The Ultimate Keyword Research Cheat Sheet

Find the Most Profitable Keywords for your Business (in 6 Simple Steps + 2 Bonus Steps) :

1. Understanding the Search Intent Funnel

The first step to profitable keyword research is understanding the search intent funnel.

Not all keywords are the same. Some have high purchase intent, and some do not. But only focussing on these keywords would be an expensive mistake.

A basic search intent funnel has three stages:

Informational - Users want to learn more about their problems and solutions to these problems.
Discovery - Users want to research your and your competitors’ products
Transactional - Users are ready to buy

You can read more about the search intent funnel here.

The important thing to understand is that keywords from all three stages are crucial.

Optimizing only for transactional intent will narrow down your target audience and reduce the trustworthiness of your brand.

When people discover your brand/products through informational intent, they trust you more. And you get to target a wider audience and build a brand that helps you improve Customer Life Time Value (CTLV.)

Optimizing only for informational/discovery keywords is another huge mistake, as you won’t be able to convert as many people without optimizing for transactional keywords.

2. Find a List of Keywords Across the Funnel

Now that you understand that you need to research and optimize for keywords for all three stages of the search intent funnel, we can actually start finding keywords.

Start with BOF (Transactional) Keywords

Transactional keywords are the easiest to start with while doing keyword research.

To start with, try answering this question—What kind of keywords would anyone be looking for, if they were interested in your products or services?

Start with seed keywords (broad) that are as closely related to your business as possible. Try to keep them as broad as possible, we’ll go specific later on.

For instance, for an eCommerce website selling cold plunge tubs, the buyer may be searching for transactional keywords such as “buy cold plunge pool online” or “affordable cold plunge tub”.

Start making a list of these keywords. Just gather keywords, don’t shortlist them for now.

TOF (Informational and Discovery) Keywords

What kind of queries will your target audience be looking for to eventually arrive at the transactional keywords that you listed in the previous step?

Or, what are the informational queries you want to talk about around your products/services that will eventually attract your target customers?

Let’s take the same example of cold plunge tubs. TOF queries that users are looking for could be “What is a cold plunge?”, “Do cold plunges have health benefits?” “ABC cold plunge tub vs. XYZ cold plunge tub”.

Competitor Analysis

Next, Google all your transactional keywords to find the top businesses you’ll be competing with. With this, you’ll find a list of competitors.

Now, use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Ubersuggest to analyze the kind of keywords your competitors are ranking for. Export these lists of keywords.

!https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a4cde1b5-02ab-4f08-b06b-e555050f0eef/image5.png

Gather all the Keywords

Gather all the keywords that you generated in the previous steps, and you should have a list of at least 200 to 300 keywords.

3. Group the Keywords Into Clusters

Once you have gathered all the keywords, the next step is to thematically group them into clusters.

Optimizing your blog posts, content, or web pages for one keyword is the biggest keyword research blunder that many businesses make. If you do this, your content will lack depth, and ranking high will be difficult. Creating keyword clusters is the best way to tackle this.

You don’t have to do this manually. You can use a tool called Keyword Insights for this.

Upload your list, and the tool will group your keywords into topical/SERP-based clusters.

4. Identify Primary Keywords

The next step is to identify one primary keyword from each of these keyword groups. The reason for identifying primary keywords is to prioritize one main keyword for on-page optimization.

To identify primary keywords, you need to factor in competition.

Competition can be assessed quantitatively and qualitatively:

1. Quantitatively:

For this, do an “allintitle” search in Google for the keyword and look for the number of keywords. For example, an allintitle search for the keyword “cold plunge health benefits” yielded only 3 results. Give this a score of 3.

!https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/ea42a2dd-be7a-4e4e-b392-af12ec99a6a9/image2.png

2. Qualitatively:

For this, you can use the Keyword Difficulty (KD) metric in the keyword research tools as a measure. For instance, Ahrefs shows a KD of 37 and a search volume of 450 for the same keyword “cold plunge health benefits”. Give this a score of 37.

!https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/8acc3de2-2cd6-42bb-af4d-335a508f24f1/image4.png

Repeat the qualitative and quantitative analysis for all the keywords in the keyword cluster. Add all this data to a Google Sheet to make things easier. You can add the scores from the qualitative and quantitative analysis to find the keywords that are easiest to rank for.

Your primary keyword should be the easiest to rank for but should also have enough search volume.

A quick note - It doesn’t matter if the primary keywords are longer or shorter than the other keywords.

5. Map to Existing or New URLs

Now you will have a bunch of keyword clusters that are best suited for your business. Based on the analysis done in the previous steps, you also know that these keywords are the easiest to rank for and will also bring in conversions when you rank for them.

Next, you can start mapping these keyword groups to different URLs.

You can either map the keyword cluster to an existing URL (when you have a blog post or web page that has already been optimized for the same/similar primary keyword.

Or, you can also publish a new content piece or web page for the keyword cluster.

6. Find FAQ Keywords

The final step is to identify related questions to add them as FAQs at the end of the page.

To do this, you can use a tool called AlsoAsked, which gets your data from the “People also ask” section from Google Search.

Doing this will help you add depth to your content and will also help you rank for the “People Also Asked” section and Featured Snippets.

!https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/b763adba-2d7e-495f-865b-b5d4da01c935/image6.png

7. Bonus 1: Understand the Semantic Relationship Between Keywords

Semantic SEO is the process of building more meaning and topical depth into web content. By doing so, you help Google crawlers better understand your content. You also help them see it as high-quality and thus promote it more often in the SERPs.

Google primarily understands the semantic relationship between keywords using the Google Cloud Natural Language API, and Bard has access to this API.

So, you can use Bard to find keywords that have a semantic relationship to your primary keyword.

Use the following prompt in Bard:

Provide a list of entities related to common <keyword> searches by using the Google Cloud Natural Language API. This is to understand the semantic relationship of keywords related to the primary keyword <keyword>. Share the results in a tabular format.

Now, you have a list of keywords that you can optimize your content for even further.

!https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/83efe4cf-85d3-4a0b-84c1-8b15a51b3a0d/image3.png

8. Bonus 2: Check GSC Every 3 Months and Optimize

Google Search Console is one of the best keyword research tools out there.

After 3 months, check the Google Search Console data for your website.
Find keywords that you are ranking for but have not optimized your content for.
Next, optimize your content for these keywords. Since you are already ranking for these keywords, the chances of you ranking well for them are high.
You can also choose to publish new pieces of content for these keywords.
Repeat this process every three months.

And, that was a simple 6-step cheat sheet on “Profitable Keyword Research”.

3 comments