Website getting traffic but still not getting conversions?
If you think your content’s fine, then perhaps you need to take a look at your keyword strategy?
Yes, you sometimes need to go all the way back to make sure you’re drawing in quality leads from the right channels.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most brilliant and engaging pieces of content in the world. If you targeted the wrong keywords, none of your PPC, SEO, or content marketing strategies will consistently produce profitable results.
The good news is, keyword research doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely difficult. With the right tools and tactics, you can definitely discover lucrative keyword opportunities without breaking a sweat.
In this post, we’ll show you the best ways to do keyword research so you can bag winning keyword suggestions every single time.
Let’s get started.
1. Turn Seed Keywords Into Long-Tail Keywords
Regardless of niche, keyword research always starts with a seed keyword that’s too broad and competitive to be feasible.
That’s why you need tools like Ubersuggest to expand your seed keyword into hundreds of long-tail keyword ideas. These are keywords that are at least 3 terms long and target a narrower audience.
To use Ubersuggest, simply enter your seed keyword and click “Look Up.” Don’t forget to adjust the localization of your keyword to generate suggestions that are relevant to your place of business.
Within seconds, Ubersuggest will generate hundreds of long-tail keywords as well as present the metrics that can determine their profitability.
To keep things short, here is a brief explanation of each of the three metrics you’ll encounter in Ubersuggest results:
Search Volume
The first metric measures the average monthly searches. This can be directly used to gauge a keyword’s popularity and demand.
CPC
Short for cost per click, the CPC metric denotes the average amount that advertisers are willing to pay for PPC advertisement actions. A high CPC often signals that a particular keyword can be monetized and converts well.
Competition
Lastly, Ubersuggest measures the competitiveness level of keywords on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. For faster results, it’s recommended that you target keywords with a competitiveness score of around 0.4 or less.
At this point, you should be able to come up with a fresh lineup of long-tail keywords (whether for PPC or SEO) based on the initial results.
But don’t get overexcited — there’s still much work to be done to make sure your keywords lead to conversions.
2. Pluck Out Commercial or Transactional Keywords
A rule of thumb when doing keyword research for SaaS is to find the balance between search volume and competitiveness.
Of course, you don’t want to target keywords with barely any demand at all. You shouldn’t go with the flow and pick up a keyword that everyone else uses, either.
What you want are long-tail keywords that pertain to a user’s desire to take action.
You can do this by injecting commercial or transactional terms into your Ubersuggest keyword suggestions. Just enter terms like “buy,” “price,” “service,” “shop,” or whatever term makes sense for your seed keyword in the “Filter Results” field.
After applying your filters, Ubersuggest will then refine and drastically reduce the number of keyword suggestions. This makes it much easier for you to spot profitable keyword opportunities:
3. Track Trending Keywords on Social Media
If you’re trying to build traffic through social media, then you’ll need a slightly different approach when doing keyword research.
The main issue is that social media networks use internal search engines that don’t use the same keywords as web platforms like Google. As such, you need to use a keyword tracking tool that’s specifically tailored to social media networks.
Keyhole is, without a doubt, an excellent tool for this job. It allows you to find and monitor trending keywords as well as hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram — two of the biggest social media networks in terms of user engagement.
Just like Ubersuggest, you can start using Keyhole by entering a seed keyword. This time, however, you need to specify if you want to track a hashtag, keyword, URL, social media account, or brand mention.
To fine-tune your keyword tracker, click “Advanced” to reveal the filters you can use to refine results. For example, if you want to ignore posts from a direct competitor, click on “Ignore posts” and fill in the rest of the details.
Let’s say you want to track the keywords “WordPress,” “web design,” and “blogging.”
After the initial data is produced, you should be able to see pertinent information, such as the number of posts with your keywords, their collective reach, and even the overall sentiment of users.
Before you save your tracker, don’t forget to specify how you want to receive alerts. This will enable you to be always in tune with social media users when it comes to your target keywords.
Remember that tracking keywords on social media can improve conversions in two ways.
Apart from letting you gauge the demand for a keyword, it will also give you opportunities to initiate and close conversions yourself whenever your brand or product gets mentioned. For this, simply, track your brand name or social media handles via Keyhole.
4. Get Suggestions from the Keyword Cloud
Once your Keyhole tracker is up and running, it’s time to snag yourself some keyword ideas.
From the main dashboard, navigate to “My Trackers” and select the tracker you want to work with.
This will pull up real-time data based on the tracking options you’ve set earlier.
Now, to locate new keyword opportunities, scroll down to the “Related Topics” section to view the hashtag and keyword clouds. Here, you can visually observe the popularity of keywords that are related to your seed keyword:
How can social media keywords boost your conversions?
Good question.
Remember that most if not all online users only transact with brands they trust.
By participating in conversations and offering your expertise to social media users, you slowly build your brand’s authority in your niche. Of course, researching hashtags will also allow you to extend the social reach of your content whenever you share something.
To learn more how to leverage social media networks to win your audience’s trust, you can refer to more guides here.
Conclusion
Keyword research is a fundamental piece of online marketing that marketers love to overlook.
Hopefully, the guide above put keyword research in a new light. It’s not necessarily the most difficult aspect of online marketing, but it can have the biggest impact when it comes to the visibility of overall profitability of your website.
Do you have other suggestions on how marketers should perform keyword research? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!
