Competitive Analysis,Keyword Research,SEO

How To Use Keyword Intelligence to LEVEL UP Your SEO Strategy

In this article, you’re going to learn exactly how to use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to beat your competitors in the game of SEO.

What is an SEO strategy?

For starters, SEO (or search engine optimization) is the method used to optimize your website so it can achieve a higher ranking on search engines’ organic results.

SEO is made up of multiple different elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important.

In other words, an SEO strategy can be considered as a complete blueprint since the whole process consists of multiple SEO elements that you wish to implement to get organic traffic.

elements of seo strategy keyword intelligence

Why do you need an SEO strategy?

While paid advertising and social media can generate traffic to the website, the majority of online traffic is actually driven by search engines.

For example, if you’re craving pizza, where do you search for more information on the nearest pizza joint? Google it!

In fact, 70-80% of search engine users are only focusing on the organic results. This means that people don’t want to click on the paid ads at the top of the search results, they want the organic results that come below the ads.

Here’s what a great SEO strategy does for you:

Generates a continuous stream of organic traffic to your website
Helps to build trust and credibility for your audience
Good SEO means a better user experience
Impacts buying cycle, which in turn increases conversion rate

About Keyword Intelligence

In case you didn’t know, BiQ is a complete SEO suite that lets you control the price.

Yes, you’ve heard it right! BiQ is a suite of advanced SEO tools that does your keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition, runs an SEO audit of your blog, looks for new keyword opportunities and lots more.

What makes BiQ stand out from other SEO suites is our unique pricing model that seems to hugely benefit small-to-medium-sized businesses as well as freelancers and entrepreneurs—you only pay for the features you actually use.

This revolutionary SEO suite revolves around six modules but we will not discuss them because we’ve already covered them in our previous article. You can read the full article here.

In this article, we are going to take a look at one of the modules, Keyword Intelligence and how it can help you to develop an effective SEO strategy.

Using the Keyword Intelligence module will give you access to four sections:

Related Keywords
Content Ideas
Popular Questions
Trending Search

So, let’s take a look at how Keyword Intelligence can help to build a good foundation for your SEO strategy.

1. Keyword Research

You should most likely have this drilled into your heads by now: the first step of developing a successful SEO strategy for your website is keyword research.

A good keyword helps to get your targeted audience for your website through the search engine.

But what makes a good keyword “good”? Here are some criteria that make a good keyword:

Search intent: Search intent is the reason behind a search query. Simply put, we want to make sure the intent of the user matches the intent of the web page or piece of content we want them to find in search results.
Search volume: There’s no point in choosing keywords that no one is searching for on Google. The higher the search volume, the more organic traffic the keyword can generate for your website.
Competition: Competition refers to how competitive the first page of search results is for a given keyword. You should plan and target keywords with reasonable competition if you wish to get ranked on Google.

Now that you understand what makes a good keyword, it’s time to see how our Keyword Intelligence can help you in this – step-by-step.

1. Start with a list of seed keywords

The first step of every keyword research is to come up with a seed keyword (or main keyword).

Coming up with seed keywords is as easy as describing a product or service with your own words or think how other people might search for it.

Let’s say that you’re running an auto repair workshop. The seed keywords that appear in your mind are probably these:

Auto repair services
Mechanics
Car maintenance

2. Generate keyword ideas

Once you’re done, head over to BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence and insert one of your seed keywords into the query.

For example, since one of BiQ’s target audience is bloggers, let’s use “blogging” as my seed keyword.

Tip #1: You can choose which specific location and language you want to target for your seed keyword. This is a great way for optimizing keywords for local SEO. For example, you can choose a location such as Los Angeles if you are running a local business and want to target the audience there.

BiQ keyword intelligence keyword strategy generate keyword ideas

You will be given a list of keywords semantically related to your seed keyword in a matter of seconds.

If you don’t know the importance of semantically related keywords in your keyword research, Google is trying to understand our language at a higher level to give users more accurate search results.

From the SEO side, by including more semantically related keywords, Google will be able to understand the topics that your content is trying to cover and how your information answers the questions being searched for online.

Well, back to our main point. Here’s the list of keywords generated based on our seed keyword “blogging”.

BiQ keyword intelligence keyword strategy list of keywords

If you want to go through hundreds or thousands of keywords from the list, it will take hours and even days to complete.

Fortunately, we’ve experienced this problem in some keyword research tools before. So, we’ve included some great filtering options to save you time in keyword research:

Trend
Search volume
CPC (cost per click)
Competition
Intent
Value
Include/Exclude terms
Relatedness
Long-tail/Short-tail option

3. Select and group your list of keywords

Once you got your list of keywords, it’s time to select the best ones using the metrics given as highlighted in the screenshot above.

Tip #2: For beginners, it’s always a good idea to choose high search volume keywords with little competition to avoid competing with other big dogs on Google.
Alternatively, you can select keywords with high value. Higher valued keywords give you more traffic at a lower competition.

BiQ keyword intelligence seo strategy export as pdf csv add to collections

You’ve selected your keywords and now you have the options of either exporting as a CSV/PDF file or Add to Collections.

Of course, you can always export it and group the keywords manually in a spreadsheet. But there’s a much easier way to group your keywords.

Using Add to Collections, there are two ways that the team here at BiQ: topic and intent.

Grouping keywords by topic is pretty much self-explanatory. Take a look at the screenshot below on how we usually do it at BiQ.

BiQ keyword intelligence seo strategy add to collections

In the past, grouping keywords by intent is a complex process because you need to analyze each keyword to identify what is the user’s intent behind it.

But, that’s in the past. SEO has come a long way since then.

With the Keyword Intelligence module, you can see the intent of each semantically related keyword that is generated from your seed keyword. Take a look at the highlighted column in the screenshot below.

BiQ keyword intelligence seo strategy search intent

Once you’ve categorized the keywords based on topic and intent, you can start planning on which keywords you want to prioritize for your next content creation process.

Tip #3: A lot of SEO experts tend to include a few long-tail keywords into their content.
Using long-tail keywords will instantly filter out the right kind of audience you are targeting, thus resulting in a higher conversion rate and lower bounce rate.
You can find these keywords using the Advanced Filter option.

2. Competitor Analysis

SEO and content go hand in hand.

If your website doesn’t have any content, there’s nothing there for Google to rank.

Since you’ve done with your keyword research, you must be thinking it’s time to write some content and start publishing.

Woah, slow down there!

If you want to create a good SEO strategy, you need to know what your competitors are doing and the keywords that they used for their content.

After all – “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.

According to Campaign Creators, performing an SEO competitor analysis lets you build:

An understanding of how your existing and potential customers rate the competition.
A mechanism to develop effective competitive strategies in your target market.
An idea of what gives your company an advantage over its competitors.
A good idea of what your customers are in need of.
Strategies for how to expand into a new market.

For this process, all you need is BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence.

1. Identify competitors’ winning keywords

To find out your competitors’ winning keywords, you need to use the Content Idea section.

This section will help you to analyze and gives you a list of keywords straight from the top 10 SERP results.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis winning keywords

The Content Idea section will give you a much better understanding of the type of content that your top competitors are doing.

For example, looking at the screenshot above, I know that my competitors are creating content about “how to start a blog” or “how to build a WordPress site for blogging”.

Tip #4: If you want to take a look at your competitors’ content and analyze to find out why they are at the top on SERP, copy the keywords and do a simple search on Google.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis wordpress blog

2. Spy on competitors’ featured snippets

Another thing you should pay attention to while analyzing your competitors is the featured snippets that they are ranked on.

You’ve definitely seen this block many times before at the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

It is a snippet chosen to be featured by Google when it thinks the page and content are most relevant and helpful to the users’ search query.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis featured snippet

To find out which featured snippets your competitors own, check out the Popular Questions section.

This section will not only give you hundreds of questions that users are searching online and the answers provided by your competitors.

For each answer, there will be a link at the bottom for you to click and find out how your competitors are answering the question.

BiQ keyword intelligence competitor analysis competitor link popular questions

Depending on the topic that you want to create, you can use the Advanced Filter option to include or exclude terms that aren’t relevant to your content.

Once you found out which snippets your competitors are ranking for, you can begin to optimize your own pages for those same terms.

3. Content Strategy

“Content is king”.

You must have seen this quote over and over again on many sites and it’s not wrong. Content marketing is still the heart of a good SEO strategy.

What else can you do to create an effective content strategy? Well, let’s find out more!

1. Question research

So, you’ve implemented keyword research as part of your SEO strategy. But have you considered doing niche question research?

Here are some powerful reasons why you should start doing it now:

Answering questions in your content may improve your search visibility
It lowers the bounce rate, which in turn results in a higher conversion rate
You’ll be able to find out what are the daily problems your audience is facing in the industry
Question research gives you more content ideas

In the process of finding out which type of answer(s) is ideal for your content, you need to find out what are the most popular questions being asked by people in your industry.

Well, there are a few ways that you can find these questions:

“People Also Ask” section
Google AutoSuggest
Social media

The only problem with these methods is that you need to enter each keyword into the search bar which makes it really time-consuming.

Fortunately, there’s a faster way in doing so – with the Popular Questions section.

This section will use a separate algorithm to not only generate a list of popular questions but also acts as a guide for your content structure.

Let’s take a look at our example again. Once you got your list of questions, you can always have the option to export as a PDF/CSV file or Add to Collections.

BiQ keyword intelligence content strategy popular questions

From the screenshot above, there are lots of questions we can use to create an outline for our content.

You can always create short content to answer one major question. But, a long, comprehensive content can help to answer up to three major questions, giving you a better chance to rank on Google’s featured snippet.

BiQ keyword intelligence content strategy what do you mean by blogging

To keep this simple, let’s say we want to create content based on one question “What do you mean by blogging?”

Think about it in your customer’s shoes. If someone wants to know what is blogging about, what informational keywords that you want to use in your content?

Based on the keyword research that we’ve done above, this will involve terms such as:

Blogging
Blogging for beginners
What is the point of blogging?
Blogging examples
….and more.

When it comes to question research, you need to have an idea of the users’ knowledge prior to looking at the content, what answers they want, and what they should do after consuming the content.

Ultimately, this forms the basis of question research using the Keyword Intelligence module.

4. BONUS: Update and revise your old content

Since you’ve read till here so far, here’s a little ‘thank you’ gift from us at BiQ. Do you know that you can use Keyword Intelligence for the post-SEO strategy?

Now, if you’ve been doing content marketing for some time now, you’re bound to have some old content lurking in the depths of your blog.

Here are some reasons that you should start updating your old content:

Google loves them: Google likes fresh content as it is more relevant to users. Take a look at the example below when I used “gaming headset” as the search term.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content date

Giving it new life: By updating your old content, you can extend the life of your best blog content as well as increase the results it continues to achieve over time. For example, Geoff Kenyon updated his Technical Site Audit Checklist post on Moz. You can see the before and after results below:

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content trend

Easier and faster: It’s often much easier and quicker to update and republish an old post than it is to write a new post from scratch.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content repurpose content

Sure, you can use the list of keywords that you’ve researched beforehand. But there’s a better way of doing so – fresh keyword targeting.

In other words, you need to look for newer and trending keywords with the “Trending Searches” section.

Trending keywords tend to have lesser competition and you can capitalize on them to rank higher on the SERP.

The “Trending Searches” section will extract keywords from the Google Autocomplete search feature. If you didn’t know about Google Autocomplete, it’s an algorithm that shows a list of search predictions based on factors like popularity and freshness.

For instance, take a look at the screenshot of the “Trending Searches” feature.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content trending search

For instance, previously, we’ve created an article with the title “Blogging Tips for Beginners 2019”. As you can see, the title is already outdated and it doesn’t generate traffic as it used to.

So, what we need to do is pick out some of the trending keywords and update the article.

From the screenshot below, here are some keywords that we can capitalize on since our competitors haven’t realized them yet.

BiQ keyword intelligence update old content trending keywords

One thing that stands out from the list above is that people are searching for blogging ideas online.

To update my article, we can now include blogging ideas into our content outline for our audience.

Conclusion

There you have it – All the things you can do to develop an effective SEO strategy with BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence. We tried to keep it brief but there’s just so much you can do with one module.

If you’re interested to find out more about the Keyword Intelligence or BiQ in general, you can click the link here to sign-up for our beta access.

About Kelvin

Copywriter. Digital Marketer. Tech Enthusiast. Hi, my name is Kelvin. By day, you can find me creating content, analyzing post performance or just scribbling around for the next content idea. By night, I will be busy updating myself with the latest digital news.

Keyword Research,Rank Tracking,SEO,SEO Tools

The Best Free SEO Tool You Should Be Using – BiQ SEO Suite

What can you do with BiQ? Learn all about the features you can use with this free SEO tool.

If you want to make money through online business and content marketing, you need traffic.

To do so, you’ve checked out all the online SEO tools out there.

But there’s just one problem – they’re TOO EXPENSIVE!

Sure, there are some free SEO tools online too, but some of the features are limited and you’re not sure whether you’re ready to invest in them or not.

Whether you need to find the best keywords for SEO, audit your website, do competitive research, or just want to see how well you rank on Google, BiQ SEO Suite is the ULTIMATE tool that you need. And it’s free!

So, what can you do with a free account with BiQ?

With a free account, you can access to 4 key features of BiQ:

Keyword Intelligence
Content Intelligence
Rank Intelligence
Rank Tracking

1. Doing Keyword Research with Keyword Intelligence

Most free keyword tools for SEO will only show you the data and metrics for specific keywords. If you’re a content creator, you will need more than that to make sure you deliver valuable content that users actually want and need.

With our Keyword Intelligence tool, you can now access to 4 reports to help you understand what people are searching for with the specific keyword:

Related keywords
Content Ideas
Popular Questions
Trending Searches

Choosing The Right Keywords Is No Longer Rocket Science With Related Keywords

If you’re a marketer like me, you will understand the challenges of selecting the right keywords.

The first keyword that pops up in your head is the accurate descriptions of your company’s products and services – but they also described what your competitors are offering as well. The competition for these keywords is high and you will be wasting a lot of time and effort optimizing them with little to no results.

