Hey there...
My name is Pawel Grabowski. I am a startup SEO consultant specializing in helping early-stage startups develop and deploy successful SEO programs.
Learn more about me or hire me to run SEO for your startup.
by
Pawel Grabowski
This is a complete guide to keyword research for startups.
But, and this is the important bit, it tells you more than just how to research keywords (du-uh!)
It shows you everything you need to:
The process you're about to learn is the exact process I use when researching keywords for my clients - all early-stage startups - to position them in front of the very people looking for products like theirs right now.
So, follow the process, and you will be able to discover how you can introduce your product to the best customers, engage them, and attract them to your site.
CHAPTERS:
Common keyword research mistakes
Best keyword research practices
Startup keyword research template
In this chapter, we're going to cover the foundational information about keyword research.
You'll learn what keyword research is (hint - it's not exactly what you think it is.)
You'll also discover why it is so important to go through the process fully, rather than jumping straight into looking for specific keywords.
We'll talk about the various types of keywords, as well as keyword research metrics.
Let's go.
When we use this term - keyword research - we refer to the process of uncovering how our ideal customers are looking for information online: what words or phrases they use, and what questions they ask.
This information helps us understand and plan what content (articles, landing pages, videos, even ads) we need create to provide the information they seek and answer their questions, and in turn, connect with them along their search journey.
But note something:
I didn't just say, keyword research is looking for keywords, or something equally generic.
No.
That's because, if you look closely at the above definition, you'll see that there is more to keyword research than just that.
In theoretical terms, SEO is about connecting with your target audience in search.
But in practical term, it means, ranking as well as possible for various words, phrases, queries, or questions that your audience uses to find information.
Or to put it bluntly, ranking for keywords.
In other words, keywords are at the core of everything we do in SEO.
Or to put it bluntly, again... there is no SEO strategy without keywords.
And so, to begin the process of ranking your startup well in search, you need to find the best keywords to target.
Unfortunately, and given the importance of keywords in an SEO strategy, the process of researching the best keywords is far from easy.
When we talk about keywords, we usually mean either specific words, phrases, or even complete questions that people use to find information online.
For example, all these are keywords:
But they are not the same types of keywords.
In fact, in SEO, we recognize several different types of keywords, and can classify them by either their intent or format.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Different keywords play a different role in your SEO strategy.
Similarly, different types of keywords attract people at different stages of their buying journey. Because of that, these keywords help you achieve different objectives with your strategy.
Commercial keywords are phrases and queries customers use when considering buying a product but need to find out more about it first.
Some examples of commercial keywords include:
Transactional keywords help customers find a specific product they want or need.
For example:
Informational keywords help customers gain more knowledge on a particular topic. These keywords often relate to your audiences pain points or problems they encounter (and that your startup is helping them overcome.)
Example:
Navigational keywords help users get to a specific website or platform through a search engine. They often take the form of a brand-related keyword.
Example:
The other way to classify keywords is by their format:
Seed terms are generic words and phrases related to your product, niche, or product category.
Generally, we don't target these keywords directly in an SEO strategy. We use them to describe generic topics that our audiences care about, and then, use that knowledge to find actual keywords to target.
For example, seed keywords for this very site would include:
I definitely stand zero chance at ranking for those. But also, it, most likely, wouldn't make much sense for me to rank Stacking Pancakes for phrases like SEO or content. They aren't defined enough to guarantee to attract people like you - startup founders.
However, seed keywords allow me to narrow the list of actual keywords to ones that relate to those seed terms, and thus, always stay on topic.
Short-tail keywords are slightly more defined version of seed keywords. They expand seed keywords with 1-3 additional words and provide extra information and as a result, narrow their focus.
Examples:
These keywords are still generic. Like seed keywords, they target broad topics, too. They might have high search volume, but because of their generic focus, they offer low conversion rates.
In other words, they form great category keywords - Phrases that describe specific topics or topical categories that your website is relevant to.
Again, using Stacking Pancakes as example, I'd use (and I do!) short-tail keywords like "SEO for startups" as my primary category that I target.
