Keyword Research Without Agencies: Manual For Beginners And Online Shop Owners

Stacy Mine

Editor at Serpstat

If search engines don't like your site, this article is what you need. I'll tell you how to improve your site's rankings by optimizing them for the right keywords. How do you carry out keyword research and what tools will be useful for you?

Why do you need keyword research?

If you want your site to be visible to search engine users, you should collect keywords of high quality. So, you find search terms and phrases that you use for optimization and distribute them between pages of your website. Then you write texts and meta tags are.

Features of the keywords you should keep in mind:

Search volume: how often do users search for this term

Keyword difficulty: how high is the competition level

Cost (CPC): how much a click costs if the user clicks on an ad containing this keyword

Generally speaking, keywords are all words and word combinations that describe your activities, services or products and fully cover the subject matter of the website.

This keyword list should also match the wishes and intentions of users and your business goals. I'll show you how to collect the semantics for a website.

The whole process consists of 5 steps:

Find relevant keywords

Expand semantics

Delete unnecessary keywords

Group keywords

Look for alternative keyword sources

How do you create a keyword list for your website?

Basic keyword research

To get a keyword list, you should find the search terms that are relevant to your topic and website. Think about which keywords describe your product and offer. Save this list in a Google Spreadsheet. Then you can do the following:

Check these keywords in Keyword Selection to find all keywords that contain a specific one:

If necessary, you can sort and filter the keywords in all columns.

If you want to optimize your site for special search results, such as the rich snippet, knowledge graph, or local pack, I recommend you to use keywords with Special elements in SERPs.

Fill in your list of keywords that are thematically related to the keywords you've collected. Open the Related Keywords section to find synonyms, colloquial variants, and LSI keywords that were not included in the initial research.

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To examine a domain, you don't need to open Serpstat in a new tab - all necessary data is available with one click directly on the site!
Click on the icon and you'll get multiple SEO metrics about a domain or page: visibility, traffic, keywords, top competitors in the region, etc.
Read the post to learn about the benefits of the updated Serpstat checker.

Learn more about SEO Checker

How do you expand the keyword list?

Competitive analysis. Competitive analysis is a reliable source of relevant search queries.

By analyzing your competitors, which successfully appear in search results, you can improve your chances.

Serpstat also offers several options. Do you want to know which keywords your competitors use? Just enter the website in the search bar to see the keywords for which this site appears in search results.

Find missing keywords. If your website already exists, you can find more ways to optimize it.

Compare your page with competitors to find out which keywords you're missing.

Everything You Need To Know About Missing Keywords Module

Search suggestions and search queries. To fill in more semantic gaps, you can benefit from these features. These are search terms suggested by search engines when the user enters a keyword. You can be really helpful in keyword research.

Click on the button Only questions so you can find excellent ideas for the headings of your articles.

Get a quick overview and save your time

Would you like to receive a personal Serpstat demonstration, the trial version or successful use cases? Send a demo request and our support team will contact you;)

How can you delete negative keywords?

You've collected an impressive list of keywords. Well done! But if you look closely at these keywords, you may find that they don't quite match the theme of your website or don't fit for other reasons. Using them may have a negative effect — your target audience won't visit your site. To avoid this situation, you should delete unnecessary keywords.

The most common negative keywords are:

Free, cheap, used

Competitors' brand names

Place names that are not important to your business

Misspelled keywords

Duplicate search terms

How can you sort out these keywords? Serpstat offers a variety of options. You can exclude any search terms (keyword), as well as place names (filter toponyms) and delete typos (misspelled keywords).

How do you group search terms?

You've collected a keyword list and deleted unnecessary search terms. Then you should put these words on pages. Manual keyword grouping requires a lot of time and effort. Serpstat has a solution — automated Clustering tool. Based on the downloaded keywords, the tool creates clusters that help determine a structure of the website and page content.

Successful Keyword Mapping In 5 Easy Steps: How To Create A Site Structure With Our Clustering Tool

Cluster is a group of similar queries that have a hierarchical structure. It is collected based on the site analysis in the top 30 search results. You can learn more about Clustering in the article below.

You should understand that the search terms from a cluster correspond to a search intent of the users. Note that you shouldn't include commercial and informational keywords on a page.

How To Increase The Text Relevance Of Site Pages: Serpstat Text Analytics Tool

If you've got a rough structure, you can check these keywords for search volume and forward exact tasks to copywriters. Recommendations for content creation or optimization of already existing pages can be made using the Serpstat Text Analysis tool.

Reports provide a list of keywords that work best with Title, Description, and Body Text.