Instead, you need to identify longer, more specific keywords (called “long-tail keywords”) with clearer intent. If you’re new to SEO, this may sound impossible, but that’s what you can do with our ‘Related Keywords’.

To give you a clearer picture, for example, my company sells home electrical appliances and I want to rank one of my products, washing machines, to get more website traffic.

Here are the steps that I can do to do my keyword research using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence”:

After signing in to my BiQ account, click the Keyword Intelligence tab.
Then, enter the target keyword you want to rank for in the keyword field.
You can also choose the location and language if you want to target the keyword to a specific audience.

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence related keywords

Once BiQ finishes analyzing your keyword, you will get the results with all the related keywords as shown in the screenshot below. You can see the trend, monthly volume, number of search results, cost per click (CPC) and competition of each related keyword.

If I’d like to focus on certain keywords, you can find options to filter your keyword suggestions based on relatedness, long tail, intent, and the advanced include and/or exclude filter.

Writer’s Block? Try Content Ideas!

In this new decade, your content will be all about your audience. Because, when you write to the right people in the right way, your writing and content will rank higher on Google.

But you are experiencing a writer’s block. You don’t know what will be a good topic for your users. “Content Ideas” will help you to brainstorm those ideas by giving you a list of topics your users are interested in based on the targeted keywords.

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence content ideas

From the screenshot, the report will list out keywords that users also searched for such as ‘energy efficient’, ‘water level’, ‘water efficiency’ etc. This gives me an idea to create articles such as ‘Top 10 Energy Efficient Washing Machines to Buy in 2020: According to Experts’.

And people will start clicking on your article and check out the washing machines that are listed there.

Know Your Customers Better with Popular Questions

Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably seen countless featured snippets from Google when searching for information or answers to your questions.

We often refer to the position that featured snippets give to content as “position zero”.

This is because featured snippets take up the most space on a search results page. They’re usually at the very top of the page, too.

Here’s an example of what a snippet looks like when I searched for “best washing machine”:

Ranking for a featured snippet is really helpful for driving visitors to your site than competing with others to rank for #1.

And you don’t have to be the number one in your industry or fork out additional money to rank for them.

That’s why you need to take advantage of the ‘Popular Questions’ report to help you to rank easily in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence popular questions

Many of the questions generated in the report are valuable search queries that are asked by users relating to your target keyword. Provide the definitive answer to some of these questions in your content and…

VOILA!

Your content will drive a huge amount of traffic with Featured Snippet opportunities.

And that’s not all. You can simply click the hyperlinked answer title and look at what your competitors are doing to make better content for your visitors.

Pretty neat, right?

Keeping up with Trending Search Report

Every day, Google receives BILLION of searches and pumps out even more answers. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a clear view of these search patterns and learn the population’s most nagging questions and topics?

With the ‘Trending Search’ report, you can. The report uses AI-powered suggestions that are constantly being updated to help you uncover the latest trends related to your targeted keyword.

best free seo tool BiQ keyword intelligence trending searches

2. Fix Your Content Marketing with Content Intelligence

More than 20 years ago, Bill Gates made a bold statement “Content is King”, signaling an era in which successful digital marketing strategies would need to revolve around content as its core.

As a result? Marketers have begun pushing out massive amounts of content – creating blogs, e-books, videos, social media posts, and website content.

And if you’re like many other marketers, you will notice that getting the same results you did even two or three years ago is challenging.

It shouldn’t be surprising!

We are flooding the internet with massive amounts of content, and your audience is getting distracted by thousands of content out there.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that content marketing as a strategy is dead. You need to change your content marketing plan to focus more on your audience instead.

When people ‘content is king’, it’s only true IF your content is relevant to your target audience. This is where BiQ’s ‘Content Intelligence’ tool comes to play.

Our ‘Content Intelligence’ tool helps to rank every paragraph in your content and assigns a rating based on relevance, readability, and sentiment.

Here are the few simple steps to start getting results with BiQ’s Content Intelligence Tool:

Select the Content Intelligence icon from the sidebar menu
Enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze in the URL field
Enter the primary target keyword of the page you are analyzing in the keyword field
Submit your query and give your report a few seconds to generate.

Report Overview

The screenshot below shows you what the report will look like once it is generated.

On the left panel, the Content Intelligence tool will analyze each paragraph of your content to make sure your content remains relevant, using the right sentiment and readable by your target audience.

You can also check the overall readability and sentiment of your content on the upper-right panel of the report.

Word Vector SEO

If you’re not up-to-date with Google’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) research, Word Vector or Word2Vec is an AI model to learn about the relationship between words, based on actual language usage.

Word Vector SEO helps to analyze your content and improve your content relevance against your top competitors.

It will analyze the performance of your current content and point out all the “gaps” that you need to improve on.

best free seo tool BiQ content intelligence word vector SEO

Keyword SEO

The keyword SEO overview will help to optimize your content based on your target keyword. This part is important to make sure that you will utilize every SEO technique to satisfy both user search intent and search engines.

Fundamental SEO

The Fundamental SEO overview gives general on-page SEO suggestions that are easy to implement to boost your SERP rankings.

Start Optimizing Your Content with BiQ

Do you know that you can actually use the Content Intelligence tool to check your top competitors too?

Yes, you’ve heard it right!

After you’ve got the report from analyzing your content, you can do the same thing with other top competitors too.

Just type in the targeted keyword on Google search and copy the URL of the first few results. Enter the URL in the search box, with the same target keyword and submit to generate the report.

Now, you can analyze your competitors and find out why they are ranked higher on Google. Find out what’s missing in your content and optimize it to rank up as high as they do.

best free seo tool BiQ content intelligence competitor analysis

And that is the SECRET of optimizing your content using BiQ’s Content Intelligence Tool!

3. Track Your Keyword Ranking using Rank Intelligence

We understand.

You’ve spent hours researching for the right keywords and publishing content onto your website and blog. Now, you need the right keyword tracker to analyze all ranking data of your entire keyword portfolio.

With ‘Rank Intelligence’, you can find out exactly which keywords you rank for, including keywords you didn’t know you’re ranked for.

Find keywords that your site already rank for

To get an overall picture of how many keywords your site is currently ranking for, just follow these steps:

Select the Rank Intelligence icon from the sidebar menu
Enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze at the ‘Create New Rank Intelligence Profile’ tab.
Submit your query and give your report a few seconds to generate.

Our tool will generate a report that tells you exactly what keywords you’re ranking for and for which exact pages. You will be surprised to find certain keywords are ranked for other variations that you’re not aware of.

For example, you are aiming to rank for “best food blender in the United States”, but you may never know that you are already ranking for the keyword “best energy-efficient food blender”.

Sometimes, you may notice that your ranking position for certain keywords will change on the next day. So, you should use the app to monitor your keyword ranking movement. Just choose which keywords you want to monitor, and click “Track” so you’ll be notified if there are any changes in the ranking movement.

best free seo tool BiQ rank intelligence track keyword

Discover underperformed keywords and improve them

At BiQ, we believe that great content deserves great ranking.

You’ve spent so much time on that great article and you find out that the keywords are not ranked as high as others.

With “Rank Intelligence”, you can now find out which keywords aren’t doing so well.

For example, if I want to check and improve which keywords are ranked at position 5 to 20 on Google. I just turned on the ‘Advanced Filter’ and enter min 5 and max 20 in the SERP Position field.

best free seo tool BiQ rank intelligence filter serp position

From there, I can see which pages you need to allocate to focus my resources and time to improve on.

best free seo tool BiQ rank intelligence underperformed keywords

4. Monitor Your Site Progress with Rank tracking

If you’re running a website that relies on revenue from search engine traffic, then being able to track the performance of keywords and pages is important.

‘Rank tracking’ gives you a lot of benefits beyond just helping you to monitor your site‘s performance in search engines. It helps you to identify which SEO techniques work (and which don’t), monitor the performance of your competitors, and more.

To monitor your site progress, just follow these steps:

Select the Rank Tracking icon from the sidebar menu
Enter the URL of the page you wish to analyze at the ‘Create New Rank Tracking Profile’ tab.
Submit your query and give your report a few seconds to generate.

Monitor Site’s Performance

One way to check the performance of your site is to check the overall progress of the keywords you are tracking across all pages.

Using the ‘Pages’ tab, you can see all the pages from your site together with its number of keywords tracked.

To check the overall performance of keywords in a specific page, the app will show you a summary of any keywords gained, keyword loss, and its average position.

best free seo tool BiQ rank tracking monitor site's performance

Assess Your Website’s Volatility

Remember that Google sneakily rolled out the BERT algorithm back in 2019?

The results? Well, a lot of marketers and businesses were not happy because they noticed a drop in both their ranking and website traffic.

Google loves to update their algorithm because they want to deliver more relevant results to its users. And no one will know when Google updates or changes its algorithm again?

By creating your own “Rank Tracking” profile, you will get an overview of your website performance over the period of change. Select from either average position, featured snippet position, or ranking with extra features. And you will see the overview over the last few days, weeks, and months.

best free seo tool BiQ rank tracking access your website's volatility

If you see high volatility on a specific day and notice that your ranking and traffic drop, it could be a sign that Google is changing its algorithm and your site has been affected.

With these insights in your hand, you can start preparing a plan to minimize the traffic drop.

Check Your Competitor’s Progress

Just like our other features, you can make use of “Rank Tracking” to monitor your competitors’ progress and see what they are doing that causes their rankings to increase.

All you need to do is create a Rank Tracking profile like your website and you can start checking their progress over time.

If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to identify the keywords that they are targeting and start putting some effort to compete with them on those keywords.

Is This The Best Free SEO Tool For You?

If you want your website to be successful, using the right SEO tools is a must. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune to do so.

At BiQ, we believe in our statement that users should “Pay for what you use, and don’t pay for what you don’t use”. In other words, if you want to use BiQ for keyword research purposes, then you will be charged on the Keyword Intelligence part.

We believe that everyone deserves an opportunity to fight with SEO giants out there.

Now BiQ is open for beta users. Sign up and be the first to try BiQ to see for yourself why we are the best free SEO tool out there!

About Kelvin

Keyword Research,SEO Tools

The Best Of BiQ SEO Suite When Doing Keyword Research

Pretty sure one of the reasons you’re here is because you are seeking an answer to this question: “Why Can’t My Site Be Found On Google?”

I hope this post can help you be clearer in this aspect.

You see, SEO comprises many methods but the underlying principle is that you’re helping Google and other search engines like Google better understand your website. One of the foundational SEO methods is keyword research. I would even say that conducting keyword research is the foundation of all marketing funnels which brings huge impact.

In fact, not doing your due diligence when it comes to keyword research can be the difference between ranking on the first page of Google and disappearing to page 20 and beyond!

Basics of Keyword Research

I know our minds have been ingrained with keywords from the start but have you ever stopped and give this a thought: “what is a keyword?”

According to the dictionary, the definition of a keyword in marketing is a word or phrase used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document.

Search engines (Google) is the information retrieval system
The document is your website/content

In real life, it means entering your targeted “keywords” in Google that is used to retrieve information from the website listed in Google’s database.

Now, “what is keyword research?” Keyword research is used to identify and target SEO keywords that you should be focusing on when writing your content. It’s knowing what you should explicitly tell your prospects – knowing the actual words and language that turn strangers into leads and leads into customers.

Creating relevant pages and optimizing them for the ways people search (keywords), can lead to improved rankings in the search results for those keywords, increasing search visibility and web visitors.

It may seem hard for starters but luckily there are plenty of ways to step up your game. By using the right strategy (which I’m about to show you later), you can drive traffic and sales by entering the mindset of your customers.

Understanding Important Keyword Attributes

Before we dive deep into today’s topic, you must first understand the important metrics associated with keyword research.

(i) Keyword Type

There are 2 main types of keywords: short-tail and long-tail keywords. Each type of keyword serves a different purpose within your strategy.

Short-tail

– 1-3 words
– Top to the middle of the sales funnel
– Low to Mid-level conversion rate
– Medium to high volume
– Moderate to high difficulty

Long-tail

– 4+ words
– Bottom of the sales funnel
– High conversion rate
– Low volume
– Low difficulty

(ii) User Intent

This aspect is becoming increasingly important for organic search. Understanding the user’s intent means knowing the “why” behind a person’s search query and what their intended goal is for that search. User intent helps in page optimization or creation – and you need to ensure your page matches the intent if you hope to rank in organic search. Here’s how they are commonly categorized:

Informational

Queries that find specific information or answers that users are curious about. For example: What is keyword research?

Navigational

Queries that involve brand, product or service names used to find a particular website. For example: BiQ keyword intelligence feature

Transactional

Queries that are closely related to purchasing. For example: BiQ SEO Suite price

(iii) Search Volume

Pretty straightforward, search volume is reported as monthly search volume or the number of times someone searches a keyword in Google (average monthly volume). In order to target the most profitable keyword, you need to know how many people out there are looking for a particular set of key search terms.

(iv) Competition or Keyword Difficulty

Understanding a keyword’s competition is vital because it measures how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Unless you’re a major brand, you’ll have to accept that you won’t simply be able to complete for some keywords they have already anchored on. What works is identifying relevant, low difficulty keywords.

Knowing whether to aim for high or low competition keywords largely depends on your situations and goals. My two cents is: If you’re running a brand new website, you may want to begin by targeting low volume, low-competition keywords as a starting point to establish some authority.

Know your keyword’s competition today using BiQ.

Why Doing Keyword Research Is Important In SEO + The Tool You Need

Essentially, doing keyword research will help you build pages that best serve the needs of your audience by providing the information they’re searching for and solving their problems.

Without a doubt, keyword research will dictate SEO strategy and content creation. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website and therefore it is one of the most important and valuable activities you must not miss. That is why every new page or content present on your website should be influenced by insights from keyword research.

Some primary advantages of doing keyword research are:

Increase in website traffic
Rank higher on search engines
Appear first when people are searching for your product or service
Find out more about your target market
Explore niche areas your competitors have yet to discover
Achieve authority over other websites

Now we know a little about why doing keyword research is important in SEO, it’s time for the million-dollar question: which tool can help you achieve keyword research in its highest form?