Long-tail keywords are, probably, the most commonly used and most commonly targeted keywords in SEO.
That's because they are highly specific, and relate to a very well defined intent and need.
Long-tail keywords are usually long and contain 3+ words.
A bit of trivia - Their name, long-tail doesn't actually refer to the usual length of those keywords but the fact that they are the end of the keyword tail:
Because these keywords are so defined, and target a very specific need for information, they usually have lower search volume BUT a much higher conversion. They also attract more relevant visitors.
Example:
Geotargeted keywords are keywords that contain a location (a country, city, area, etc.) Often, we also consider keywords that contain the term "near me" as geotargeted (even though the actual location isn't specified.)
Example:
Why understanding different keyword types matters so much?
Keyword types (either by intent or format) help you define why someone would use that keyword, and also, where they are in their buying journey. With that knowledge, you can decide what information to include on a page to meet that need, and as a result, rank and connect with those people.
For example, by knowing that a particular keyword you want to target has a transactional intent you'd also know that a tutorial or a how-to guide wouldn't deliver on that need. A commercial sales page, however, would.
There are four key metrics (plus several associated ones) that help you determine whether a keyword is good to target for your startup:
Keyword search volume determines the average number of times a particular keyword is used per month.
There are several things to remember about search volume:
Keyword difficulty is, probably, the most confusing keyword metric of all.
For one, many founders treat it as an absolute truth. But in reality, it's nothing but a rough guide. That's all.
Keyword difficulty defines (or aims to, at least) how hard it would be to rank well for a particular keyword. It takes various data points about top-ranking domains, and tries to establish whether the keyword is do-able or not.
And this is exactly the problem with it - Keyword difficulty considers those data points in generic terms, not in the context of your domain.
For example, SEMrush reports this keyword as semi-difficult. The actual keyword difficulty score is in a region of 9/100.
But that might be true for an established domain.
A quick look at the top ranking domains reveals only highly authoritative sites.
Most likely, your startup, with its new site and low authority, fares differently in comparison. As a result, for you, that keyword might be unachievable for now. Not until you build that authority.
The opposite can be true, too. Your SEO platform might determine a particular keyword as difficult. But your site, with its laser-focus topical authority on that very topic, might be able to crush the competition without having large number of links and so on.
So, as useful as keyword difficulty is, remember to only consider it as a rough guideline, not an absolute truth. And always consider the data in the context of your current situation.
CPC is not an SEO metric. It determines how much money other brands are willing to pay for a click through Google Ads.
But this keyword delivers a highly important metric you can use to evaluate the keyword - It's commercial potential.
The logic here is simple: If brands are willing to bid money on a keyword, then, it's highly likely that it pays off. They get signups and sales from that traffic.
And so, it stands to reason that the keyword is worth investing time and effort to rank.
Trend is another highly useful metric for keyword research.
It reveals how the interest in a particular keyword or topic is changing throughout the year.
Knowing the keyword trend can help you plan and decide when to work on that particular topic.
For example, knowing that the interest in a particular topic peaks around the summer, it'd make sense to start working on the keyword at the start of the year. This way, by the time summer comes, your page might already be ranking well enough to capitalize on that interest.
In this chapter, we're turning all this theory into practice.
You'll learn all the elements of the typical startup keyword research process.
You'll also learn how to understand what information your audience is searching for online, how to find the most profitable keywords for your startup, and even, how to evaluate what keywords your competitors target (and which ones would be a good fit for your startup, too.)
It's all super cool stuff, so let's do it.
Overall, to find the best keywords, you need to follows a simple process:
In practice, it looks like this:
In other words, contrary to what most founders assume, the keyword research process doesn't begin with jumping into SEMrush or Ahrefs and well, researching a bunch of keywords.
As you can see from the list above, that's actually step three.
The process actually starts with learning about what information your audience actually searches for online.
Let's see how to do that.
Important to note - At this stage, you're not interested in what keywords they type into Google.
Before you focus on that, you need to figure out what topics (related to what your startup does, of course) they search for.
And that process starts with figuring out what pain points and problems drive them to searching for information.
