Almost all SEO begins with keyword research. Understanding what people are searching for and how many people are searching helps form a solid content strategy.
Beyond the basics, keyword research encompasses many more advanced considerations, including SERP features, keyword search intent, competitive analysis, and even internationalization.
Read the latest Moz posts on keyword research. We’ve also included links to our most popular keyword research resources to help your SEO journey.
Keyword Research : Everything you need to get started with keyword research.
Keyword Research Learning Center : Our free keyword research learning hub. Here, we’ve gathered our top resources in one place.
What is search intent and why does it matter? : Learn more about the power of search intent and how to use it in your keyword research strategy.
Keyword Explorer : Want to dive in? Try our top-rated keyword research tool, with over 500 million keyword suggestions.
Find Striking Distance Keywords With Moz Pro : How to quickly locate, track, and label these keyword opportunities in Moz Pro in this Whiteboard Friday video
I have various things I’ve turned into processes here in-house at my company, but today I’m going to talk about my favorite process - the Gap Method. This is the one I use to find keywords driving traffic to the “wrong” content and to identify links and anchor text to push out to our partners.
So “content is king”. But seriously, can you say that a video with a million views is always better content than another video with only a thousand views? Even more puzzling is that videos with more views don’t always rank higher in YouTube Search Engine Rankings.
I often find that keyword research is an overlooked part of the SEO process. Many SEOs will tend to stick with using Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and as a result, they will most likely be targeting the exact same keywords as the competition. The ultimate goal with keyword research is to find those juicy, low-hanging fruit - the long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are sometimes defined as keyword phrases containing multiple words of four or more. However, this is not how I like to define them. For me, the long-tail keywords are those that have lower volumes of traffic and are less competitive to rank for. In other words, they may contain multiple words or they could contain as few as two words.
Here are few of my favorite places to look for long tail keywords if your company is not getting the traffic, or is getting the dreaded (not provided) from Google.
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Ahoy, SEOmoz UGC blog lubbers! Great SEO always starts with great keyword research – unfortunately, getting high-quality, actionable keyword data can sometimes be challenging for seve...
The SEOmoz blogs and YOUmoz blogs always provide me with a lot of help and support. So I figured it's my time to give something back. In this post I will take you through the process I went through while doing keyword research. In the post I use the original Dutch keywords, but that shouldn’t be an issue. Also in the Netherlands Google accounts for 97 - 98 % of all searches on search engines so in the post below I will only focus on Google.
Don't forget about semantic keyword research to help you focus your content and and improve your rankings.
More and more, SEOs and small business owners are realizing that you cannot pay the electric bills or rent in rankings, and often times, traffic. Google Analytics or other site analytics packages can tell you your most profitable keyword broken down into a dollar value, however, what if you’re not ranking for the keyword but still want to assign a dollar value to it?
So recently I was having a chat to some friends involved in the digital space and they had a question: "Hey what do you think are the most competitive SEO term in the Australian SEO market?". Been involved with internet marketing for almost 8 years now I had a good grasp on some of the most difficult terms, I have personally worked in some of the most difficult markets in both Australia and the United States so I thought what better opportunity than to put together some research in this space.
One of my guilty pleasures is looking through the search query reports (SQR) of an AdWords campaign for the cringe-worthy search queries that led to someone clicking on a PPC ad. Really Google? You felt that goat transportation cost was related to my keyword of freight costs? Or that a babe cam search should show my ad for digital camera? Sadly, these matches and worse can happen if you lack proper negative keywords.
A while back, I went to a Distilled meetup here in NYC. SEER Interactive's Mark Lavoritano did some cool slides on the seasonality of keywords. Basically, his presentation made the point that you should not only think about which keywords you want to rank for but also WHEN they are most valuable.
For the past decade, most of us in the field of search have relied on Google's AdWords data (either in the public tool, the API or the tools inside AdWords accounts). It's the best source we've got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what's actually happening on Google's search engine. I'll illustrate ...
Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.
In December, we rolled out branded keyword rules and metrics to campaigns, to help you segment your branded traffic. Now, we’re excited to introduce a companion feature to make your keyword research easier: Find New Keywords. With this feature, you can view keywords sending you organic search traffic, filter on your brand rules, and determine if you want to track them in your campaign....