By using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence module.

The first thing users will see is BiQ's welcome screen after signing up. — BiQ’s welcome screen upon signing up.

BiQ is the world’s first revolutionary SEO suite that provides granular cost control. It’s different than the conventional SEO tools because you have the full-flexibility in paying for features you want to use and not having to pay for features you don’t use.

In short, you pay only for what you use.

For more clarification on how BiQ is different than the rest of the SEO tools out there, read this blog: https://biq.cloud/blog/biq-closed-beta-launch-invite-first-batch-users/

Now back to the module;

BiQ’s keyword intelligence module drills the importance of targeting the right keywords or phrases based on searcher’s intent for your SEO strategy. After entering your word or phrase in the search bar, it gives you vital information about the keywords you want to target, allowing you to make informed decisions.

Keyword research allows you to gauge what your competitors are doing, what your customers are searching for, and which keywords are going to get you seen. Having the keyword intelligence module is the best place to start your keyword research and excel in it.

What’s Inside BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence

BiQ’s keyword intelligence starts you off by having you to insert the target keyword you want to rank for. You’ll likely have a few keywords in mind that you would like to rank for.

These will be things like your products, services, or other topics related to your website and they are great seed keywords for your research, so start there!

Once you enter your seed keywords (along with the location and language of your choice), you will begin to discover other related keywords, content ideas, popular questions and trending searches for your content that you might have otherwise missed.

* Related Keywords

Related keywords help you find related keywords within your main keywords. Accurately finding them is a critical part of the keyword research process.

Use related keywords in your content to help search engines better understand your content in the right context. In return, it can help your page rank faster.

* Content Ideas

One of the most difficult parts of content marketing is coming up with fresh ideas that can result in quality traffic, lead, and conversions.

Use Content Ideas to easily find ideas that will make great blog posts, which will keep your readers coming back for more.

* Popular Questions

Popular Questions show questions that are frequently asked by searchers in the search engine. It will return with valuable insights on what types of questions people ask in relation to your topic.

This can be a great place for you to start creating a how-to content and frequently asked questions! Use the question phrases as a roadmap to your content marketing success.

* Trending Searches

Trending searches show the latest keywords or topics around your selected keyword. It helps you discover what trending searches people are searching for online.

Paying attention to online search trends can make a big difference in your content marketing success. This feature can help especially if you need some fresh, up-to-date content for your blog.

Conducting Keyword Research with BiQ

#1: Enter your target keyword in the search box, choose your preferred location and language.

BiQ's Keyword intelligence search bar where users can insert their targeted keyword, location and language of their choice.

* There are more than 100,000 locations and 35 languages to choose from!

#2: BiQ will analyze your target keyword and return with results. The image below shows keywords in the related keywords tab.

#3: On your left, you’ll be able to see the trend, monthly volume, number of search results, cost per click (CPC) and competition of your keyword.

Metrics found in BiQ's Keyword intelligence module

#4: If you’d like only focus on certain keywords, you can find options to filter your keyword suggestions based on relatedness, long tail, intent, and the advanced include and/or exclude filter.

* Filter by Relatedness

Filter by Relatedness allows you to filter the keyword suggestions based on the relatedness level – from closely to loosely related. Simply select the desired relatedness level, and click Filter Keywords.

Quickly check the keywords on the suggestions to see if they are related to your topic. If the they seem unrelated, adjust the level until you are satisfied with the semantic relatedness.

* Filter by Long Tail

Filter by Long Tail allows you to select long-tail keyword suggestions. Other than that, you can also use this filter to discover only the short-tails. Use them to get the type of keywords that you want; long tail or short tail.

* Filter by Intent

Filter by Intent allows you to filter keyword suggestions by the user intent. The three intents listed are: Informational, Transactional and Navigational.

Informational: Searching for information (E.g. Review, compare, recommendations)
Transactional: Searching for items to purchase (E.g. Buy, deal, discount)
Navigational: Searching for a specific brand, website or location. (E.g.YouTube, Google, Facebook)

Use this filter to specifically identify the user intent for different keywords.

* Advanced Include and/ or Exclude Filters

Advanced filters allow you to either include or exclude particular terms from the keyword suggestions provided. Just type it in and select the option “AND” or “OR” to get the desired results.

Include and exclude keywords of your choice

Include: Keywords in the table should contain the text entered in the filter
Exclude: Keywords in the table should not contain the text entered in the filter

Use this filter to perform laser-focused searches. You can also choose to include or exclude branded terms that are not relevant to your searches.

#5: Next, we’ll be looking at the content ideas tab. These are keywords extracted from the top 10 rankings in the SERP. The filtering options are similar to the related keywords tab.

#6: On to the next tab; Popular Questions show questions that are frequently asked by searchers in the search engine. It will return with valuable insights on what types of questions people ask in relation to your topic.

#7: The 4th tab is on trending searches. It shows you the latest keywords or topics around your selected keyword. It helps you discover what trending searches people are searching for online.

#8: Lastly, export the keywords that you wish to track instantly with these two steps. You’ll have the choice to save it as CSV (spreadsheet) or PDF according to your preferred manner.

#9: Not only will you have the ability to export your data in PDF and CSV, but you can also add them to a collection. The “My Collection” feature gives you a clear overview of your saved items.

Joining The BiQ SEO Suite Closed Beta

BiQ is currently on closed beta where users who signed up are being invited to try out the tool for free. (Invitations will be in batches). Those of you who successfully joined the program will help shape BiQ to be better.

So sign up today and get invited to try the new and unreleased features. You won’t want to miss out on this!

Join BiQ's SEO Suite closed beat program CTA

If there’s further clarification that you’ll be needing from us, reach us on our email hello@biq.cloud or just leave a comment down below. We’ll be happy to answer you.

See you inside.

About Winnie

Winnie is a copywriter and digital marketer in the vast world of SEO and marketing. She's as curious as she can be; constantly hunting for answers to her questions, never saying no to new experiences. When she's not spending her time typing up a storm, she is at home keeping up with her never-ending movie marathon & self-improvement books.

Announcement,Content Marketing,Keyword Research,Rank Tracking,SEO Tools

BiQ Closed Beta Launch: We Are Inviting the First Batch of Users

Get excited everyone!

Today, we’re delighted to share that after eons of hard work, blood, sweat, and love, we’re taking a major step forward on our commitment to provide a revolutionary tool by celebrating the BiQ closed beta launch.

It’s currently only available to existing users who have signed up and have successfully maintained their ranks on the top of the queue. If you’ve just discovered us, you’re not late so don’t you worry! Just sign up at https://biq.cloud/closed-beta-invite/ and be on the lookout for further instructions to get you qualified!

Join BiQ's Closed Beta Launch CTA Button

On a more interesting level, the team from BiQ has successfully forged a collaboration with SEOPressor, a pioneer in the SEO world that helps with on-page optimization. You might also be interested to catch a tip or two from their recent interview with our Co-founder, Ian. (He gave some good insights about BiQ!)

BiQ carries the torch of bringing an intelligent, innovative and ambitious future to the world of SEO. The tool is packed with powerful features your growing website needs. This post will introduce you to all the unique capabilities that are set to take off using the tool.

First and foremost, allow us to thank every single one of you for your patience and anticipation towards this tool. Receiving your messages of support throughout this period means a lot to the team and we can’t thank you enough.

We’ve heard your frustration towards having to pay excessively monthly, subscribing to various online tools to keep up with the ever-changing SEO world. We understand that many times we’ll face situations like this without other alternatives because the market packaged it that way, right?

As common users, most of us can’t do much but to abide by whatever pricing these tools have set in stone.

BUT…

BiQ has completely changed the landscape of how SEO tools can go about. We know you want something DIFFERENT in the market – and we’re back with happy news!

The Only SEO Tool That Gives Cost Control Back To You

BiQ is the only SEO tool that provides granular cost control. It’s better than the conventional SEO tools out there because you have the full-flexibility in paying for the features you use and not having to pay for those that you won’t need.

You’re cutting all costs and promoting zero resource wastage by paying only for what you use.

With that said, we’ll be inviting our very first supportive batch of users to try out the features for free! In this release, you will see 4 main modules that constitute BiQ.

They consist of:

Keyword Intelligence
Content Intelligence
Rank Intelligence
Rank Tracking

with a special feature lined up for you too;

BiQ’s Collection

The next part will highlight what BiQ has that other tools don’t.

What Makes BiQ Different From The Rest Of The SEO Tools?

You might be asking now – “What makes BiQ different than its competitors?”

Instead of doing a comparison or a “battle between the best SEO tool”, I figured, why not showcase some of BiQ’s unique features and functionalities instead?

If you’re responsible for growing your website for your company, then you could most likely grow your audience – possibly pretty significantly – by using these unique features found in BiQ’s modules.

The Unique Selling Points That Drive BiQ

(i) Price Democratization

Think Amazon Web Services for SEO tools, where pricing is democratized. BiQ gives cost control back to you by designing the entire tool to provide granular cost control where features get inexpensive.

When you start paying only for what you use, you directly reduce your total spending cost.

(ii) Experience Ultimate Flexibility & Freedom

BiQ aims to give you the ultimate flexibility and freedom to pay only for the features you need.

Want to know if your content is optimized as per the search engine’s requirement? Only choose to use BiQ’s Content Intelligence!

Have clients that only want a monthly report on their website’s rank? Just pick BiQ’s Rank Tracking module and only that!

Keyword Intelligence

(i) Keyword Intent Analysis

Behind every Google search, there is an intention.

To find out what type of content you should serve, you’ll need to segment your keywords by the user’s intent. Using the rule-based machine learning algorithm, BiQ’s keyword intent analysis automatically classifies the user’s intent for you; informational, navigational or transactional.

Leverage these terms and modifiers to infer what types of results or actions your visitors are aiming for.

(ii) Build Content Briefs With Popular Questions

Use BiQ’s Popular Questions feature to discover queries others may be interested in. It offers you a set of questions that relate to your original search query which you may build content briefs with.

Consider answering these questions or create new content starting from these questions.

(iii) The Total Volume of Related Keywords

Do you know that combining hundreds of related keywords could lead to a total search volume of millions in numbers? (Provided that you rank for most of the related keyword that you’ve targeted)

Knowing the total search volume of related keywords that BiQ provides gives you the possibility of getting untapped traffic from related keywords. Most importantly, you’ll know instantly if it’s worth your effort to build a content hub to win all the related keywords.

(iv) Find Trending Topics & Keywords

Being in trend is a matter of being caring for your visitors, introducing them to the latest news in the market.

Staying in the loop of trending content gives you an edge, which is what keyword intelligence will provide you with. Equip yourself with the most updated keywords and ideas with our app, people are more likely to follow and listen to what you have to say – you could be seen as a trend-setter.

(v) Filter Long Tail or Short Tail Keywords

In the keyword intelligence module, it’s possible to filter by “Long Tail” allowing you to select long-tail keyword suggestions. You can also use this filter to discover only the short-tail keywords.

Make good use of them to get the type of keywords that you want; long tail or short tail in just one click.

(vi) Quick Search Bar & Advanced Dynamic Filter

We understand that having tools that allow quick filtering offers a fast and convenient way to bring up the best data for your specific needs.

Across every module, BiQ’s filter feature will change based on what is important to your research. According to your optimization strategy, easily filter what you want to see in the quick search bar within a single second.

Content Intelligence

(i) Content With Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis involves analyzing the emotion the author is expressing through content. BiQ’s sentiment analysis can be classified into 7 different categories.

It allows you to fine-tune a message or a piece of content for the greatest impact. By understanding what makes customers tick, these insights could multiply the reach and influence of any businesses.

(ii) Advanced Line-by-line Analysis

BiQ analyzes your content section by section, so you know exactly which part to work on.

With this feature, you’ll be able to achieve maximum precision to know if each paragraph is contributing to the SEO of the page. Gain insights into which paragraph you can further modify, optimize or delete until your content turns from “Edit Needed” to “Great”!

(iii) Word Vector SEO

BiQ analyzes the content gap with Word Vector SEO and suggests the best keyword composition to rank your website higher, making the website optimization effort priceless.

Now, search engines will pay more attention to your content!

Rank Intelligence

(i) Position Zero

We’ve always heard about how we should be ranking for position zero and getting the featured snippet position on Google. Yes, we know the benefits it brings but do you really know how you could get there?

BiQ’s Rank Intelligence module will tell you how to capture valuable position zero spots and identify featured snippet opportunities!

(ii) Top 100 Ranking Opportunities

BiQ reveals keywords that are ranking for your pages you may not have known. The tool’s deep neural analysis will point out hidden ranking potential, letting you know keywords and associated pages you should optimize for easy ranking.

Time to discover opportunities you never knew you could rank for!

(ii) Quick Search Bar & Advanced Dynamic Filter

We understand that having tools that allow quick filtering offers a fast and convenient way to bring up the best data for your specific needs.

Rank Tracking

(i) Accurate Rank Tracking from All Locations

BiQ’s rank tracking feature accurately checks positions for the location of your choice. Like everything else in this rank checker – these locations are – you guessed it – unlimited.

(ii) Rank Tracking Updates On Your Schedule

You’ll be given the option to select from intervals of Daily, Weekly, or Monthly rank checks for more cost-effective monitoring.

Automating your ranking checks also means you don’t have to run them manually each time.

(iii) Focus On The Keyword Data You Care About

When you want to track your ranking for specific keywords, you can hone down your search criteria to get more accurate insights with the advanced filtering feature.

(iv) Ranking Change Notification

Whenever there’s a change in your ranking positions, you’ll see clear notification without having to spend time looking through rows of data.

(v) Quick Review Of All Created Profiles

For the sake of simplicity, all profiles created are composed into an easy to comprehend table with information in the most convenient and nicest way.

(vi) Tagging System To Organize Your Rank Tracking

Group your pages and keywords into different segments. Need a quick view of all your blog posts? BiQ’s tagging system allows you to tag them under a single tag so you can check their performance in a glance.