For example, let's assume that you've built an cold outreach product. Some immediate topics that come to mind include:
None of these are keywords. These are just topics of interests that relate to your product that you'll use to identify your actual keywords.
But the thing is - The above is, probably, not a complete list. There are many other topics that you could target with specific keywords.
Here are some methods to uncover those:
This is by far one of the coolest methods to identify topics that might be relevant to your product.
Head to Wikipedia, and type in your broad topic. In the case of our cold outreach software example, the broad topic is cold email.
(Note, the reason we're not using "cold outreach" is because, as it happens, Wikipedia doesn't have an article on the topic. But it does have one on cold email.)
Review the article's table of contents to look for potential topics of interest.
For this topic, I can immediately see that two sections - Deliverability and Rules and regulations - contains quite a number of various subtopics that I could research further to find keywords people use to learn more about them.
Another way to use Wikipedia is to follow some of the internal links on the page.
Using our cold email page as an example again, note that its authors linked to other relevant articles. There aren't that many internal links here, I admit, but that's probably a good thing. It cuts down my research time, but still allows me to uncover some potentially interesting topics.
Reddit has been becoming a hugely influential resource online. The site always dubbed itself "the front page of the Internet" but recently, with its rising prominence in the search results, it's influence has only grown.
Which means that your audience, most likely, is very active on Reddit. You can research what they discuss, and uncover much about their pain points and problems that way.
Here's how:
On Reddit, type in your broad topic into the search box. We're going to use "cold email" again.
Reddit will return a list of subreddits relevant to that topic.
Choose one (you can always research the others later, if there is more than one), and go through the most popular thread titles, identifying what information these people discuss.
TIP: Once you're done with researching the broad topic, research any subreddits related to your audience. The chances are that there are dedicated ones to the very people you're trying to attract AND that they go there too to discuss information related to what your product does.
FREE TOOL HIGHLIGHT
Reddit Insights is an amazing (and absolutely free) Reddit keyword research tool that will scrape questions from specific subreddits for you, helping you to build a list of topics your audience discusses the most on Reddit.
Finally, dig into your support queries. For most startups, they are a treasure trove of customer problems, issues, and challenges.
Granted, if your startup has just launched, you might not have that many support inquiries (and that's one reason why I included this at the end of the list). But as your customer base grows, so will the number of questions you get from them.
It’s that simple.
Most likely, the research so far, generated a ton of data and information. If you've done it well, you might have hundreds of data points in front of you.
But naturally, not all of this is useful to your keyword research.
For one, some of these might be duplicates. Sure, the audience used slightly different phrases to describe their problems, but overall, they're looking for the same information.
Other pain points might not be as severe in the context of what your product does.
Using our cold outreach product as an example, you might have discovered the audience discussing email signatures a lot. But the ability to create good-looking signatures is only a small part of your products offering. It's also not the core value proposition that differentiates you from others. Not to mention that it's rarely a deal breaker when it comes to choosing a cold outreach product. It's hard to imagine it being a pain point that would push someone to search for such a product either.
As a result, it's, probably, not the most critical audience problem to tackle right now.
So, as the next step, you need to sift through it, and identify the most relevant topics for keyword research.
Luckily, doing so is relatively simple.
TIP: I like to grade my topics by what I call the "proximity to purchase".
Basically, I look at each pain point and ask: "How likely a person with this pain point would be to sign up for my product right now?"
For example, someone interested in improving email deliverability might be interested in a product that offers features ensuring such better deliverability. So, their proximity to purchase is relatively small.
But someone asking about what information to include in their email signature is most likely in a different place.
TIP 2: Another way to look at pain points or topics is by evaluating how easy (or not) it would be to talk about your product's core value proposition in the context of the topic.
Again, it's probably quite easy with email deliverability but not as much with email signatures (unless beautiful signatures are your core differentiator, of course.)
To conduct keyword research, you will need to use a dedicated keyword research tool. You could, probably, find some keywords without it but the tool will make the process easier, faster, and will deliver all the insights you need to analyze your keywords and build a content plan.
I'm covering a whole bunch of them in a separate guide. But overall, the two most popular are SEMrush and Ahrefs.
