enter ac keyword , select the country and hit search and it will suggest questions related to your C keyword .

It will provide you with proposition keywords , comparison , keywords in alphabetical order and related keywords is just that simple .

Now , a H reps is a paid tool , but they do provide several free tools to the public with no strings attached .

For example , the keyword generator on its keyword generator , enter ac keyword like BBQ tips or any keywords related to your business or niche .

And it will suggest a bunch of related keywords with its search volume and keyword difficulty for the keyword difficulty .

The higher the number , the harder it is to rank you can use this as a keyword validation tool , which we'll talk about later .

This is definitely a very handy tool for keyword research personally , out of all the existing keyword research methods , I would say that the Google tools and the A HWF keyword generator are the most useful .

What do you think ?

Do you have any other existing keyword research methods to share ?

Do leave them in the comments .

Now , let's finally talk about how to use chat G BT for Q A research before everything else you might have questions about whether you should use Chat G BT to write an article for you to be published and rank on search engines .

And the answer is no , it goes against Google's guidelines .

Chat G BT should be used as a guide and not an end solution with that said chat G BT is an amazing keyword research tool .

It has learned and absorbed a lot of information on the web and it is a very good assistant just to put it into context text .

If you are an expert in a particular industry or niche chat G BT is just one level below you , which brings it a highly qualified assistant to be helping you with task , but they shouldn't be doing all the work for you .

The best part is you can treat chat G BT like a human associate .

Let's check it out .

Now , there are no fixed commands to tell chat G BT to do certain things .

You should tell it to do certain tasks like you would dedicate task to your assistant .

Let's take the BBQ retail shop as an example .

Again , first , I would treat Chat G BT like a new employee of my business .

So I would say assuming you are a business owner of a BBQ appliance store trying to start a block to sell your products .

Please provide me with a list of underserved block topics in the BBQ niche .

As you hit enter , it will start to write out a list like you have instructed .

Now , this is interesting because every new chat it comes up with different ideas .

But don't you think these can be the top categories of your blog ?

They definitely can .

Right now , I haven't gone into researching keyword ideas yet .

In this approach , I'm going the top down method .

I'm researching the top categories and then I'll go deep .

It is as though you are building out an entire site structure .

I will show you a bottom up method later on .

And by the way , if you want to learn more about building a good site structure for seo and higher rankings , you can check out this video right here .

The link is in the description back to this .

Let's say that you don't want chat G BT to stop at eight topics and you want more .

So I would say please provide me with a full list instead of stopping at eight , you see it is providing you with even more top level topics that are potentially the top level categories of your blog don't you think this is amazing to me ?

It is .

And if you want even more , just ask chat G BT , like you will ask a human assistant .

Are there more topics ?

Please provide me with everything and it goes on with even more ideas and of course , you can probe even more .

You can just type out there more .

But for the sake of this video , let's move on now , based on all these top level topics , let's say that this topic is something that is related to my business .

And I want to know what are the underserved keywords related to it ?

I would ask chat G BT , what are the questions people ask about the topic and it will go on to generate the questions for you .

These questions can be keyword ideas for your blog .

Kind of cool , right ?

If you want more , just ask are there more and you can go on and on and it is practically giving you all the questions within the top level topic which makes it easy for you to build topical relevance for your site .

I don't know about you , but I think this is really a game changer when it comes to keyword research .

Now these are the informational keywords you can go on to ask about other types of keywords .

For example , I want to know if there are commercial keywords in this top level topic , I would ask , please provide me with questions that have buying intent and related to the topic and it will list them down for you as you can see , some of these keywords are keywords that you probably never think of and it is awesome .

Now , in case you want local keywords , you can ask , assuming the BBQ retail shop is located in San Francisco .

Can you provide a list of questions with buying intent that locals will ask on Google and it would start listing those questions for you .

Stay with me because we are going to use another method for keyword research with chat G BT .

Now , what if you want to do keyword research from the bottom up perspective ?

Let's start a fresh , let's give a comment , like provide a list of keywords in the BBQ niche and it will start to generate a bunch of keyword ideas .

Now , these are all one word keywords which are highly competitive .

So if you think this list is not helping , you can adjust your command , let's say , can you provide long tail keywords instead and it will go on to get you those keywords .

How cool is that ?

Of course , when it's done , you can definitely ask for more .

But for now , let's say that I want to group this list of keywords into top level categories so that we can build a good site structure .

I will give a command say from the keywords above .

Please group them based on their semantic relevance and it will start grouping them like a pro .

And with this , you can build a really good site structure for your website or blog .

As you can see , these are top level categories that your blog can adopt .

So there are no set commands or rules .

Just ask the right questions , the right probes and make sure that the questions you ask are understandable by a human and it will provide you with the most phenomenal information you want .

And honestly , don't you think this is mind blowing ?

You no longer need to spend a lot of time researching .

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We really appreciate that .

And now that we found a bunch of keywords , let's verify them to see what we should focus on first .

Now the H OS EO advice is to avoid writing articles on topics that are highly competitive and that still stands true , but it doesn't mean that you should avoid them completely .

Just put yourself in the position of Google .

What is their mission statement ?

