How I Conduct SEO Keyword Research for Myself and Clients

Learn my SEO keyword research process that's helped me and clients rank for important keywords that build our businesses.

Keyword research is the most important first step in writing a blog post. 

Sure, you could whip out your keyboard and type out an entire article off the top of your head. But without keyword research, you have no way of knowing if your article will rank or earn any traffic.

When you start with SEO keyword research, you get to sleuth out what your customers and readers are looking for when they type in your keyword. You may think you know what they’re looking for, but often, you don’t have the full picture.

Keyword research also shows you which articles are already ranking for that keyword. In other words, you get a good look at who you’re up against if you want to rank. 

Without keyword research, you have no way of knowing if your article will rank or earn any traffic.

Knowing all this gives you clues about what to include in your article and how to structure the article, name the article, and describe your article so that it has a better chance of ranking.

So in this article, I’m sharing my entire keyword research process (and giving you an easy-to-use template) so you can give your articles the best chance of ranking for important keywords. This method has helped me write dozens of articles that rank in the top 1 to 3 results for clients and drive thousands of monthly visitors to my clients’ sites every month.

Note: This article assumes that you already know what keywords you want to rank for. If you’re still figuring that out, I’ll dedicate another article to that process and link back to it when it’s ready.

A quick overview of my SEO keyword research process

When I research a keyword, I follow these three basic steps:

1. Look at the search engine results page (aka the SERP)
2. Look at the top 3 or 4 ranking articles
3. Write out my ideas for the article based on what I’ve found

All of this goes into my keyword research template, so I can refer to it when I’m outlining and writing the article later.

So yeah, it’s pretty simple. Now that you can see the big picture of what this is going to look like, I’m going to walk you through each stage and show you exactly what I do.

Step #1 – Look at the search engine results page

The search engine results page (SERP) itself will tell you a lot about your keyword and what Google thinks people are looking for.

Sometimes it may include an AI overview (though those are harder to spot these days), or a bunch of pictures at the top, or a collection of products to buy. There’s a lot you can understand from this page.

Search for the keyword on Google

So the first step is to go to Google, type in your keyword, and search for it.

This is what I see on my screen:

If you’re not in the same location as your target market, though, you’ll want to use a browser extension that can emulate the search results in your target country.

Since I live in Japan, but work with clients in the US, I use the free Chrome extension SEOQuake. After I search for the keyword, I select “United States” for the locale and click “Set locale” to change to US results.

Here’s a quick video where I show how to install and use this plugin yourself:

Screenshot what you find

Next, I start looking through the entire SERP page and taking screenshots of everything.

Here I’m asking questions like:

• Is there an AI snippet at the top? What articles are ranking for the AI snippet, and what kind of information is included?
• What other related questions and searches are popping up?
• Are there any featured snippets or other types of media featured at the top?
• Are there any forum results showing up on page 1?
• And what are the YouTube results for the keyword?

For example, here are some questions people are asking about “seo keyword research”:

As I’m looking at these, the main question I’m asking myself is, “What is the main thing that Google is showing its searchers?” 

Is it how to do SEO keyword research? Tools to do keyword research? Or a full overview of the topic for beginners?

In other words, what are searchers trying to find out when they type this in? This is the search intent for the keyword.

The results for “seo keyword research” seem to be a mix of free keyword research tools and how to do seo keyword research.

Google has a pretty good understanding of this (that’s what they do for a living), so you can bet that whatever they choose to show, that’s what people are looking for. So if you write an article that brings all of that information together in an engaging format, you will have a better chance of getting featured here.

Step #2 – Examine the top-ranking articles

Next, I look at the top 3 ranking articles. If some of the results are product pages, YouTube videos, or other non-articles, I will skip those and just do the top 3 blog posts I find.

(If almost ALL the results are product pages or non-blog posts, then you’ve probably chosen the wrong keyword. I will write another article about how to decide which keywords to focus on, then link back to it when it’s ready. For now, just make sure that MOST of the ranking pages are blog posts.)

Take screenshots

First, I take a screenshot of the page title, directory, and meta description as it shows up in the SERP.

Record article details

After the screenshot, I record this information:

• The URL of the page
• The word count
• The headers included on the page

The free Chrome plugin Detailed SEO makes it easy to find the word count and headers, so this takes a few seconds to copy and paste.

Here’s what it looks like for the article above:

Here’s how to install and use this plugin:

Step #3 – Write down some ideas for the article

Now that I understand the search intent for the keyword (aka what people want to know when they type it in), and what’s already ranking, I can start to form some ideas for the article I want to write.

I scroll to the bottom of my research notes and write out some thoughts on these questions:

• What’s the general topic (or list of topics) that people want to learn when they search this term?
• What are the gaps that we could add to our article make an even better resource than what’s out there?
• What kind of URL slug should we use to target this keyword? (Usually this is the keyword itself, but based on what’s ranking, we might want to take a different direction.)
• What kind of structure should the article follow? (Is it a step-by-step post, a comparison post, a review-style article, or something else?)

Now, actually planning out the post and outlining it is another stage of my writing process (and I have another template for that), but I’ll save that for another article.

But for now, I jot down some notes that I have for the article and everything I’d like to include.

How to make your blog post extra juicy

Let’s say there are a ton of articles already ranking for the topic, and they’ve done a great job of covering the content you know people are looking for.

How can you make your blog post even more valuable to the reader?

There are SO many things you can do, and that’s what makes content creation exciting! Here are some things I would consider for my own articles:

• Conduct original research in your industry or with your customers and include those insights
• Share your personal opinion and experience on the topic (no one else has that!)
• Interview another industry leader or knowledgable person in your company on the topic and include their thoughts
• Add a Loom or video tutorial showing them how to use a tool or do something related to the topic
• Give an extra section of tips that are related to the topic
• Walk them through a real-life example
• Create downloadable templates or copy-and-paste text
• Give them a bunch of ideas to jumpstart their process
• Share products you sell that can help them take the next step
• Give the article a different angle that’s not on the SERP yet

I’m actually using some of these in this here article right here! ? It just makes any article that much better.

Final Thoughts

So that’s my keyword research process in a nutshell.

Click the link below to download my template as a Google Doc. It’ll walk you through the process so you can recreate this for your own articles.

>> Download My SEO Keyword Research Template <<

(This is free and you don’t need to enter your email!)

Remember, good keyword research is the foundation for an SEO-optimized article that’s designed to rank well in search results and bring in traffic to your website. That’s not the only thing you need to rank, but without it, you can pretty much kiss your chances of reaching page 1 of Google goodbye.

Good luck with your SEO research, and if you have any questions about this, leave them in the comments below and I’ll be happy to answer them.