Collections

(i) Neat Display Of “My Collections”

Not only will you have the ability to export your data in PDF and CSV, but you can also add them to a collection. The “My Collection” feature gives you a clear overview.

All the data you wish to specifically track will be saved according to your modules so you can have quick access to them anytime. Give it a name and description for a clearer outlook and you’re good to go!

(All these, and we’re only in closed beta)

That my friends are obviously not everything…

What’s Next In Store For BiQ?

We may have successfully released closed beta today but that’s not all! We’re only getting started because we have more awesome things in store for you!

We’re excited to announce an ambitious roadmap of more features. 5 other core modules are in the pipeline for the upcoming release. Just some final touches to make it a cut above – and we’re good to go!

They include;

Link Intelligence,
Site Intelligence,
Markup Intelligence,
Team Management,
Community

Over the coming weeks, we’ll also be inviting our second, third, fourth, fifth batches… (there is no limit to when we’re stopping!)

Constructive Feedback Is Welcomed!

In the spirit to provide what our community truly needs, the team behind BiQ whole-heartedly accepts feedback to make the app more useful, and to hear your feature requests and requirements.

All features are in active development, which means your input directly shapes what we’re building next. You, and the entire SEO community, have the steering wheel in control.

Reach us on our email hello@biq.cloud or talk to us through live chat if you’re successfully invited to BiQ!

First-Timer & Eager To Join the Revolution?

If you’re wondering what’s in for you after joining this revolution, here’s what you can expect. As a member of the closed beta program, you’ll help shape BiQ by test-driving pre-release features and telling us what you think.

The program is your opportunity to experience upcoming pipeline features before they are publicly available, and weigh in on how we can make them better to help you crush your goals you’ve set.

So sign up today and get invited to gain early access to new features. Try all the features before anyone else and most importantly, join a community of marketers shaping the future of SEO.

Finally, Refer To Your Friends & Get The Word Out!

We’re excited about this new chapter and thrilled to finally share what we’ve been working on thus far. We look forward to your feedback and have many of you make the BiQ closed beta launch a massive one.

Best Regards,
Winnie

About Winnie

Keyword Research

When Should You Ignore A Keyword’s Search Volume?

Every webmaster wants to rank on the search engine result page (SERP). That’s where you’ll get traffic organically. People just never go to the second page of the SERP, because they don’t need to. In order to rank their page, webmasters usually go for keywords with high search volume because it indicates there is huge traffic. In other words, there are people searching for it.

Now, ever have a great blog post title and idea but when you’ve done your keyword research, the keyword shows a low search volume? Ended up forgoing that blog post?

Well, today, I will be sharing with you the situations when you can actually ignore a keyword’s search volume. For your reference, below is a list of areas that will be discussed.

What is Keyword Research and Why We Do Keyword Research
What is Keyword Search Volume and How to Get Them
When You Should Ignore A Keyword’s Search Volume

What is Keyword Research and Why We Do It?

Keyword Research is one of the very first steps of an SEO campaign. It is the process of looking for alternative keywords that people enter into the search engines. We do keyword research also to find out how popular they are.

Keyword research gives us an idea of what to expect; traffic, sales, ranking. They’re usually done using tools where they provide data such as search volume, cost per click, etc.

What Is Search Volume and How to Get Them?

The search volume data tells us how popular the search term is. It is important to pick the “right” keyword. The higher the search volume, the higher the number of potential traffic to your website.

But a high keyword search volume isn’t always good, we will go further into details about this later on.

As mentioned above, many keyword research tool provides users with data. The data are usually obtained from the Google Keyword Planner. My team and I have actually written a few blog posts on free and freemium keyword research tool. You may read about them by clicking on the titles below:

A majority of the keyword research tools mentioned in those blog posts provide data such as search volume, trends of the keyword, cost per click as well as competition. These data are obtained in several ways.

Twinword has a blog post which talks about where keyword research tools get Google Search Data and Statistics.

But let’s focus on a keyword’s search volume today and when you should actually ignore them.

When Should You Ignore A Keyword’s Search Volume?

1. When You Are Using a Long-Tail Keyword

You should ignore a keyword’s search volume when you are using a long-tail keyword. A long-tail keyword is a search term that consists of 3 or more words. Content writers use them as they’re much easier to rank for and they convert better.

Also, they’re used to pinpoint search intent as well as avoid tough competition on the SERP. The opportunity cost would be the high search volume.

Some characteristics of long-tail keywords are low search volume, low competition, high focus, and high conversion rate.

If you want to convert better, you will need to target long-tail keywords as they have lesser competition and are able to pinpoint the users’ search intent.

Long-tail keywords are specific, which means their search volume will generally be lower.

ii. Competition

Similarly, you need to ignore volume if you think competition is high. Everybody wants to rank for high-volume keywords. Who wouldn’t want a huge amount of traffic, conversions, and sales from organic search?

But not every business can rank for high-volume keywords. Those super popular keywords are way more competitive, which means many more sites are competing for the limited number of spots on the first page of the SERP.

So what can you do if you’re a smaller business with a less authoritative site? Higher volume, more work to achieve rankings.

You can obtain long-tail keywords in many ways. In fact, I have written a blog post on it:

Here’s one way: Using Google Autocomplete.

Google Autocomplete gives prediction based on searches that are popular, or in other words, high search volume.

2. When You Are In A Niche Market

When you are in a niche market, a keyword’s search volume will definitely be lower because logically, there are fewer people searching for that term.

What you can do when targeting keywords with no or low search volume is using tools like WordGraph. See what keywords other people are targeting.

WordGraph.io tells you what keywords your competitors are targeting and you can use them in your content to achieve the same effect.

3. When It is A Seasonal Keyword

Sometimes, when you come across a keyword that has a low search volume, you need to check Google Trends. Perhaps, there may be low volume now but high volume for a specific period of time.

Some keywords’ search volume surge only for a particular period of time. For instance, when it’s close to Christmas, the search volume for “Gingerbread” increases.

As you can see from the image above, the search volume surges during the last quarter period of the year.

Why? Because Gingerbread cookies are made during that period. Chances are people are looking for recipes to make it. Or, they’re looking to buy them.

Hence, if you’re writing about something that is seasonal, you should totally ignore the search volume. Or… the current search volume. When the season comes, traffic and search volume will surely come!

4. When They Are Irrelevant

Keyword relevancy is more important than search volume. A high search volume for a keyword does not indicate that the keyword must be used. The tools only generate keywords that are related to the primary keyword.

Your task is to choose only those that are relevant to your content. After all, it is read by the users and not the tool. Irrelevant keywords will make your readers confused and it isn’t any good for user experience.

5. Page Rarely Rank For A Single Keyword Alone

There are many ways to ask the same question. For instance, you want to learn how to increase website traffic. Possible searches would be something like:

How to increase website traffic?
Ways to increase website traffic
Steps to increase website traffic

Hence, webmasters typically include LSI keywords in their content to improve their chances of ranking. There are a few benefits to using LSI keywords.

Firstly, it prevents you from being penalized by the search engine itself. Using the same keywords over and over again in your content will make the search engine think that you’re stuffing keyword, which tells Google you’re just trying to rank instead of providing value to the users.

Next, it does not bore the users as well. It makes your content nice for the readers to read. It will increase their time on page and satisfaction, which means they will visit your page more often in the future.

Besides using LSI keywords, for some webmasters, they do keyword research and result page analysis to see which keyword would reap the most benefit. Now, take a look at the SERP below.

Top 3 **organic** results for “How to Increase Website Traffic”

Result page for “Ways to Increase Website Traffic”

Result page for “Steps to Increase Website Traffic”

Now, if you noticed, WordStream ranks first for “How to Increase Website Traffic” and ranks in Position 0 for “Ways to Increase Website Traffic”. That’s two of the searches people would likely key in when they are looking to increase their website traffic.

Another search possibility would be “steps to increase website traffic”. As you can see, ThriveHive ranks in Position 0 for this query.

6. When you are focusing on voice search.

Last but not least, it is when you’re optimizing for voice search. Many do not realize this yet but, voice search will be dominating SEO in the coming years. It is only getting more popular as days pass.

We are making searches using voice command, be it, television, our cars, and mobile phones itself.

Voice Search is very different as compared to a regular search on the search engine, in terms of how we interact with them.

Regular search: jump higher exercises
Voice search: What exercises can help me jump higher?

See the difference?

If you’re optimizing for voice search, you should ignore your keyword search volume. There may be low to no search volume because they’re specific, at least for the time being. But guess who will rank when voice search becomes the norm? You!

Conclusion

Remember, the broader the keyword (or the higher the search volume), the tougher the competition. Hence, it may be more profitable to target long-tail keywords with less search volume as they have lower competition and they are more targeted as well. If you go for broad keywords, you may not even rank

Even if it does have thousands of searches each month, your site may not get even half of them. The top 3 pages on the SERP capture the most traffic share and they are usually pages that are authoritative.

Hence, it’s better to focus on niche, long-tail keywords. Every single keyword can potentially bring in revenue regardless of search volume. It all depends on how you convey your message, how well you write for your readers, and how well you promote your content.

About Howard

Howard is a student of life, constantly learning and progressing. He has always been interested in business studies and fascinated by the capabilities of Marketing in transforming the whole business game.

Keyword Research

Keyword Gap Analysis – Tips for greater content

Use keyword gap analysis to help you uncover valuable keyword opportunities that you are missing out on.

Say you have written great content and hit the publish button. What’s next?

You log into your analytics to see the traffic. Chances are you’ll see something like the image below that shows you how many visitors are currently reading your content.

Optimize your published content using keyword gap analysis — *Are you aware of how many visitors are reading your content after publishing your content?*

Well, most of the time reality tends to hit you hard in the face… but it actually does not have to be that bad. Let’s look at the statistics below.

It is reported that in March 2019 alone, over 4.4 million blog posts were published every day! That’s equivalent to 51 blog posts being published every second.

If you want your hard work to stand out from the rest, your efforts should not just revolve around writing “just another” blog post.

It may sound cliche to say this but you must be willing to put extra work to see a positive return on your work. Yes, extra effort is needed here!

So, the question is – how do you get people to read your content?

Trust me, there are endless tactics and strategies out there to get people to read your content. Well, if you don’t believe me, try searching for “how to get people to read my content”. You’ll see a whopping 7.56 billion search results returned on Google!

You can simply pick any of the suggestions and implement them right away. But we all know it’s not as easy as it sounds when it comes to doing search engine optimization. Why? Because Google now uses more than 200 factors in their algorithm. The good thing is you don’t have to tick off all the 200 algorithm lists because it’s nearly impossible anyway!

Today, we will be looking at one of the core elements that get your content optimized for Google and humans; keyword gap analysis.

It is the one strategy that you should be using for your next great content.

Of course, I have implemented the strategy myself and have proven to work! It is now my turn to share them with all of you.

Let’s start!

What is keyword gap analysis for SEO?

Keyword gap analysis is the process of analyzing your existing content and discovering the “gaps” between your keyword strategy and your competitors as well as uncovering areas of opportunity.

The main reason why we are looking at keyword gap today is that it really does help our content to perform better. This is done by comparing what is lacking in your content when compared to competitors. Stay with me, I will be explaining more on this in a bit…

Let’s assume you have written a topic on “the benefits of exercising” for your fitness website.

How do you make sure your targeted visitors are able to find you in the sea of content produced every single second? Is your content relevant to your customers? What are the keywords they are using to find you? What are the keywords your competitors are using? I’m sure all these questions have lingered in your mind before as I did.

To be able to rank on the first page of the search engine result page is not depending on luck or magic. A major part of it comes from identifying the right keyword searchers used when doing a search.

Here comes the question – Have you ever wondered what keywords your competitors are using to tackle those searches but are not found in your content?

This is where the keyword gap comes in. You want to fill in the “gap” by using the right keywords to close the gap between your content and the searchers’ queries.

Why does the keyword gap analysis matter to you?

Because keyword gap analysis allows you to see where you are being outperformed, what you need to do next and most importantly how you can outrank others.

Have you ever played a puzzle? Doing keyword gap is exactly the same as completing a puzzle. You find the missing pieces or “gap” from the whole picture. Once you discover it, the picture will start to look a lot clearer. This is where optimization is done and getting better rankings will follow suit.

Here are the strategies you can use to get the most out of your keyword gap analysis.

How can you do keyword gap analysis?

Filling in the “gap” should not be that hard right? I would say yes if you know what exactly is the gap that you are looking at. Without further ado, let’s find that missing gap and fill them up!

Allow me to show you the five steps on how to conduct keyword gap analysis.

1. Expand your target keyword

Before writing your content, you must already have listed down a few keywords that you want to rank for.

Now, write them out on a piece of paper and expand them with another list of keywords you believe should be found in the search engines.

2. Identify your competitors

Knowing who your competitors are is a crucial part of doing your keyword gap analysis. In fact, it is the deciding factor for your keyword choices.

If you already know who you are competing with, you may skip this step and move on to the next step. But if you have not, do read on.

Then, type your target keyword into Google and write down the sites that show up on the first page.

Keyword gap analysis - identify your competitors — *Look for your competitors on Google’s search engine result page.*

You may notice that some sites may appear more than once on the first page. This indicates a high authority for that particular topic. For example, Webmd.com appears twice for the same search term in the example above.

When finding who your competitors are, it’s important that you find sites that are “truly” competitive with yours. Comparing “Medlineplus.gov”, “Mayoclinic.org or “Webmd.com” with your fitness site would not be a fair comparison. I would suggest you not include a large brand or site operated by the Public Interest Registry.

Basically, we are looking at a competitor that is performing slightly better than us, and that we are still able to catch them up. We don’t want to be aiming for keywords that we have no chance to rank at all.

3. Identify the missing keywords

Next, it is time to identify the keywords that your competitors rank for and don’t rank for.

To ease up this process, let’s look at the keyword gap tool you can use to identify the keywords that you should be looking at.

Let’s dive in!

WordGraph

This is my personal favorite keyword research tool. I have been using WordGraph since the very first day they launched the tool. WordGraph is designed to tackle the search matching for the closest words around the search term.

