Keyword research is a cornerstone of SEO success, but many SEOs do it incorrectly. Instead of focusing on keywords that drive revenue, they only chase traffic volume.
This guide tackles a new approach to keyword research that boosts your online presence and directly contributes to your bottom line.
By the end, you’ll understand how to transform keywords into valuable assets that drive business growth and profitability.
Why most keyword research is wrong
Before writing this article, I searched for and read several keyword research guides.
They all suffered from the same problem. They only talked about how to acquire traffic from Google and not about why.
And the “why” is the most crucial part of keyword research.
As such, this article is split into two parts.
First, we’ll examine why we use keywords and how they lead to business success.
Then, we’ll examine the process for identifying business-relevant keywords.
Let’s start with the “why” behind keyword research.
Why are you doing keyword research?
The problem with keyword research is that people talk about how to do it but never talk about why you are doing it.
Most people, if asked this question, will talk about traffic.
But unless you are a publisher earning revenue from display advertising, this metric is too basic to be valuable for SEOs working for businesses that need leads, sales, profits and growth.
Others might use phrases like building brand awareness or talk about concepts like the ‘funnel’ and how they want to create top-of-mind awareness through content.
However, these are all essentially flawed and over-simplistic approaches that generally do not work or deliver value for clients.
To make life easier, I’ll explain why you are doing keyword research.
Revenue generation.
The goal of keyword research is to find keywords for which a brand can rank, leading to increased revenue.
So, for keyword research to be successful, we need to learn how revenue is earned online.
Dig deeper: Keyword research for SEO: 6 questions you must ask yourself
How brands make money from SEO: The fundamental rule of keyword research
Brands make money from SEO through leads and sales.
And here’s where SEO starts to unravel.
Traditionally, SEOs view their work as optimizing a website for all funnel stages. This is a strategic error. Here’s why.
The traditional marketing funnel looks like this:
This approach leads to using SEO to rank web pages, targeted at all stages of the funnel.
TOFU: Top-of-funnel content to build brand awareness.
MOFU: Middle-of-funnel content to reach those considering their purchase options.
BOFU: Bottom-of-funnel content where people buy products or services.
SEOs have sliced the funnel up in many ways, such as by renaming metrics as informational, commercial, etc.
However, the core goal has remained: to use SEO as an all-in-one marketing channel.
This has resulted in websites with huge traffic numbers and brands creating content for every keyword they can think of, believing it’s all advertising.
But most web traffic is useless.
Because it targets people at the wrong time.
SEO is product placement, not advertising: A tale of how marketing works
The argument by SEOs around keyword research is that “all traffic is good traffic.”
This makes the delivery of SEO more aligned with the “publisher model.”
SEOs will create content at scale to generate traffic and justify SEO.
This means that most SEO content is called “top of funnel.”
The argument used by SEOs is that they use SEO to create brand awareness. And through ebooks or other lead gen activities, you acquire marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
I’ve seen this justified using first-touch attribution data, where an email sign-up later becomes a customer, justifying the content.
Firstly, marketing metrics are rarely this granular. Yes, it will undoubtedly have first-touch attribution as “organic,” but so will all your organic traffic.
This includes your service and product pages.
However, significant studies show that we do not purchase or recall brands this way.
Dig deeper: 6 vital lenses for effective keyword research
We serve busy people with busy minds
When I think about keyword research strategy, I think about this line from Byron Sharp’s book “Marketing Theory, Evidence and Practice.”
“Our marketing and brand is ignored and forgotten by most people most days.”
The reason for this is the forgetting curve.
The forgetting curve is a well-established principle in memory function.
In short, we quickly lose what we don’t use regarding new information.
To demonstrate this, I often ask clients to name the last five articles they read and videos they watched online.
Followed quickly by asking them the brand or person behind them.
The answer is almost always met with difficulty.
I then ask the clients to name ten toothpaste brands. The struggle is intense, even for something as simple as toothpaste.
We have too much going on in our heads to recall the name of every brand we encounter online. We often forget things such as PINs and loved ones’ birthdays.
And yet, there is a romantic idea among SEOs and content marketers that the 3,000-word ultimate guide the prospects read 10 months ago.
They somehow embedded the brand in their memory architecture to such an extent that they can recall it and themselves easily.
This logic looks like this:
“We need to get some food for our new puppy. We’ll buy it from Pooch Love online. I read their 400 names for Daschunds article six months ago. They look great; I’ll search for them.”
