How to Do Basic Keyword Research Using Google Keyword Tool

Step-by-step Tutorial on Finding the Right Keywords to Optimize Your Site

This basic keyword research tutorial is the result of a suggestion made by The Lady Programmer. For this purpose, let’s pretend we have a freelance writer’s website. So obviously we want to find the right keywords starting with the keywords “freelance” and “writer”.

Why Google Keyword Tool?

I have 3 reasons why I’m using it for this tutorial:

1. It’s free!

2. I have used it at work.

3. It uses Google search results data. In short, it’s Google and more people are using it for their searches more than the other search engines.

Here’s the link to the tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Step 1: Collect the Seeds

Seeds are the main keywords or the general keywords that our website is known for. And for the sake of our example, our top seeds would be “freelance”, “writer” and a combination of both which is “freelance writing”.

From these seeds we are going to find other keywords to help optimize our website. One main reason behind this is because our seed terms are usually general terms and therefore we will find more competition in the search results. By finding more specific keywords, we can have better chances of ranking using those keywords.

Step 2: Expand Those Seeds

How do we do this? I have two ways to expand seeds. First thing I would usually do is to get a thesaurus and find the synonyms to those seeds. So for “freelance” and “writer”, I found these synonyms:

self-employed, non-staff, free agent, unaffiliated

author, editor, journalist, columnist, biographer, copywriter, freelancer, scribe, screenwriter, reporter, blogger

Second, I would find a competitor website and spy…err…I mean, find out what keywords he is using. If you do this, at least find a competitor with a better ranking than yours.

Step 3: Preparing to Use the Google Keyword Tool

Okay, first thing you will have to do is decide what country’s search results data do you want to know. What this means is, in your opinion, from what country do your site’s visitors usually come from?

Find the phrase “Results are tailored to English, United States” and click on Edit. Choose the language and country of your choice. But for this tutorial, we’re going to use English, United States.

Step 4: Type Your Seeds and Start Looking for Your Keywords

Type your main keywords one keyword or phrase per line. You might want to cover all possible related keywords so better include both the singular and plural forms of your keywords as well as the misspellings.

Leave the box for “Use synonyms” checked to help you expand your keyword research. But when you have seen the results and you find that there are a lot of unrelated keywords, repeat the process but this time do not check the box.

Your results will look like this:

Whew! It’s quite a list, isn’t it? And as you can see, I just cut the image so there are still a lot of results.

Now you will want to download these data to your Excel or OpenOffice Calc and sort them all out. To do this, go to the end of the results and click on .csv.

Step 5: Sort Out Your Search Results Data Using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.Org Calc

Download the .csv file of your keyword research data and sort out data in any manner that you prefer. As for myself, I prefer to sort the data based on the Approximate Average Search Volume.

So that’s it! Now we have a fresh list of possible keywords that we can use to optimize our website. You can repeat the whole process with another set of seeds or main keywords so you can build on your previous data.

One thing that I want to point out is that a keyword research tool is still just a tool. It is up to you to form your own insight on the keyword data that you will gather and decide which keywords are the best ones for your needs.

As a rule, do not rely on just one tool. There are lots of other tools out there, both free and proprietary. You can use Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SeoBook Keyword Suggestion Tool, and many others.

Good luck on your keyword research!