In other words, it helps you to extract the keywords your competitors are using, and what are some of the keywords they are targeting that you might be missing out. That’s the opportunity you should be seizing to be included in your content.

WordGraph comes into play in helping you find your missing keywords.

First, enter your target keyword and domain in the search box. Then, type in the locations that you desire.

Keyword gap analysis — *Use WordGraph to identify your keyword gap.*

Give it some time for the tool to grab some accurate data for you. After thoroughly analyzing your site, WordGraph will show your overall matching rate and keyword suggestions on the left column.

Green colored keywords mean you have them already in your content. If you see grayed out keywords appearing, it means that the keyword is lacking in your content.

Wordgraph allows you to find your keyword gap — *WordGraph shows your website’s overall matching rate and keyword suggestions.*

Other than that, you can also use WordGraph to find the keywords that the top 10 sites are using to rank their content. You’ll easily see them by clicking the expand icon as seen below.

To improve your content matching rate, it is preferable that you use the keywords suggested surrounding your main keywords. WordGraph also mentioned in their Word Vector Guide: “Since Word Vector is not as straightforward as keyword matching, the optimization will need a little bit more of pushing”.

Head over to WordGraph and let me know about your experience using it. I would love to hear them in the comments below.

4. Re-optimize your content

If you need a reason why re-optimizing your content is worth your time, the team from Hubspot has already done the research for you. They managed to find out that up to 76% of the traffic to a blog actually comes from old posts.

re-optimize your old content using keyword gap analysis — *Your former posts may actually give more traffic and leads than your new ones.*

That means out of 100 visitors, 76 of them actually come from your old blog posts! Just imagine the difference it can give you if you were to re-optimize your old posts today. Needless to say, you will gain traction and start moving up the ranks too.

Now, that is exactly what we are going to do. After compiling your list of keywords from step 3, it’s time to re-optimize your content!

There’s a probability that your content was not fully optimized the first time it went live, and it is currently the time to fix them. I’m pretty sure you’d have a list of keywords that others used to rank by now so you can apply them in your content more strategically.

Now the question is where should you place the keywords?

BiQ’s Content Intelligence

Enter your URL and target keyword on BiQ’s Content Intelligence. The Word Vector SEO will analyze your whole content and show which paragraph needs editing to increase the relevancy of the keywords.

These are some of the prominent places in your content that you can optimize:

Title tag
Meta description
First paragraph
Last paragraph
Headings
Body content
Link anchor text
Alt text, file names, and titles of images

When optimizing your content with the new set of keywords, don’t get too obsessed with it. You certainly don’t want to be overusing them because it will do you more harm than good. Remember the penalties you face when you do keyword stuffing. Read your content all over again and place the keywords only where it is relevant. Keep them natural to you and your readers.

Be sure to optimize them not just for the search engine but for real humans too. The rule of thumb is – always write content that matches the user intent. Because at the end of the day, humans are the ones who are going to read your content and take action from it. Learn more about why user intent is critical to your successful SEO.

5. Monitor and track your content performances

It must be tempting to measure just about everything, but that does not mean you should be doing so. Instead of juggling between a handful of metrics on your hand, how about this – start with a few content performance metrics that are highly relevant to you.

What is the one ultimate goal that you want your visitor to do when they read your content? Click that “purchase” button? Share your content with their friends? Subscribe to your website? Write them out and after you are done with it, check which of the metrics matches your content performance goal.

Site Traffic

Site traffic is one of the common indicators marketers use to check their content performance. Well, it is no surprise because traffic is the lifeblood of your content. No matter how great your content is, if nobody is reading them – it does not mean anything, really

That brings us to a pretty simple conclusion – traffic is one metric that you must measure.

After you are done with your content re-optimization, head over to your Google Analytics. These are the metrics that you may want to look at:

Pageviews – the total number of times a page on your site has been viewed. Pageviews allow you to track how web traffic interacts with your site since it includes the total number of views.

Unique pageviews – it combines the pageviews that are from the same person, and just count them as one. Unique pageviews show you a more accurate look at the amount of traffic coming to your website.

Use Google Analytics to check your site traffic performance — *Use Google Analytics to track the amount of traffic coming into your website.*

By using Google Analytics, you can further breakdown the data to see where your traffic is coming from, either geographically or how they found your site online. Just filter your traffic by ‘source/ medium’ if you want to see how your visitors managed to find you.

Knowing how you are discovered can be useful to plan your future content strategy. For example, if a large proportion of your traffic is coming from your social media channels, you may want to tailor your content to cater to that audience.

Engagement

It is insufficient just by using ‘traffic’ as your content performance indicator. Traffic can be easily manipulated with clickbait headlines. Here’s a clickbait headline from Buzzfeed you may not want to model yourself on:

Write headlines that engage readers — *Make sure you deliver content that matches the promise that you said you’d deliver in your headline.*

Clickbait is one of the ways to boost clicks by creating an enticing mood yet often misleading readers. This tactic might bring a large number of visitors to your site, but they are highly likely to leave quickly too.

So, does that brief interaction do justice to your content performance? The short answer to that is ‘no’.

In fact, a high bounce rate would indicate that a site does not have the high-quality, relevant content that the search engine wants out of its top-ranked sites. If the content is not relevant to your visitors, then you can’t be expecting any conversion, sales or leads too.

It is good to see high traffic visiting your site but isn’t it even more rewarding when these people actually interact with you?

I will have to say yes because traffic without engagement doesn’t contribute to my content’s goal.

After optimizing your content, check the bounce rate in your Google Analytics. Monitor if there are any significant changes over the next few days.

Conversion or…Sales, sales and sales!

Now you have a number of visitors reading your content, but what do you want them to do next?

If we look into the definition for “conversion” in the MarketingSherpa glossary, it means:

“The point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action.”

In short, the conversion is simply getting someone to respond to your call-to-action.

If the goal of your content is to raise awareness of your brand and increase authority in your niche, you might want to take a look at the number of social shares and engagement.

On the other hand, if your content is aiming at selling a tool, you might want to track how many sales are generated after you’ve published them.

Traffic, engagement, and conversion are some of the indicators that can tell the performance of your content. There is no definite answer to what are the best metrics that you should use to check your content performance. You basically just want to use a metric to check if your content is performing better than yesterday.

This quote from Lord Kelvin totally blew my mind:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Conclusion

To sum it up, here are the five steps to conduct keyword gap analysis:

Step 1: Expand your target keyword

Step 2: Identify your competitors

Step 3: Identify the missing keywords

Step 4: Re-optimize your content

Step 5: Monitor and track your content performances

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say you can rank for “the benefits of exercising” on the search engine within the next 24 hours, but you can certainly grow your traffic in a reasonable time if you have put keyword gap analysis to good use.

Can you see how this applies to create your next great content?

Try them out by first scanning the content that is not performing that well in your site. Choose that one lucky content to start with and monitor the results after you have done all the necessary steps.

Let me know in the comments below if you have done so!

Allow me to share another great quote from Arthur Ashe to end this article:

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Keyword Research,SEO,SEO Tools

What Are LSI Keywords (Do they help your SEO in 2020?)

Recently, we’ve been hearing a huge speculation on whether LSI keyword really does work in your search ranking or not.

Looking at the buzz surrounding that topic, we’ve decided to collect all sides of perceptions from the experts and bring it into today’s discussion.

Before we go more in-depth, let us first look into the fundamentals of LSI keywords.

What is LSI keyword?

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI keywords are keywords that are semantically related to each other.

Although they may look alike, LSI Keyword is definitely not synonyms. They are words that often supplement each other in a context. The examples below will explain why it is not.

To give you a better understanding of how LSI keywords work, let’s look at the example below.

Let’s say you want to write a blog post about your recent vacation to Seoul, Korea. How do the search engines know what topics are you talking about in your blog post?

Imagine if you use the three different sets of keywords below in your content, what will the search engines think?

Seoul, flight, accommodation, places to visit

Your content may be talking about how to travel to Seoul, how to get there, where to stay and showing a list of places to visit.

Seoul, best singer, best dancer

Your content may be talking about the entertainment industry because the keywords you are using are related to singers and dancers.

Seoul, university, acceptance rate

Your content may be talking about educational information because the keywords you are using are related to a university and the acceptance rate.

The thing is, how does the search engine know what topic you are writing about?

You got it right! By using LSI keywords.

According to Backlinko, Google scans your page for LSI keywords to determine what your page is all about. They reinforced the thoughts by sharing a Google research paper stating that they use “words frequently occurring together to understand an article’s main topic.

Google use “words frequently occurring together to understand an article’s main topic. — *Google uses “word co-occurrence clustering generates topics from words frequently occurring together” to discover semantically meaningful topics in search queries*

But do LSI keywords really help your SEO in 2020?

While researching on LSI keywords and its usefulness, I found this tweet by John Mueller from Google. He posted on Twitter the line “There’s no such thing as LSI keywords – anyone who’s telling you otherwise is mistaken, sorry.”

John Mueller from Google said there’s no such thing as LSI keywords - but is it true? — *John Mueller from Google said there’s no such thing as LSI keywords – but is it true?*

This tweet started with @klaudiofejzaj asking him if adding some LSI keywords will help him to rank better. The reply from John has then gotten some attention from others who are asking for more explanation on his tweet. But to no avail.

Amongst the responses to John’s reply, here are some that caught my attention:

“Hmm not sure about this. I find LSI tools great for visual representation of linked concepts. Helps define perception. Really useful for SWOT analysis of a digital profile. Not useful to use solely for keywords analysis.”

– @ClairMarr

I find this a rather a pretty fresh idea on how to use LSI keywords. Rather than using them to support the main keywords, it is used as a SWOT analysis of a digital profile! Have you ever done the same thing too? Be sure to let me know in the comments below. We will further discuss how to use LSI words in a bit.

Also, Clair Marr brings up an interesting point that using LSI tools help in giving a great visual representation of linked concepts. Looking at the definition of LSI in Wikipedia, it says that LSI is able to correlate semantically related terms that are latent in a collection of text. In simple words, LSI determines whether two texts are semantically close to each other.

“LSI Keywords, TF-IDF, Co-Occurrence, Neural matching. tomayto, tomahto. It’s just semantics. Pun? Yes

Ok these are not one and the same. But the use case as an SEO could be: Deciphering user intent and creating comprehensive content.”

– @JeffreyBowdoin

Like how Jeffrey mentioned, what’s more important is you are creating a comprehensive content and it is able to answer your user’s intent.

So the question is…

Can LSI keywords answer your user intent?

Here’s some compilation of what the experts have to say on using LSI keywords to answer your user intent:

LSIGraph

What Is LSI keyword & How To Use It Effectively

“When you search for ‘warriors’ in LSIGraph, it will return with a list of LSI keywords. All these keywords give an insight to what people have in their mind when searching for ‘warriors’ in the search engine.”

Jeff Bullas

How User Intent Affects Your SEO Performance: Intent-Based Keyword Research

“Google algorithms not only see target keywords, but they also consider the whole content of the page. And LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are those which will help you answer users’ queries and create useful content.”

Andrea Lehr, published in Hubspot

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-latent-semantic-indexing-why-does-it-matter-for-your-seo-strategy

“Additional and more accurate categorization helps users, publishers, and marketers alike. Publishers, for instance, can increase engagement because LSI-driven content is more targeted and ensures that it’s landing in front of the right audience. Users entering queries also benefit because they can easily (and more quickly) find the content that answers their questions.”

As I dig deeper into the relation of LSI keyword and user intent, it brings me into a rather same path; almost all agree that semantically related keyword does answer your user intent.

A user intent, also called search intent or query intent, is about what the user actually has in mind when searching into an online web search engine. On the other hand, satisfying user intent is ultimately the search engine’s number one goal.

In fact, Think with Google published over 200 editorial posts on “search intent” topic alone. Let’s take a glimpse of it:

There are more than 200 topics on “search intent” by Think with Google — *You’ll see more than 200 topics on “search intent” by Think with Google*

What Does This Mean For Your SEO Strategy?

If you want to succeed in SEO today, search intent has to be part of your strategy.

Let’s look at the example below to understand how using LSI keywords can help to answer the searchers’ intent.

Learn how using LSI keywords can help to answer the searchers' intent — Using LSI keywords can help you to answer your searchers’ intent.

If you are writing a content about an apple fruit, how do you make sure that Google understands your content is about apple as a fruit and not the brand Apple?

Using the same keyword ‘apple’ over and over again will not help Google to understand what your content is all about. Searches wishing to find more about the Apple brand may come across your content that is not matching with their intent.

To avoid this mismatch, use other keywords that are semantically related to the apple fruit. This will help Google to understand what your content is all about. In turn, searchers will only see your content when their intent is to search for an apple fruit.

“Fruit”, “sweet”, and “healthy” are not synonyms to apple fruit, but they are terms that are closely related to your intended keyword.

Using keywords that are semantically related to your main topic helps Google to understand your overall topic and later deliver them to the right audience.

How to use LSI to boost your SEO?

After spending more than a day reading and researching how other marketers use LSI keywords to boost their search optimization, here are some takeaways you can refer to:

Meta descriptions: Using LSI keywords in your meta descriptions help search engines know what your content is about. You want to use your target keywords and at the same time make sure it is descriptive enough for them to understand. This is where semantic keywords play an important role.

Content quality: Rather than using the same keyword over and over in your content, use LSI keywords to increase the readability of your content. It gives more meaning and better understanding on what your content is about.

Image optimization: When you use an optimized alt attribute with a target keyword, it gives your page a boost because the alt text is a helpful relevance signal for search engine. But you don’t want to excessively use your target keyword as the alt text because it will be marked as spam if you do so. Try using LSI keywords instead to help search engine ‘see’ your image.

Anchor text: Anchor text can provide both search engines and users relevant contextual information about the content of the link’s description, but using the same keyword in as you anchor text will deemed as over-optimization. To prevent this from happening, use semantically related keywords as part of your anchor text strategy.

