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
Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There's a natural conflict that creates the issue - the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages. ...
At some point during your University's SEO 201: Advanced Keyword Research & Targeting class, they probably gave a few lectures and case studies on how to effectively split up your keyword research list across multiple pages and use those terms/phrases to maximum benefit. But, for those who might have missed that lesson (which would be, umm, all of us, since no...
The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer's post ...
There is a lot of information on the web on how to do the basics of SEO yet it took me years to figure out the right way to analyze Keyword Difficulty. I think there are a few reasons for this. One being that it’s a difficult subject to explain and it’s a lot more complicated than it looks. I know there is a keyword difficulty tool from SEOMoz (htt...
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In mid-June 2008, I met my friend who has a canvas painted shoes boutique. She requested me to make a blog that promotes her painted shoes boutique. One of the challenges I came across when building the blog was the keyword research, as none of the online keyword research tools I used were able to return good results of searches for our local language (Indonesia). The tools always showed "0" or "not available." The experience made me doubt that there was a market share available for her product over the internet.
SEOmoz member, Michael Janik wrote to me last week and asked about how to optimize for multiple word order search phrases. I think it's an excellent topic, and one that we haven't covered well in the past. The issue arises from keyword phrases that receive search queries in different formats, for example: Restaurant Reviews Seattle...
My company is very focused on the global marketplace. Thus far this year, we've targeted the Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and British languages in search results. If you're playing "One of these things is not like the other..." you probably feel the urge to inform me that "British" just doesn't belong. On the technical merit of your argument, I woul...
For the last three months I have been hard at work learning SEO by optimizing a local small business website. The business is called Giggly Wiggly Preschool and is located in the Seattle suburb Issaquah, Washington. This Issaquah Preschool was the preschool I attended many years ago so I am happy I was given the chance to give bac...
Rather than trying to make this post go through all the tactics and specifics of Rebecca's already comprehensive KW Research article, I figured I'd instead provide a solid list of every which way you can look at a keyword to get an idea of metrics, value and potential from the engines themselves (rather than services like AdWords, YSM, Wortracker or KW Discovery). This is more of an "exper...
Matt McGee (who I owe a link to for winning the SEO group NCAA tournament bracket back in March...damn you, Florida) wrote a fantastic post over at Small Business SEM called "I Have My Keywords...Now What?" It's concise, it's to the point, it's magical. Read it. Seriously. Click over to it and read it. ...
Last week I chatted with Levi from Wordze about the keyword research tool he built. Levi, who's chummy with SEOmoz's resident black hat blogger G-Man, is a programmer who tinkered around with various keyword research sites and decided to build his own. ...
Introduction When told that writing for the Web is different to writing for print publications, the understandable reaction of many journalists is that it shouldn’t make any difference; we’re writing for people, not machines, they say. But there is a need to write differently for the Web and the reasons for this are quite simple: the ...
Use your server or analytics search logs to find what people are looking for once on your site.The keywords used to search within your site or narrowed with search filters (by price, brand etc.) are a gold mine of fresh terms and phrases that can be used within your content and links to attract those users. Track what your visitors search for on your site, see which filt...
I've spent this week putting the finishing touches on our keyword research guide (which will most likely be available--both to purchase and for Premium Members--on Monday). This afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Tancer from Hitwise. Bill took me on a walkthrough of Hitwise's Competitive Intelligence tools, which he referred to as their "f...