I'm using the former, and will show you how to research keywords with it. However, the process is pretty much the same with the other one.
So, here's how to find keywords for your startup.
The tool will deliver several data points:
1/ Overview of the topic, including local and global search volume, generic keyword difficulty, intent (although, keep in mind that these tools often get this wrong), cost per click, the competition, and more.
This is a great starting point, and allows you to get a "feel" for the topic.
But naturally, what we're really interested in are keywords.
2/ Keyword ideas
Note how the tool splits this into two categories - variations and questions.
Clicking on each of the categories will take you to the actual list of keywords the tool has in its database for your broad topic.
Here's the top of the variations list.
The first thing you notice on that list of keywords is that these phrases are a bit all over the place, right?
I mean, some relate to recruitment, others to sales, etc.
That's because by default, the tool shows you Broad keywords, which are basically variations of the broad topic including all words in it in any order.
In other words, it includes every keyword with the words "cold" and "email" in it.
Such list is obviously too long to sift through. Luckily, you can filter it in two ways:
1/ You can change the keyword format from Broad to Phrase (exact keywords or keyword phrase in any order) or Exact (all words in your broad topic in the exact order).
You can also switch to show only keywords (in any of those formats) that use the question format.
But even with changing the format, you usually up with long lists of keywords.
2/ Another way to filter your results is to filter by keyword categories.
This is what's included in the left sidebar beside the keyword list:
Clicking on each category will filter the list to keywords including that topic only. For example, here are the results for the category "template."
These are much more precise and specific, right?
This is how I use this process to build initial keyword lists:
IMPORTANT
Notice one thing about this process. The only keyword evaluation you're doing is checking if the category and specific keywords in it are relevant to your product or the audience's pain point.
You do not choose which keywords you will be targeting yet, or how likely you are to rank for those, etc.
Your goal is to build a list of keywords that I could target. That's all.
I need to make something clear before we move on - Competitive keyword research seems like the easiest way to find profitable keywords for your startup.
And to some degree, it is.
But it shouldn't be the only type of keyword research that you do (which, sadly, is what founders do commonly.)
Properly conducted competitive keyword research helps you understand two things:
So, how do you conduct it properly?
Well, you need to use two methods.
First, research keywords each of your competitors is ranking for already.
To do that, once again, you need to use a keyword research tool.
Most such tools allow you not only to research keywords but also domains.
So, this time, instead of typing your broad topic into the search box, paste your competitors domain.
The tool, in my case, SEMrush, will deliver various metrics about the domain - it's authority, no. of links, estimated traffic, etc.
I need to make something clear before we move on - Competitive keyword research seems like the easiest way to find profitable keywords for your startup.
From then on, you can access the full list of ranking keywords, along with relevant keyword data.
TIP: Most SEO platforms will also list the domain's most popular pages - URLs that the platform has in its keyword database.
The report is another great place to look for keywords. Although, this time, you review the domains top ranking pages, and then, look at what keywords each of those pages ranks for.
Secondly, compare what keywords all your competitors rank for.
The logic behind this method is that if two or three of your competitors "go after" a specific keywords, it probably has at least some value to them.
Here's how to figure that out.
Most major SEO platforms - SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. - offer the ability to compare domains.
SEMrush calls this feature Keyword Gaps.
Ahrefs calls it Competitive Analysis.
I'm sure other platforms have their own way of labelling the feature.
Nonetheless, for all of them, it works the same way. It allows you to compare domains against each other.
You can compare these domains in several different ways.
But here's the best method to uncover their top ranking keywords:
Filter the results to show only the top 10 ranking keywords for each domain.
You will see a list of keywords that all your competitors rank relatively well for.
Review the list, just like you did with other methods we discussed earlier, and add the most relevant phrases to your keyword lists.
It's that simple.
This chapter is all about filtering and analyzing your long list of keywords to find the most profitable ones for your startup.
And that filtering process is important because you’ve been researching different topics, analyzing associated phrases, reviewing the competitors, and building keyword lists.
As exciting as this process might have been, you now have hundreds (if not more) of potential keywords.