Reoptimize old blog posts: When was the last time you look into your old blog posts performance? In our case, we do them frequently. If you need proof that reoptimization is worth your time, Hubspot did them well by achieving an average of 106% increase in their monthly organic search views! Remember to keep your original keyword phrase and supplement them by adding one or two LSI keywords.

How many LSI Keywords should I use?

It’s not always the number that matters. It’s the quality.

LSI keywords do not replace your main keywords. They are here to supplement your main keywords and help the search engine understand your content better.

The first rule of thumb is to ensure that you don’t keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is a practice of putting keywords in multiple places in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results.

These are examples of keyword stuffing by Google:

Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

Google's example of keyword stuffing — This is Google’s example of keyword stuffing.

Choose the most relevant LSI keywords to your main keyword and place them naturally throughout your content. Simply placing them without considering the relevancy will not help your search optimization efforts.

In deciding how many LSI keywords to use, LSIGraph shared this guideline on their website:

“A good rule of thumb is to maintain a 2-to-1 ratio of LSI keywords to your main keywords. When using LSI keywords in your content, make sure that they are in the same paragraph of the keyword they are supporting as this will help provide more context of your main keyword to Google. What’s more, Google can better understand your content now.”

This means that if you are targeting one main keyword in your content, using one or two LSI keywords will be sufficient to strengthen the context and semantic relation of your content.

How do you find LSI keywords?

Now that you know the fundamentals of LSI keywords, let’s jump into how to find LSI keywords. These tools are in no particular order. Feel free to check which tool matches your need to semantic keyword research well. Let’s begin!

1. Use Google

This may be one of those old-school methods but it is certainly a good place for any beginners to start with. There are two ways you can search for your semantic keywords using Google: Autocomplete and Related Searches.

Google Autocomplete

To give a better understanding on how to use Google Autocomplete to find your LSI keywords, let’s look at the example below.

Before I published my recent article on “How to rank for ‘Near Me’ Searches In Local SEO”, I have done some quick keyword research by just typing “near me” on the search box.

These are the phrases that are suggested to me:

Using Google Autocomplete to find LSI keywords — Using Google Autocomplete to find semantic keywords.

These boxed words are your sources of finding LSI keywords. These are keywords and phrases that humans use to search for when they search for anything related to “near me”.

Next, I also included relevant terms in my content:

Learn how to use LSI keywords in your content. — I used the relevant results in my content.

Google Related Searches

Google related searches is quite similar to the above method. The only difference is you can find these keywords or phrases at the bottom of the first page. These are the keywords that are related to your search term.

Using Google Related Searches to find LSI keywords — Using Google Related Searches to find semantic keywords.

Find the related searches at the ‘searches related to’ section.

2. Use LSIGraph

LSIGraph is simple yet commonly used LSI keyword tool. Once you land on their site, you’ll see that their tool is mainly about generating LSI keywords. Just insert your keywords in the search box and click ‘generate’ to get a list of LSI keywords.

LSI keywords tool — Discover LSI keywords for your topic and niche using LSIGraph.

Using their premium subscription, you can get a lot more data than just LSI keywords. You will also get to see some important metrics such as search volume, trend, and latent semantic value. These valuable data will help you further in deciding which LSI keywords to use.

LSIGraph Premium — A snippet of LSIGraph premium

3. Use Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a keyword generation tool that further breaks down keywords that contain prepositions, comparisons, an alphabetical list, and most importantly, related keywords.

The keywords generated can be displayed visually, or in a list format.

Using Answer The Public to find LSI keywords — Answer The Public gives out 20 related keywords.

4. Use Ubersuggest

I have seen some marketers suggesting Ubersuggest to find LSI keywords. It is simple to use too.

Just insert your keywords and it will list out ‘suggestions’ and ‘related’ keywords for you.

5. Use Keyword Tool

Another tool you can use to find LSI keywords is by using Keyword Tool. Like Ubersuggest, it shows you the keywords that people are typing into Google search box.

Using keyword tool to find LSI keywords — Keyword tool generates up to 670+ suggestions for every keyword.

The only difference with Keyword Tool and the rest is it lays out different search terms for other platforms than just Google, namely Youtube, Bing, and more.

6. Use Twinword Ideas

Twinword Ideas LSI Graph visualizes the semantic relationships between keywords. It allows you to visually see how each keyword is related to your topic.

Using Twinword Ideas to find LSI keywords — Twinword Ideas displayed results in visual forms.

7. Keyword Intelligence by BiQ – Free Option

BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence suggests keywords that are semantically related to your target keyword. Simply enter your target keyword and it will return with a list of valuable related keywords.

BiQ Keyword Intelligence — Explore hundreds of related keywords using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence

Conclusion: It’s always the same goal

Up until today, there’s no single proof that Google uses LSI but again there’s nothing wrong with using LSI keywords in your article.

As what @JeffreyBowdoin said, it is the user that matters the most.

If using keywords that are semantically related to your main keywords help searchers to find your content, which matches their intent, shouldn’t you continue doing so?

It is true that LSI keyword is not the only answer for your quest in matching the right message to the right audience. In doing search optimization, there are more than just adding LSI keywords in your content. For example, you may want to understand who is your target audience and their buyer’s journey beforehand.

With that being said, it’s worth taking the time to identify and add semantically related keywords in your content. If you noticed, up until here, I have added a few LSI keywords for my main keyword “LSI keywords”. I’ve found that doing so gives me more content ideas and values to the readers.

Now, back to you: Have you ever used semantically related keywords in your content before? Let me know in the comments below.

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Keyword Research,SEO

How do you rank for featured snippets? – And get tons of traffic

Looking to get your website appearing on Google’s featured snippet and attract tons of traffic?

You’ve come to the right place!

The “trick” is to know what and how you are getting them.

In fact, featured snippets are nothing new. It has been around since 2013 and we have witnessed tremendous growth of its appearance over the years.

Looking at the growth and popularity of this topic, I’ve decided to share with you on how you can get your sites featured.

Allow me to give you a heads up on today’s topic. In this post, we will be covering:

What is a Google featured snippet
What are the four types of featured snippets
Why should you care about featured snippets
How can you mark your page as a featured snippet
How to find featured snippet opportunities
8 Optimization Tips for ranking in Google’s featured snippets

What is a Google featured snippet?

The featured snippet or Google snippet is actually pretty simple to understand. It is a summary of an answer to the user’s query. It is also known as position zero because it is placed right on top of the first ranking website.

According to Google,

“We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself. They’re especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.”
Google

The primary objective has always been the same, that is to help searchers in getting what they want when they are performing any searches. But it’s worth noting that not every search result has a snippet.

If you’ve not noticed before, there are actually a few types of featured snippets in the search results. Let’s look into them below.

What are the four types of featured snippets?

Here are the four primary ‘types’ of featured snippets:

1. Paragraph

Paragraph or text featured snippets are the most common snippets that you will stumble upon in the search results. According to Getstat, the most popular featured snippets are paragraph snippets as it takes up around 81.95% of the total snippet.

This is because they provide a direct answer to a user’s query. This snippet usually shows a paragraph type-answers to questions like how, who, why, when, and what.

An example of the paragraph featured snippet:

2. Lists (numbered, bullet points)

The list featured snippets come in 2 types: numbers and bullets

The numbered featured snippets appear when the searchers are looking for a set of steps to complete a certain task. While the bulleted snippets show a compressed view of the content in a list where the order doesn’t really matter.

Example of the list featured snippet:

3. Tables

The table featured snippets show structured content in an easy to understand format. It is often used for comparison purposes. Google will reformat the data found on the website into what it thinks is the most useful for the searchers.

Example of the table featured snippet:

4. Video

Other than text snippets, Google may also feature video snippets from Youtube. It pulls in relevant videos that they think are likely to best answer the user’s query.

Example of the video featured snippet:

Now that we understand the four types of featured snippets, let’s talk about why you should care about featured snippets in 2019 and beyond.

Why should you care about featured snippets?

1. High click-through rate (CTR)

Getting your website displayed on position zero of the result page is the same as being featured on the Forbes’ front page. You’ll get the fame that you deserve for being featured; you’ll get more clicks too.

As found by Hubspot, content with a featured snippet has a 2x higher CTR in search results than content that is not shown in a featured snippet.

2. Increase in organic traffic

No matter what business you are in when you have a website, it means you want website traffic. And Google featured snippets will help you achieve that without a doubt.

SEOPressor saw an increase of 200% in traffic after their articles got featured on snippets.

Google snippet helps to increase your website organic traffic

This traffic usually comprises of those who are interested in your content. Giving them the content that will be able to answer their questions will make them stay on your website.

3. Increase in conversions

Now, if you can increase your CTR by 2x then your conversion rate will also follow by a 50% increment.

More clicks simply mean more chances of your website in convincing more people to convert into your customers, provided that your website is able to get people to do certain actions. Since we’re talking about this, feel free to check out this blog on how to map keywords to your buyer’s journey.

4. Increase brand awareness

Being featured on Google’s snippet helps to boost your brand awareness. More people will see your website and this automatically gives the impression that you are the most credible source of information for the users’ searches.

Indirectly, they will view that your content is the most authoritative and trustworthy in your niche.

How can you mark your page as a featured snippet?

The short answer is you can’t just simply wish for it to happen.

It is up to Google’s systems to determine whether your page would make a good featured snippet for a user’s search queries. If it does, then it will be elevated.

But, the good news is you can work out some optimization on your page to get chosen for featured snippets.

How can you find featured snippets opportunities?

Before we go into snippet optimization, we will need to identify whether there are any snippet opportunities found for a particular query.

First, take out a paper and list out all the keywords that are related to your business.

For example, if your business is about conducting a baking class, keywords that are related to your business could be, “how to bake a cake”, “learn to bake a cake”, or “baking class”.

Now the important question is this: how do you know if all these keywords have featured snippets?

Ask Google

The best place to search for featured snippet is from Google because it is where you want your snippet to be featured. I will be sharing with you a few ways on how I used Google to find featured snippet opportunities.

The simplest way is to observe what phrases appear when you type your keyword in the search box. This is known as the Google Autocomplete. You can get a basic idea of what people are searching for once you start typing in a keyword.

When you type “how to bake a cake”, you’ll also get some other keyword suggestions such as “how to bake a cake from scratch”, and “how to bake a cake without eggs”. These are some of the keywords with high intent because it returns with commonly asked questions and searches terms for a given subject.

Keywords that appear in the suggestion usually will have featured snippet. Let’s pick one of the keywords suggested by Google, “how to bake a cake without eggs” and then type in the search box:

how to find featured snippet opportunities

See! It immediately returns results with a featured snippet on “How to Make a Cake Mix Box without Eggs”. When I attempted to select the other keyword, “how to bake a cake for beginners”, it returns with featured snippet too:

how to find Google snippet opportunities

Another way to check if there is an existing snippet on the search result using Google is to check out the People Also Ask section:

Use Google's People Also Ask to find Google snippet

Let’s take the first question “What are the ingredients used in baking cake?” and put them in the search box:

It returns with featured snippet too!

The People Also Ask section highlights questions that are closely related to the search topic. It lays out the common questions that people ask regarding the topic itself. In other words, Google is basically giving you a free look at what questions they think are deemed relevant or related to a topic.

So what does that mean?

All those keywords from Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask are a good place for you to start finding featured snippet opportunities. Select and compile keywords that are relevant to your product or service. Then, create content surrounding the topics and optimize them to rank in Google’s featured snippets.

Use BiQ’s Rank Intelligence

BiQ’s Rank Intelligence will help you to discover featured snippet opportunities available for your website.

Simply enter your URL and it will show you all the keywords that your website is ranking together with the featured snippet opportunities.

You will also get to know all the keywords where you already own the featured snippet in the app.

Now you know how to find featured snippet opportunities, let’s move on with the optimization part!

8 Optimization Tips For Ranking In Google’s Featured Snippets

Here are 8 useful tips you can use on how to appear in a featured snippet.

Tip 1: Get your content on the first page

95.58% of featured snippet pages already rank in the top 10 SERPs in Google. So if you want to rank in a featured snippet, you must first get your page up on the front page of the Google search result.

Use the BiQ’s Rank Intelligence to check the keywords that have already ranked on the first page.

If your content is already ranking on the first page, you may continue with the rest of the snippet optimization.

If you’re not, you may want to start with optimizing your content to rank on page one for your target keywords. Check out this post on the 13 best free keyword research tools for you to start your keyword optimization.

You don’t have to be ranking on #1 or #2 to make it to the featured snippet, but ranking in the top five ranks will definitely give you higher chances of being featured in snippets.

Tip 2: Use words that are likely to generate featured snippets

Upon researching on featured snippets optimization, I came across a study of ‘The Best Words and Themes To Generate Featured Snippets’ by the STAT team.

Their study revealed the top common queries that generate featured snippets which include:

words that generate Google snippets — *Queries with high featured snippets occurrence based on question types.*

Go through the list and check which words would be effective additions to your titles.

Tip 3: Create a proper format for your content

A proper format content will make it easier for Google to understand your content type. The easier it is for Google to understand your content, the higher is your chance of being featured in the snippets.

Depending on which featured snippet you are trying to rank, use the HTML code below:

For Paragraph Featured Snippet

<h2>QUESTION</h2>

<p>ANSWER</p>

</div>

For List Featured Snippet

<h2>QUESTION</h2>

<ol>

</ol>

</div>

Check what type of snippet is being featured for the keywords you are targeting. If Google is pulling a paragraph, create a paragraph structure to increase your chances to get into the featured snippet.

Tip 4: Add A Question and Answer page on your site

Adding a Q&A page to your site will help Google understand your content easier.

When creating a Q&A page, list out all the questions that are related to your overall topics.

Go to BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to get ideas on the questions that people have frequently asked.

After you have a list of questions that are relevant to your topic, compile them and provide a clear and concise answer in short paragraphs.

Tip 5: Maintain within the optimal word count

According to SEMrush’s discovery, the most common length of content in featured snippets is between 40-50 words.

But I noticed that some snippets may have more than 50 words such as in the example below. It’s 63 words to be precise!

Even so, I would strongly recommend that you keep your answers between 40 to 50 words. Keep your answers concise and specific to get higher chances of being featured.

