Lesson 2: Keyword research - Your SEO Course

Even for small local websites, 50+ or 100+ keywords can quickly become relevant for your site.
For larger websites, such as online shops, there can easily be several thousand keywords. For example, the SEO tool SE Ranking finds more then 3 million keywords in the top 100 for nike.com just in the US.
With keyword research, you decide which keywords are relevant to your site and which are not.
Only if the keywords perfectly align with your services and your customers’ interests can you ultimately achieve the desired success with SEO.

Top tip: First do keyword research, then create content

From an SEO perspective, it definitely makes sense to do keyword research first and then create the website content, rather than the other way around. The reason for this is that the content must match the respective keywords exactly in order to achieve good rankings. You can find out more about creating content based on keyword research in Lesson 4.

2.2 General tips for finding suitable keywords

Selecting the “right” keywords for your website is not always that simple.

2.2.1 General Tips:

In general, it is quite difficult to determine the “right” keyword for your website. However, the following tips can help with keyword selection:

Own services & offerings: A keyword should match your services and offerings as precisely as possible. This is, in my view, one of the most important aspects of keyword selection for product and service pages on your homepage.
Page topic: For blog articles or other informational pages, the goal is to find as many keywords as possible that relate to the content of the specific page and comprehensively cover the topic.
Monthly search volume: The monthly search volume of a keyword also plays a very important role. Here you can use SEO tools (see next point) to determine the monthly search volume. It is usually advisable to select keywords with high search volume and use them as the main keyword for a page.
However, it is worth noting that keywords with low search volume should also be integrated into individual landing pages of your website if they align well with your offerings or the content of the respective landing page.
Target audience: A keyword should fundamentally be interesting for your target audience and commonly used by them.

In general, it is quite difficult to determine the “right” keyword for your website. However, the following tips can help with keyword selection:

Own services & offerings: A keyword should match your services and offerings as precisely as possible. This is, in my view, one of the most important aspects of keyword selection for product and service pages on your homepage.
Do you have accounting software and sell it nationally? Then of course keywords like “accounting software” “accounting software for small businesses” ( If the accounting software is actually for small businesses), “best accounting software” or “accounting software price” interesting. I
Do you have a cooking school in Chicago? Then of course keywords like “Cooking School Chicago” and “Italian Cooking Course Chicago” may be of interest to you, depending on what you offer in detail.
Or as a final example: For a tennis online shop, all keywords that match your own product range are of course interesting and suitable. For example, this could be “women’s tennis shoes”, “women’s tennis shoes sale”, “women’s tennis shoes on clay court”. There are similar combinations for men’s tennis shoes or children’s shoes.
Page topic: For blog articles or other informational pages, the goal is to find as many keywords as possible that relate to the content of the specific page and comprehensively cover the topic.
Monthly search volume: The monthly search volume of a keyword also plays a very important role. Here you can use SEO tools (see next point) to determine the monthly search volume. It is usually advisable to select keywords with high search volume and use them as the main keyword for a page.
However, it is worth noting that keywords with low search volume should also be integrated into individual landing pages of your website if they align well with your offerings or the content of the respective landing page.
Target audience: A keyword should fundamentally be interesting for your target audience and commonly used by them.

View topic 3.2 in Lesson 3

Be sure to take a look at the topic "3.2 Different types of landing pages and suitable keywords". There you will find further helpful information on the topic of keyword selection.

2.3 SEO Tools to get search volume, keyword ideas and more

Keyword research tools are essential for determining the right search terms. Below I will introduce you to some free and paid tools.

2.3.1 Keyword Generator from SE Ranking (Freemium)

(Screenshot seranking.com)

You can use this tool up to 3 times daily for free. With the premium version, much more queries per day are possible.
The Keyword Generator provides you with the following information:

What is the monthly search volume of a keyword?
What similar keywords and keyword suggestions are there?
How strong is the competition for this keyword?
What would the cost per click (CPC/Costs per Click) be on Google Ads?
Which pages rank in the top positions on Google for this keyword? To see this, click the blue “show” button.

Tool Tip:

2.3.3 Google Keyword Planer (Free)

The Google Keyword Planner is available to you for free and without limits through your Google Ads account.
However, you will only get exact values if you have an active campaign running on Google Ads.
Otherwise, you will only receive approximate data (e.g., 100-1,000 instead of 720 search queries per month).

(Screenshots Google Keyword Planer)

Tool Tip:

2.4 SEO tool to identify keywords on an existing website

2.4.1 Google Search Console

While the previous tools presented here are primarily used before starting optimization, the Google Search Console is excellent for keyword research for existing pages.
The tool displays all the keywords for which the complete website ode a specific page has ranked in the top positions over a given period. This allows you to discover keywords you might not have considered before.
Keywords like the one in the picture are often very interesting: They have no or only a few clicks, but an interesting monthly search query (impressions) from users. Of course, you have to check each keyword to see whether it is worth it.

(Screenshots Google Search Console)

Tool Tip:

Top tip: Register your website with Google Search Console

It is highly recommended to register your website with Google Search Console for numerous reasons. You can learn more about this in Lesson 7 of the SEO online course.