It is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful and to make sure that the search results are useful , they want to make sure that the information they rank highly is credible and to do that , they have to analyze many data points .

And one of the data points is that the website has covered most or all of the important keywords in the industry on niche .

And did they do it ?

Well , let me give you an analogy .

Let's say that you are Google and I'm a guy who is covering a lot of sco information and I made them publicly available .

Then comes another guy who claims that he is an seo expert .

He's not known anywhere .

He doesn't publish much content .

Who would you trust as Google ?

I know you want to trust the other guy , but you are Google , you can only judge what you see .

So most likely you will trust me , right ?

But does it mean that I'm more of an expert than that guy ?

You never really know , right ?

Maybe that guy is really an expert .

So applying that even if a topic is highly competitive , you should still cover it as long as it is an important topic to your blog or business .

I hope this makes sense to you with that in mind .

All the keywords you have found that you think are important to your business or blog are good keywords , but you have to verify if there are people searching for it and depending on the competitiveness of the keyword , you want to prioritize them accordingly .

One of the tools I recommend to know if there is a search volume for a keyword is Google Trends .

So we are on Google trends .

Let's plug in one of the keywords we have found , say best BBQ , save the tips when you search for it nothing is found .

Let's change this to worldwide .

If your target audience is in a particular country , feel free to change this , then let's adjust the data range to the max .

Still nothing .

That's fine .

When you put in exact keywords , sometimes you will not see any results , but that doesn't mean that it has no search volume .

Let's remove best and leave just BBQ safety tips .

Even when we remove best the search intent stays the same .

Let's search for it .

So here we have some data .

Whenever you see a graph with no data , you see this has data if there are no data and it doesn't matter if the graph is trending upwards or downwards , it means that there is a search volume , maybe 200 searches per month or more graph with data .

Like in this example , signals that the search volume is 500 or more no graph .

But with data signifies about 100 searches per month .

I will show you some proof in a while .

Essentially , this is what we are saying .

This is the closest gauge .

So if the exact keywords you found do not have any data , try to adjust it to a generic keyword and you will have a gauge of the search volume .

This requires some skill but information is more accurate than any keyword research tool you use .

But if you want to use an easier method , it is to use the A HD F's keyword generator .

Now there are some limitations to the data from A HD F's keyword generator because you can't filter worldwide data .

You can only access country specific data .

Let me give you a real example .

So we are on the A H reps keyword generator and we're going to research this keyword best bamboo toothbrush .

Let's select the United States data , perform the search and you will see the search volume at three 150 searches per month .

If we visit Google trends , using only the United States data , you can see that it is signifying about 200 plus searches per month , which is pretty close .

But if you filter the Google trends results by worldwide , you can , we can see that it signifies 500 searches or more per month .

And if we visit the Google search console , we can see that for this keyword under the impressions .

It is getting about 600 plus searches per month .

This is the global data .

Let's adjust it to the United States data .

And you will see that there are about 100 and 71 searches per month for the keyword in the United States .

So it suggests to us that the results from A H revs is pretty decent , but it is limited to the country specific data .

And if your website is targeting worldwide traffic , if you rely only on the US data as a gauge for the worldwide data , you are missing out on a lot and that's why I would prefer to use Google trends to verify the search volume , especially when it comes to targeting worldwide traffic .

Alright , once you have identified that a particular keyword has search volume , let's determine the competition level to prioritize what keywords to focus on .

First to do that , I will install chrome extensions like the mouse bar .

Uber suggest or any extensions that will tell you the domain and page authority of each search result .

For this case , I will use the Uber suggest chrome extension .

Let's do a search of the key phrase barbecue safety tips .

And we can see that the top results are with domain authority of 83 68 71 93 which are relatively high .

If you see signs that have a domain authority of more than 50 across the 1st 10 results , it is highly competitive .

And if you see super high authority sites or government sites ranking for that keyword , that is not a keyword you want to target at all .

Let's do another say sustainable swimwear .

From this , we can see that the domain authority of the top 10 results are 56 29 17 , 38 this is 89 43 .

So as you can see , there are a lot of sites with domin authority of less than 50 ranking for this keyword .

So this keyword is competitive but at an acceptable level .

So we will target this keyword .

First .

The key is you need traffic coming to your site for it to get noticed and to grow in authority , right ?

If you are targeting all the highly competitive keywords at the start and you don't rank at all , nobody will come to your site and your site would never grow .

Does this make sense to you ?

So to recap , the first step to finding good keywords for your site is to use one of the keyword discovery tools I've mentioned .

I think chat G BT is a game changer as it will save you a lot of time .

Then the next step is to verify if the keywords have search volume , I would prefer to use Google trends to do the research as the information I get is more complete on a global scale .

The final step is to determine the competitiveness of the keywords so that you can prioritize the low competition keywords first to gain some search visibility traffic and eventually build authority .

When your site is more established , you want to target the more competitive keywords .

I hope that this makes sense to you .

So with all that we have shared , we hope that you can formulate your own keyword research strategies to find highly relevant keywords that will bring high quality traffic to your site .

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This is Jack from Rang Math .

Stay awesome .

And I'll see you in the next video .