In any case, it’s not the quantity that matters, but the quality.

Tip 6: Use high-quality images

If you noticed, featured snippets often include an image in the snippet box. And the interesting thing about a featured snippet image is that it can come from different websites.

There’s no way to make sure Google will use the image that you want them to, but it’s a good practice to always use high-quality images for your posts.

Another best practice for high-quality images is to always put alt text and title for your image. The alt text describes what’s on the image. It helps Google to understand your images better.

This is a complete HTML image tag for your reference:

Tip 7: Post videos on Youtube

Hubspot analyzed over 160 featured clips and it resulted to these interesting findings:

80% of the featured clips contained the exact keyword in their title
The video length doesn’t matter
It’s important to keep your video content updated because the average video age was 4 years and 8 months.
Your videos’ Youtube ranking doesn’t affect your chances of being featured.

We found out that most of the video snippet answers a user’s “how to” question. Choose a video title that is related to such a question. Or you can also use the title suggested in Google’s People Also Ask section.

After selecting the right title for your video, the easiest way to optimize your video is to create a voice transcript for all of your videos. It will be easier for Google to recognize the text. Thus, giving you higher chances for your video to get featured in the snippets.

Tip 8: Do better than the existing snippet

Once you’ve found a featured snippet opportunity, check how the current website ranks for the snippet.

When optimizing for a featured snippet, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Identify the format being used in the snippet and replicate the format to your content. However, you should not simply copy your competitor’s content.

Spend some time on figuring the searcher’s intent. Give what the searchers want and you are on the right track. You want to give what’s best for Google and also the readers.

To sum it up, here are the 8 optimization tips you can use now to rank your pages in featured snippets:

Tip 1: Get your content on the first page
Tip 2: Use words that are likely to generate featured snippets
Tip 3: Create a proper format for your content
Tip 4: Add a Question and Answer page on your site
Tip 5: Maintain within the optimal word count
Tip 6: Use high-quality images
Tip 7: Post videos on Youtube
Tip 8: Do better than the existing snippet

Conclusion

Featured snippets aren’t that complicated.

As we are living in a fast-paced world, we want quick answers to our questions. Google, as the master of user experience, acknowledge the needs and gives what’s best for the searchers; featured snippets.

While there’s no exact formula to get your website on the featured snippets, the easiest way is to always produce quality content that Google and humans will love. Focus your effort on creating engaging content that answers the user’s query.

Once you are on the first page of search results, you will have a good chance of snatching that snippet. Use the eight featured snippet tips above and keep optimizing!

If there is a will, there is a way.

How will you apply this to your own SEO efforts? If you have any queries and additional information to share, please do so in the comments section below! I’ll be more than happy to discuss further on this topic with all of you.

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

Keyword Research,SEO Tools

14 Best Free Keyword Research Tools

When users are searching for information on the search engine, what they type in the search bar is called a “keyword” or a “keyphrase”.

People may key in different search terms and it may lead them all to the same search result. Being able to know their trends, competitiveness and, the volume of the different terms would be beneficial.

I believe all of us, content writers, can agree on this. And what most of us do is determine the “right” keyword before working on the article.

Q: How can we find the “right” keywords?
A: By using keyword research tools.

In this article, I will be providing you with a list of free keyword research tools that you can start using today.

This article will be divided into two parts; “Completely FREE” and “FREEmium”.

Let us begin with tools that are completely free.

Free Keyword Research Tools

1. Google Trends

Of course, the first one on this list had to be related to Google. Most of us are optimizing for Google after all.

Google Trends is a website created by Google that shows users the popularity of search queries. It also allows users to compare the popularity of different queries over time.

It is very easy to use as well. Simply type in a term or topic in the search bar.

After the search, you’ll be able to see the trends, breakdown by subregion and, related queries. Not only that, Google Trends allows you to add a comparison, filter the results by regions, time, categories and the type of search (web/image/news/shopping/YouTube).

Here is an example of a result produced by Google Trends:

This is an extremely useful tool if you want to see your keyword’s trend, whether there are more or lesser people are searching the keywords in the search engine. In other words, we can call it the demand for content.

2. Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is a unique one compared to all other keyword tools you’ll see on this list.

While you use the rest of the keyword research tool to discover new keywords to target, the Google Search Console will let you know old keywords that you’re already performing.

Here’s how you can find this section in Google Search Console:

Click on the ‘Main Menu’ button on the top left side, and then under ‘Performance”, click on ‘Search results’.

The keywords you see under ‘QUERIES’ are the keywords that lead people to your pages. You can then focus on them for your content and even create internal links to pages that are close to ranking high.

3. Google

Another favorite of mine is the search engine itself. While it is not exactly a Google keyword tool, it does help a lot in keyword research. Let me show you the many ways it helps.

i. Google Autocomplete

The bolded words you see in the image are called “Autocomplete”. The search engine predicts that they are relevant to what you’re looking for and also shows you what people have already searched for.

In short, they are popular searches, search queries that have been searched by many before.

So with this search prediction, you can see what people are really into and perhaps you can write about them.

ii. Related searches

Related searches are similar to autocomplete. It shows you the most popular keywords, keywords that are frequently searched.

They usually appear in the middle of the search result page or at the bottom. Here’s how it looks like:

With these, you get more ideas on keywords you can target. You can even explore and discover more related searches by clicking on them.

4. Keyword Sh*tter

As the name implies, this tool gives you tons of keywords. Where do the suggestions come from? Well, they all come from Google Autocomplete, which are popular queries related to your search.

It seems that the list can generate thousands of keywords. It has provided me 1,330 keywords in just 5 minutes. Had I not clicked ‘Stop Job’, it would continue running until tomorrow (maybe… for you to find out).

5. UberSuggest

UberSuggest is a free keyword tool that was acquired by Neil Patel in 2017. If you’re a marketer, chances are you know who he is. UberSuggest is also featured on his website’s homepage.

It is simple to use. It has something that only some keyword research tools have, which is the option to key in a domain or a keyword. It allows you to search by country as well.

Below is a result I’ve obtained from my search:

The result provides you with the following keyword overview:

Seach Volume: The number of searches this particular keyword has during a month.
SEO Difficulty: Estimated competition in organic search. The higher the number, the more competitive.
Paid Difficulty: Estimated competition in paid search. The higher the number, the more competitive.
Cost Per Click: Average cost per click if you wanted to pay Google to be seen as an ad. If someone is paying a high CPC, the keyword is usually more valuable.
Volume Graph: Searches per month

Besides keyword overview, the result page also provides its users with keyword ideas with their respective keyword overview. Lastly, users get to see a list of webpages that have lots of social shares for the keywords entered. They are called content ideas.

6. Keywords Everywhere

Update October 2019: Keywords Everywhere is now a paid tool.

Keywords Everywhere is a Chrome and Firefox Extension. However, to use the tool, you will need to sign up for an API Access. What you need to provide is your email address.

In the settings, you’ll be able to choose your preferred country, currency, metrics you want to see and supported website.

As for data source, you can choose from Google Keyword Planner only or Google Keyword Planner + Clickstream data.

Here is an example of its work:

Whenever you enter a keyword in the search bar, it will show you data (Volume, CPC, Competition) for every suggestion without you clicking any of it. It is indeed very convenient and helpful.

Here is how it looks if you clicked on any of it:

For me, I think this has completely changed my search experience. I’m provided with data just by doing what I normally do, browsing. There is no extra effort needed.

Keywords Everywhere also show data on websites like eBay, YouTube and other keyword research websites (UberSuggest, Soovle, Answer The Public). As of now, it only works for the English language.

7. Soovle

Soovle is a keyword research website that gives you a list of top keywords from multiple platforms [shows up to 11 platforms on one page]. The platform includes search engines and e-commerce sites.

Pressing the right arrow key will move another search engine’s result to the bracket. Users can save suggestions they want by dragging to the ‘Saved Suggestions’ window. That way, users will not have to jot them down or forget them. Users can even download keywords they want in a CSV file.

8. QuestionDB

QuestionDB is a unique one. Type in a keyword and it’ll give you questions that users are really asking online. Where do these questions come from?

As of now, they’re all sourced from Reddit, an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. I believe that the questions generated by this tool give content writers original ideas.

The above are keywords research tools that are completely free you can use today! Now, let’s go into freemiums!

Freemium Keyword Tools

9. BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence

Currently, we’re considered a freemium keyword research tool. We’re at our beta stage, where a few hundred people are trying out our tool for free. You can too and you’ll find out how in just a bit.

Our Keyword Intelligence module is very simple to use. All you need to do is just insert your target keyword and you’ll get lots of good information and data.

BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence has what other keyword tools have such as the metrics, languages and location filters, as well as the collection report. But…

Here’s what’s unique:

Long-tail and short-tail keyword filter
Keyword Intent Analysis
Popular Questions Your Customer Ask
Trending Topics & Keywords For Your Content
Reveal Your Competitor’s Keyword Profile
Content Ideas, Straight from the top SERP results

You must think that we’re costly, considering how much information we generate for you. But that just isn’t the truth. We created this suite for the purpose of giving cost control back to fellow users. Starting today, pay only for what you use, and don’t pay for what you don’t use.

Request early access to our beta on our homepage today!

10. LSIGraph

LSIGraph provides users with LSI Keywords. LSI Keywords as explained by them:
“LSI Keyword is a keyword that is semantically linked to the main keyword. In a nutshell, LSI keywords are keywords that we generally find related to the main keyword.

In SEO (search engine optimization) context, they are keywords that we should be using in our content to help search engines understand our content better.”

The free version will provide you with closely related keywords to your search term. You are only allowed to perform 3 searches a day with the free version.

The following are things you’ll get if you decide to get the premium version:

Unlimited LSI Keywords
Unlimited Searches
100,000+ Locations Support
Multi-Languages Support
Bulk Keyword Analysis
Data of keywords (Search volume, CPC & Competition, Trend)
Semantic Analysis
Project Management

I am subscribed to LSIGraph so I’ll be able to give you a look of the premium version on this one:

The special thing about this keyword research tool is that they have LSV value. The LSV is a proprietary formula developed by LSIGraph.

It is a measurement of how valuable an LSI keyword is. Users should prioritize keywords with higher LSV for optimization. And on the right side, you’ll be able to refer to a list of websites that are popular for that keyword.

11. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic has creative and cool web design.

Unique, huh?

Well, the design is one thing and the functionality is another.

For the free version, the tool allows you to enter your search queries in 15 languages. The languages include French and Russian. You’ll get 3 free searches a day.

Upon typing in your search queries, you will be shown plenty of content ideas related to your keywords. They come in the form of questions, prepositions and alphabetical orders. The free version also allows you to download images of your result.

Here is an example in the form of questions:

So, if you like the results you’re getting and decide to go ‘PRO’, here’s what you’ll get for $99 per month.

Unlimited searches.
Compare data + see new suggestions
Language + Location-based results
High-res images
Priority customer support
Saved reports
Unlimited team members
Hide unwanted sections
Hide individual suggestions.

12. WordGraph

WordGraph is a pretty interesting tool that I’ve come across while researching the different keyword tools available. It is powered by its own proprietary algorithm, Word Vector Technology.

It is designed to help users outrank competitors by uncovering your competitors’ keywords.

The free version allows up to 3 searches a day while signing-up will give you unlimited search.

All you need to do is enter your target keyword and your page URL so you can compare it with the top 10 results of the keyword. Take a look at the result generated:

It shows you “other keywords” used by the top 10 results. These “other keywords” are separated in to high and low priority. It then gives you a score that indicates the number of “other keywords” you’re using already.

Below the score, you’ll see ‘LEARN HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT WITH WORD GRAPH >>’. Clicking on it will show you 3 detailed steps.

Seems simple? It really is! The free version itself provides all the data already.

The premium version allows users to enjoy some features which include the ability to export data, track performance and create more projects.

13. KeywordTool

KeywordTool.io is a freemium keyword research tool that uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundreds of long-tail keywords. The free version provides users with related keywords, related questions, and prepositions.

As for the data of the long-tail keywords generated, they provide search volume, trend, CPC and competition. However, they are very limited. At times, they provide data for one keyword, at times four keywords.

For its “Pro” version, you’ll get twice as many keywords compared to the free version of the Keyword Tool, 100% accurate search engine volume data, and Google search volume that can be localized to 192 countries, 47,035 individual locations and 46 languages. It also allows you to find keywords competitors are targeting.

Two very special and helpful features I noticed in this tool is it allows users to filter results by keywords they want. Another feature is the ability to remove keywords users do not want on their list.

14. Moz Keyword Explorer

To use the free version of Moz Keyword Explorer, you will need to sign up for an account. A free Moz account will allow up to 10 free queries per month. It is relatively lower compared to other tools.

So, here’s what it looks like after entering your search:

As compared to other keyword research tools, here are some differences:
1. Organic CTR: It calculates what percent of searchers are likely to click on the organic, web results.

2. Priority: Aggregation of metrics to determine which keywords to target first.

3. SERP Analysis: Some tools do have SERP Analysis, but the analysis provided by Moz is accompanied by Domain Authority and Page Authority score.

To use other features that are locked, you will need to get Moz Pro, which is their all-in-one suite of SEO tools.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this list of free and freemium keyword research tools you can start using today. Both free and freemium tools here work well. For the freemium tools, they do have limited features.

Let this be the article that allows you to compare both free and freemium tools as well as the features each of them has.

I will be updating this list from time to time. Are there any free or freemium tools you think I should add to this list? Let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below!

About Howard

Keyword Research,SEO

4 Killer Keyword Mapping Steps To Match The Buyer’s Journey

Learn how to do keyword mapping for a better SEO strategy.

Would you like to know how to convince your website visitors to become your paying customers?

If your answer is a ‘yes’, then you’ll definitely need to learn how to do keyword mapping to your buyer’s journey.

I ask this because almost all of the marketers create websites to communicate with their potential customers. But here’s the real challenge in the digital world;

how do you actually communicate with them and successfully deliver your message?

This brings us to: Using the right keywords and mapping those keywords to the right content.

