Informational keyword research is a subject that has been covered thousands of times across every SEO blog, publication, and web design company.
However, with voice becoming a more prominent way of searching, it’s important that it’s now taken into consideration. With voice usage growing, marketers need to understand how their audience is using this technology,[1] and how they can adapt to this. Keyword research has been advancing dramatically over the last couple of years. No longer are the days of simply sorting by the highest search volume and creating a page; it comes down to much more than that. Semantics, categorisation, ranking difficulty vs reward, questions, featured snippets, people also ask. The list goes on.
A straightforward task has now become much more complex as well as time-consuming, and it’s important that it’s right the first time as keyword research will tend to influence your strategy, projections and, in some cases, KPIs.
We’ll be using a variety of paid and free tools within this guide. However, even without the paid tools it will give you a large dataset but will require a little more manual work.
Keyword Set
We’re going to be basing this on you already having a website that is established in some form or another, meaning you already have some rankings which can be used as an initial starting point. However, if this isn’t the case you’ll be able to simply skip these steps, although in some cases it could cause you to miss out on some smaller keywords.
Search Console
Underrated a lot of the time and critiqued heavily, however it’s a free tool that does give you lots of data, especially with recent updates; you’re able to obtain 16