2.5 SEO tool for competitor analysis

2.5.1 SE Ranking (Premium)

Analyzing competitors’ websites is extremely interesting to find suitable keywords. However, you usually need a paid tool for this. I use SE Ranking for competitor analysis. The tool shows you which keywords the competitor site ranks for overall and which subpages/landing pages achieve particularly good results.

(Screenshot seranking.com)

Tool Tip:

2.6 Keyword types according to search intent

There are different types of keywords based on the user’s search intent. The most important ones to mention are informational keywords (users primarily seek information) and commercial keywords (users primarily have a purchase intent).
This is important to understand because you can often only rank well for a keyword if you create engaging content that matches the keyword. To do so, you need to know what type of content users want: for example, product information or general information on a topic.

Commercial or informational?

When a person searches for "tennis shoes for women", she typically doesn't want to see a blog article about it, but rather products and related information. So it is a commercial keyword.

2.6.1 Informational Keywords

These are keywords where users primarily seek general information on a topic.

Examples:

Sights in Barcelona
Tips for learning English
Making jam yourself

2.6.2 Commercial Keywords

For commercial keywords, users have a purchase intent or want to book something.

Examples:

buy leather jacket
affordable tablets
spanish classes nyc Munich

2.6.3 Transactional Keywords

For these keywords, users want to perform a transaction. This can include commercial keywords such as “buy wine online” (which is why transactional keywords are sometimes used synonymously with commercial keywords), but it can also involve keywords for free transactions.

Examples:

Order wine online
Download free audiobooks

2.6.4 Navigational Keywords

These are keywords that users use to navigate to a specific page. They often include a company name.

Examples:

bmw.de
amazon login
zalando offers

2.6.5 News Keywords

This type of keyword is often not mentioned in articles on this topic. However, from myperspective, it definitely makes sense to highlight this keyword type separately because with these keywords, you need to regularly create up-to-date content to achieve good rankings. News keywords are a subset of informational keywords.

Examples:

news melbourne
nba results
polls us election

2.6.6 Schema Keywords: Jobs, Events und Recipes

These types of keywords also deserve their own category, in my opinion. Why? Because after entering these keywords, Google typically displays an enhancement at the top of the search results.
To appear in the respective enhancement on the Google search results page, you need to add so-called structured data (also known as schema markup) to your SEO landing page. You can learn more about structured data in Chapter 5.2.

Examples:

jobs los angelos
events houston today
sushi recipe

2.7 Determine the main keyword and secondary keywords of individual pages

At this point, I am giving a small preview of Lesson 3. It is generally useful to categorize the various keywords that match a single SEO landing page into a main keyword (also called focus keyword) and secondary keywords.
Examples of keyword assignments to individual SEO landing pages can be found in Lesson 3.

The following applies to the main keyword of a single landing page:

It has the highest click potential or revenue potential.
It usually also has the highest monthly search volume. However, if the competition for a keyword is too strong, you can choose a keyword with lower monthly search volume as the main keyword.
The main keyword is typically prominently placed in the URL, meta tags, headings, text, etc. More about this in Lesson 5.
The main keyword determines the topic or content of an SEO landing page.

The following applies to the secondary keywords of a single landing page:

They are not as important as the main keyword or have less click potential.
You should still strive to integrate secondary keywords as effectively as possible into headings, meta tags, text, etc.
The content of individual sections of an SEO landing page can be tailored to an important secondary keyword.

2.8 Use Long-tail keywords

Another way to differentiate keywords is by categorizing them into long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords consist of 4 or more words. They are often phrased as questions, such as “What is the cost of a used bicycle?”.

Short-tail keywords, on the other hand, consist of only 1-3 words, such as “tennis racket” or “spanish classes nyc.”

2.8.1 Example of successful use of long-tail keywords

One of my blog articles on my German-language site addresses the question: How often is a term searched on Google? This article ranks almost exclusively for long-tail keywords in question form and, for example, generated nearly 100 clicks during the week of May 2, 2023, to May 8, 2023. Which specific long-tail keywords the article ranks for and generates clicks can be seen in the second photo.

(Screenshots Google Search Console)

2.8.2 Advantages and disadvantages of long-tail keywords

Advantages:

There is less competition.
This often leads to faster and better rankings on average.

Disadvantages:

The search volume is often significantly lower compared to short-tail keywords.

Tip: Be sure to use long-tail keywords

You should definitely use long-tail keywords when optimizing your website for search engines.
They bring traffic and the easier or faster rankings increase motivation.
In addition, questions and the corresponding answers are very popular among users and will probably become increasingly important in the future in the age of AI.

2.9 Creating Keyword Clusters

Especially for medium and large websites, it can be very beneficial to group keywords into clusters. This allows you to:

Systematically cover individual topics on your website.
Present yourself as an expert to search engines and users.
Avoid a significant amount of internal keyword competition (keyword cannibalization).
Internally link thematically related products/articles in an excellent way.

2.9.1 Example keyword cluster for a Cooking School in Chicago

For a cooking school in Chicago, keywords that match their own offerings are of course initially interesting.
For this purpose I have a keyword cluster with ChatGPT.
Prompt:
“Create a keyword cluster for a single cooking school in Chicago. The keyword cluster should be for the individual cooking courses.”

But of course you can also create a keyword cluster for the blog if you create it for your own school.
Prompt:
“Create a keyword cluster for a single cooking school in Chicago. The keyword cluster should be for the cooking school blog.”