In order for you to attract potential customers to your website, you need to create the right content that speaks directly to them at whatever stage of the buying cycle they might be in.

Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll appreciate the buyer’s journey process and know how to map the right keywords in each buying stages to see a positive grow your business, in the name of increasing profit.

Let’s get started!

What is the buyer journey?

The buyer’s journey is not something new in the year 2020 There are lots of variations on the definition of the buyer journey, but they all mean the same thing.

According to Hubspot,

“The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.”

In general, the buyer’s journey stages are made up of three main stages:

The Awareness Stage – This is the stage in which a buyer understands that they have a need and are looking for ways to fulfill it.
The Consideration Stage – At the consideration stage, the buyer is defining their need and are starting to research on options to fulfill it.
The Decision Stage – During this stage, the buyer has made their decision to buy and make their purchase.

The example below illustrates a sample of the buyer’s journey on a simple purchasing decision of a runner who wishes to buy new running shoes.

Awareness: Shane is aware that he needed a new running shoe because his existing shoe is torn. He then started to look for shoe options available online.

Consideration: After doing some research, he is considering whether to buy the same shoe brand or check out other brands.

Decision: Lastly, he decided to buy the same shoe brand because of the discounted price.

At each buyer’s stage, a buyer will have different thought processes. They are looking out for different types of information according to their needs at that point in time. It is your goal to speak the right content at those different stages.

4 Steps To Map Keywords To The Buyer’s Journey For SEO

Now, you have understood what are the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Let’s look at how you can map the right keywords in your potential buyer’s journey.

Step 1. Mapping keywords to the buying stages

Mapping keywords to the buying stages means finding the right keywords you should be using in your content.

Typical keyword research only focuses on keywords with the highest search volume and lowest competition. But that is not what we are looking for here.

You should be looking for keywords or topics that your potential customers are searching for. In this case, it is the keyword with high intent that matters.

The stage your buyers are in will determine the searches they’ve made. The following stages are how we can match the user intent keywords to the buyer journey.

Awareness Stage

Since this stage is all about the potential buyers’ quest to answer a question or looking for ways to fulfill their needs, it is your task to ensure you create content that is optimized for that.

The goal for this stage is to provide value before the visitor even needs your product or service.

These are some questions to better understand the searchers’ intent at this stage:

What problem does your products or services solve?
What possible topics or keywords that the buyers will use to describe their problems?
What is the buyer’s attitude towards the problems and potential solutions?

Consideration Stage

At the consideration stage, the user has a good idea of what they’re looking for and are actively looking for products or services to fulfill their needs.

Your goal at this stage is to build trust in these potential buyers and to convince them that your products or services are the best solutions for them.

These are some questions to better understand the searchers’ intent at this stage:

What is your brand known for?
What are the frequently asked questions for your products or services?
How do users feel about the pros and cons of your products or services?

Decision Stage

During the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, they will have already informed themselves using the content available and will be ready to make a purchase.

Your goal at this stage should be to provide the content that offers their need to acquire the customer.

These are some questions to better understand the searchers’ intent at this stage:

What do prospects need at the exact moment that they’re about to make a purchase?
What are the things that can encourage them to complete the transaction faster?
What expectations do the prospect have for a transaction?

Step 2. Finding The Right Keywords To Use

Finding the right keywords to use doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as you can understand the searcher’s intent at each buying stages, you should be able to identify the best keywords to use.

Now that you know the user intent in each of your buying stages, it’s time to find the right keywords to use.

Let’s start with keyword research, shall we?

Awareness Stage

Searchers at this stage are just starting the searches and the questions may be broader in nature.

The searches made at this stage may not immediately appear valuable because they have very little commercial intent. But if you can successfully position your website as an authority in your niche, it’s going to help you gain trust with your audience. Then it can positively impact the next buying stages.

Let’s make use of the previous example. Shane is looking for a new running shoe and he may be simply just looking around for various types of running shoes. Some queries might be:

Running shoes for men
Best running shoes
Cheap running shoe
Running shoe review 2019
What’s the best running shoe in 2019

Put yourself in your customer’s place and list out all the possible queries they will make.

To help you with this, I would suggest you to use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to help you generate more ideas in a second. Just enter your keyword in the search box, and you’ll get even more ideas:

What’s best about Keyword Intelligence is it provides you with relevant LSI keywords, also known as semantic keywords. These are the keywords you want because it emphasizes user intent.

Consideration Stage

As the potential buyer move through the buyer’s journey, they will more likely make queries that correspond to products or services such as:

Compare Adidas running shoes
Latest Adidas running shoes review
Best Adidas running shoes 2019
Skechers vs Adidas shoes

They know what their problem or opportunity is and begins to look for potential solutions. Also, potential buyers at this stage will be looking at not just your products, but also your competitors’.

Decision Stage

Queries at the decision stage will indicate a higher commercial intent than the rest.

This means your potential buyer knows exactly what they want and is ready to make a purchase. You may also consider adding some ‘motivator’ keywords to further convince them to choose your products or services such as:

Discount
Coupon
Cheap
Free shipping

For example, if we search ‘adidas ultraboost coupon’ in the Keyword Intelligence, we can see the intent now has shifted from informational to transactional.

To sum up the potential queries Shane will make in each of the buying stages, let’s look at the illustration below:

How to do keyword mapping to the buyer's journey

Use keywords with intent to attract the right traffic

Using keywords with intent is useful as a way to pre-qualify the prospect that you want on your website. When done correctly, you can narrow down the focus of your web traffic to only those who are likely to perform the action that you want based on the content you’ve optimized for the intent.

Searchers that are using high intent keyword signifies a strong intent to conduct a transaction, whether to purchase something, to ask for more information or any other action that will later lead to a conversion. Think of terms like “buy”, “purchase”, “order” and so on. The formula you can use is:

High intent keyword + (product name)

For example, “buy car insurance”, “cheap facial treatment” and “where to buy bean bag”.

Step 3. Mapping Keywords To Your Content

Now that you have collected your high intent keywords, it’s time for you to plan out your content strategy accordingly.

Your content strategy should make sure that when a potential buyer makes a search in the search engine, they will be able to see your content. To do this, you will need to create content covering the needs of your potential buyers at each stage of the buying cycle.

Awareness stage

88 percent of consumers will pre-research their purchases online before taking action either online or in-store. Online research is becoming more common and people are more inclined to look for information before a transaction is made. You do too, right?

Searchers are looking for information and sometimes they may not even be aware that they actually need the solutions that you are providing.

If you are selling ginger juice, you can easily reach your potential buyers with related content such as:

“11 Proven Health Benefits of Ginger”
“Ginger – The World’s Healthiest Food”
“Benefits of drinking ginger water”
“11 Benefits of Ginger That You Didn’t Know About”

Type in the keywords on Keyword Intelligence, and you will see the majority intent is ‘informational’.

At this stage, searchers are just looking for content to help them to a solution. There’s no guarantee that they’ll buy from you but if your content is helpful and interesting enough, they may as well proceed to the next buyer stage.

Real-Life Examples

MarketersMEDIA is a company that provides press release distributions. As such, the content they share in their blog is meant to drive leads that are not just looking for press release distributions but also those who just started writing their press releases.

MarketersMEDIA blog example on keyword mapping

Since Hootsuite is all about social media management, they have an entire blog dedicated to talking about content related to social media.

Hootsuite blog example on keyword mapping

When all your posts revolve around your main niche, and that’s essentially all you talk about, your audience will assume you as the authority in that niche. This will help in creating credibility and trust towards your brand in the long run.

Consideration stage

Here, your potential buyers have known about the benefits of the product you are offering. What they probably will do next is to compare your product to your competitors.

Therefore, your content strategy now should be focusing on letting them know your business provides the right solutions for their needs such as:

“Organic ginger juice in New York”
“Top 10 places you can get ginger juice”
“Best Ginger Juice Review”

According to the result in Keyword Intelligence, the type of intent for such keywords is slowly changing from ‘informational’ to ‘navigational’.

Your content can be geared to educate your potential buyers more about your product as the best solution and why it is the best fit for their problems or needs. Build trust between your audience and your brand that could help in the buying stage later.

Real-Life Examples

MarketersMEDIA puts out content on how their service works on their website. This piece of content targets people who are now looking for press release distribution, and it goes a step further by telling why you should choose their services.

LSIGraph, the well-known LSI keywords generator, has written an in-depth educational content on what is LSI keywords and how to use them effectively below. This piece of content helps point their audience to a specific solution while building authority to the niche.

Fun fact: 87% of shoppers today use Ecommerce reviews to decide whether to buy, and 77% of those shoppers tend to buy online. So you may want to consider encouraging your existing customers to give some reviews on your website.

For example, SEOPressor is a WordPress plugin that offers on-page optimization to their users They even dedicated a page that shows all their user’s testimonials as shown below.

Decision stage

Since this is the most important stage where your potential buyer will determine to become your customer or not, you may want to create content that can motivate them to make the final purchase.

If you managed to create trust and establish yourself as an authority in the earlier stages, without any doubt, your potential buyers will be more receptive to purchase from you.

Nevertheless, your ultimate goal at this stage is to create content that is attractive enough to capture your potential buyers. You may consider topics such as:

“Ginger juice delivery to you”
“Ginger juice store voucher”
“September promotion – Ginger juice”
“Best Price Cold Pressed Ginger Juice”

By now, the type of intent is not only focusing on ‘informational’ intent. Users starting to look for ‘transactional’ searches.

The right offer and content at this buyer’s stage will have a dramatic impact on securing your conversions. Here are a few statistics to prove them:

A study has shown that 89% of consumers name price as a top factor affecting their purchasing decisions (Hawk Incentives)
83% of consumers said that coupons change their shopping behavior (Inmar)
41% of consumers say they’re more likely to seek out something to buy if they have an offer (Kelton)

Attractive pricing will usually encourage the buyers to purchase from you but there are also other contributing factors such as brand loyalty, credibility, and trust. Let’s look at the real-life examples below.

Real-Life Examples

Other than just giving a massive discount at the pricing page, MarketersMEDIA also lays out all the reasons why you must choose them over other distribution platforms.

Zapier, on the other hand, provides a ‘free forever’ account for anyone. It is also a clever way to warm people up to use your product or service to the paid plan.

Step 4. Measuring Keyword Effectiveness in Keyword Mapping

After you’ve done mapping the keywords in your content to the buyer’s journey, you may wonder how you can measure the effectiveness of each keyword.

When it comes to measuring your keyword effectiveness, data is your best friend. The way to go about this is by using just one keyword per page that focuses on the subject matter of that page’s content.

You can then use analytics tools to measure certain data, such as the number of page visits, bounce rate, click-throughs and conversions over time. These numbers will tell you which of your keywords are doing well and which aren’t.

Do also take note that keyword targeting and understanding customer intent is a process of continuous improvement. Expect continuous effort to reap your return.

Conclusion

In deciding anything, always start with the end in mind. Know who your target audience is and what is their expectation towards your product or services.

When you are able to identify your buyer’s journey and align your content to each stage, you gain a better understanding of who you are writing for and how to deliver more value and help them reach a potential solution.

Use the steps given in the article, but, by all means, take caution by considering what works best for your buyer’s journey.

What are your thoughts on doing keyword mapping to match your buyer’s journey? Let’s talk in the comments section below.

About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknown.

In this article, you’re going to learn exactly how to use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to beat your competitors in the game of SEO.

What is an SEO strategy?

Why do you need an SEO strategy?

About Keyword Intelligence

1. Keyword Research

1. Start with a list of seed keywords

2. Generate keyword ideas

3. Select and group your list of keywords

2. Competitor Analysis

1. Identify competitors’ winning keywords

2. Spy on competitors’ featured snippets

3. Content Strategy

1. Question research

4. BONUS: Update and revise your old content

Conclusion

About Kelvin

Related Posts

What can you do with BiQ? Learn all about the features you can use with this free SEO tool.

1. Doing Keyword Research with Keyword Intelligence

Choosing The Right Keywords Is No Longer Rocket Science With Related Keywords

Writer’s Block? Try Content Ideas!

Know Your Customers Better with Popular Questions

Keeping up with Trending Search Report

2. Fix Your Content Marketing with Content Intelligence

Report Overview

Word Vector SEO

Keyword SEO

Fundamental SEO

Start Optimizing Your Content with BiQ

3. Track Your Keyword Ranking using Rank Intelligence

Find keywords that your site already rank for

Discover underperformed keywords and improve them

4. Monitor Your Site Progress with Rank tracking

Monitor Site’s Performance

Assess Your Website’s Volatility

Check Your Competitor’s Progress

Is This The Best Free SEO Tool For You?

About Kelvin

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Basics of Keyword Research

Understanding Important Keyword Attributes

Why Doing Keyword Research Is Important In SEO + The Tool You Need

What’s Inside BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence

Conducting Keyword Research with BiQ

Joining The BiQ SEO Suite Closed Beta

About Winnie

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The Only SEO Tool That Gives Cost Control Back To You

What Makes BiQ Different From The Rest Of The SEO Tools?

The Unique Selling Points That Drive BiQ

Keyword Intelligence

Content Intelligence

Rank Intelligence

Rank Tracking

Collections

What’s Next In Store For BiQ?

Constructive Feedback Is Welcomed!

First-Timer & Eager To Join the Revolution?

Finally, Refer To Your Friends & Get The Word Out!

About Winnie

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What is Keyword Research and Why We Do It?

What Is Search Volume and How to Get Them?

When Should You Ignore A Keyword’s Search Volume?

1. When You Are Using a Long-Tail Keyword

ii. Competition

2. When You Are In A Niche Market

3. When It is A Seasonal Keyword

4. When They Are Irrelevant

5. Page Rarely Rank For A Single Keyword Alone

6. When you are focusing on voice search.

Conclusion

About Howard

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Use keyword gap analysis to help you uncover valuable keyword opportunities that you are missing out on.

What is keyword gap analysis for SEO?

Why does the keyword gap analysis matter to you?

How can you do keyword gap analysis?

1. Expand your target keyword

2. Identify your competitors