Firstly, there’s simply no chance that you could work on them all within a reasonable timeframe.
And secondly, you probably don't need to target them all.
That's where keyword clustering and analysis come in.
Let's start with the important bit - Clustering and analysis are not the same thing.
Keyword clustering is a process of grouping similar keywords based on their search intent.
In this process, you take all keywords on your list (even there are thousands of them there) and group them into groups of similar keywords.
Using cold email as an example again, your keyword list might include hundreds of keywords relating to cold email templates.
But this doesn't mean that you need to target each of those keywords individually.
In fact, many of those keywords would target a similar intent, meaning that you could rank for them with just a single page.
Keyword clustering helps you identify those clusters of keywords, and significantly reduce your target list.
Because of the, potentially, large volume of keywords to evaluate and cluster, you generally don't cluster keywords by hand.
Instead, you need to use a dedicated tool that will research the intent (and top ranking pages) for each keyword, and cluster all keywords on your list accordingly.
TOOL HIGHLIGHT
Keyword Insights is by far THE BEST keyword clustering tool on the market today.
Not only it offers the most advanced clustering algorithm, it's also the most user friendly AND it has been developed by professional SEOs.
I use it regularly, and it's a tool I would not be able to do my work at a level I do it.
Keyword analysis, on the other hand, is a systematic way to identify phrases that are ideal to reach your current SEO goals.
When you analyze keywords, you basically review your clusters to decide which keywords to work on now, and which ones are best left for later.
In other words, analysis helps you prioritize keywords and start building a content plan.
You analyze keywords by looking at various data points, combined with your knowledge of the target market, to decide which topics to target and when.
Search traffic potential (or search volume)
Whatever tool you’ve used to build the keyword list probably provided you with the average search volume data as well so you can review that quickly.
When you do, remember that the search volume doesn’t tell you how many people will visit your site from this keyword. It only suggests the interest level in that phrase or topic each month.
But it's a great data point to get an idea of the audience's interest level.
TIP: Don’t immediately discount keywords with low search volume. Sometimes these keywords might attract fewer visitors but these might also be highly relevant to your product.
Keyword competitiveness
Most keyword research tools include a metric like a keyword difficulty (some call it slightly differently, so you might need to check how your platform refers to it.)
This metric can tell you roughly, how hard it might be for you to target that phrase.
But note, I said roughly.
That’s because these tools evaluate keyword difficulty in general, not in the context of your site. So the actual keyword difficulty might be lower or higher, depending on how authoritative your site already is, how great your content is, and many other factors. That said, KD is a good indicator to review when evaluating keywords.
Commercial potential
You can tell what that potential is by looking at the average CPC bid for the keyword. If companies are willing to pay serious money for every click from that phrase, then it pretty much suggests that they’re also getting something in return from it. It’s that simple.
Topic scope
This isn’t any metric you can find in SEO platforms. It’s something I use when building SEO strategies for clients. And what I do is looking at how many similar or closely related keywords are there (by that I mean potential phrases that target the same user intent.) Looking at this helps me assess the full potential or search interest around the phrase or topic.
Trend and seasonality
You see, the interest in various keywords changes throughout the year. Take any queries relating to Black Friday. Customers would be more likely to search for such information closer to the day. I’m recording this show in January, and I doubt that the event is on anybody’s mind right now. In fact, I just checked it on Google Trends, and the interest in Amazon BF deals is practically at a zero level now. Although I can see that it will start picking up around September, with the peak right before and during the event.
Gut feeling
This is probably a bit controversial thing to say in SEO. We should all make data-driven decisions, after all. But the truth is that all this data is meaningless unless you run it through your product, business, and market experience. Keyword data is amazing but you need to match it with factors like your audience’s preferences. If you know that a particular product feature (or customer pain point) attracts the most signups or conversions, then, naturally you should be focusing first on keywords that relate to it. And that’s even if their metrics are not as good as what you see in other topics.
Hey there...
My name is Pawel Grabowski. I am a startup SEO consultant specializing in helping early-stage startups develop and deploy successful SEO programs.
Learn more about me or hire me to run SEO for your startup.