OK, so that’s a little tongue-in-cheek. But this is the logic behind the vast majority of SEO strategies.
The idea is that all traffic leads to brand recall.
But it doesn’t. This is why advertising exists. To build and refresh memory structures around brands.
Source: Les Binet
We need to ditch the idea of using SEO to build brand awareness through top-of-funnel logic.
The articles you’re writing that are growing your traffic are forgotten minutes after being read.
Your brand isn’t remembered and your traffic graph is meaningless.
So, what matters?
Tom Roach, VP of brand strategy at Jellyfish, wrote a compelling article about why the marketing funnel needs to change.
In his modified funnel, SEO sits as a connecting function. Connecting immediate prospects with brands.
And a bit of nudging as well.
We connect brands with buyers and show up on their purchase journey.
With this as our goal, keyword research will be more focused and revenue-driven.
Now that we’ve thoroughly covered the why of keyword research, we need to dive into the how.
Your new keyword process
The standard of keyword research will always depend on the amount of time you have to conduct it.
If you have a small retainer, the time you have to conduct keyword research will be limited.
But a good keyword research process looks like this:
Building your keyword strategy.
Customer and competitor keyword research.
Mapping your buyers’ keyword journey.
Keyword ideation – identify what your customers need.
Selecting your keyword assets.
Asset viability (manual keyword research).
Let’s break each section down.
Building your keyword strategy
When addressing keyword research, we must start with the premise that our brands are easily and quickly forgotten.
That’s the starting point for SEO.
And so, we come to the customer or buyer journey.
The buyer’s journey is a series of touchpoints from product awareness to purchase.
Many brands are discovered online with buyer intent keywords, which is no different from how many products are discovered in stores. We walk along physical aisles, where many brands are first discovered.
Search is the digital version of this.
Our first search terms are often broad and straightforward.
Often referred to as head terms. These keywords are broad and are usually expensive for paid search.
These keywords are also often competitive to rank for.
You need to start your keyword strategy with the client and their budget in mind.
There is no point in building a huge keyword strategy if the client lacks the resources to rank for the terms.
Before you take another step forward, it is useful to run through a SMART analysis at the beginning of the process to build your strategy.
Specific: What specific results are we trying to obtain here? Are we looking to grow revenue for a particular service or all services/ products?
Measurable: Where is the client now? What are their rankings?
Actionable and achievable: Can we achieve the desired result with the current budget? Do we have the resources and stakeholder buy-in?
Realistic and relevant: Are the desired results realistically achievable? Are they relevant to the business goals?
Time: How much time do we have? When are results likely to happen?
Much of the above can be gathered with a simple client call and a gut feeling by quickly checking some data and competitors.
The above is not designed to be perfect. It’s more of a guide as you move through the process.
We can now move to the next step.
Customer and competitor keyword research
To conduct your research into customer needs, you need data.
Some sources can include:
Customer data/ business data.
Search console data.
Paid search data.
Keyword research tools.
Google Analytics 4.
In-house teams will generally have access to more data and more time for the above, while agencies and freelancers will have less.
However, the aim of this initial stage is to gather as much data as possible about your buyer’s search journey.
What are they typing into search engines? What do they think when they are looking into buying what you sell?
Many keyword tools can assist with this. ChatGPT is, however, surprisingly good at giving you starting points for this information:
Throw in a simple prompt and you will gain some logical searches to consider.
If we look at what a simple prompt gave me if I was looking for “in the market” keywords for people buying fish tanks.
General fish tank searches.
Size-specific searches.
Type-specific searches.
Brand-specific searches.
Material-specific searches.
This isn’t exhaustive, but it is designed to get you thinking about a consumer.
The good thing about ChatGPT is that you can analyze markets for ideas, keyword formulas and more.
I have deliberately not used a specific search tool in this article because there are so many with their own guides.
What matters is that you gain the data from various sources. Our aim is not to study all the keywords but to make an SEO plan.
We are gathering as much data as possible about how our consumers might search for a brand like ours when they enter the market to buy.
Using this data, you can now map the buyer’s keyword journey.
Mapping your buyers’ keyword journey
To build your strategy, you need to identify the customers you want to target and the search terms they use. Then, we can map our keywords against the buyer’s journey.
For example, let’s say you are in the market for car insurance. Your 17-year-old daughter has just passed her driving test and wants a car.