Imagine serving the best cocktail in a party without knowing who your guests are.
You spent a lot of time, money, and effort preparing the drinks, only to find out in the end that majority of your guests are minors.
All your efforts would have been for nothing.
The same could be said for digital marketing.
Every marketing campaign — regardless of whether it’s for social media or the search engines — needs to have a list of feasible and target-worthy keywords at its foundation.
It’s exactly because of this that you need to give keyword research its due diligence and not simply skip the process.
Without doing proper keyword research, you might find yourself preparing your marketing funnels and assets for the wrong audience.
In this guide, we will cover tips and strategies that will help you find the best keywords in the fastest (and easiest) possible way.
Are you ready?
Let’s start!
Choosing the Best Keyword Research Tool
A good number of online marketers today — particularly the beginners — believe that using paid tools are a must if anyone were to succeed in digital marketing.
While that may be true in some situations, I can assure you that such doesn’t always have to be the case.
In fact, when it comes to the best keyword research tool, Ubersuggest would often cross the minds of seasoned marketers.
Why, Ubersuggest?
For one thing, the software is FREE. Yes, it’s free!
You don’t have to register to unlock any of its fantastic features. All you have to do is go straight to its page and use it. That simple.
In a matter of seconds, Ubersuggest will provide you with hundreds of keyword suggestions that you can use in your social marketing campaigns. All for free!
As you can see, keyword research always begins with choosing the right tool.
And, now that we have chosen the best among the rest, it’s time that we move on to the next step.
Seed Keyword Expansion
Another point worth highlighting about the platform is it loads really fast.
As a marketer, time is something that you can’t afford to waste. If you are slow in executing your marketing strategies, you lose significant amounts of profit.
Ubersuggest knows this, and so, you’ll be surprised at how quick it responds to queries. To start using this keyword tool, you must already have a seed keyword in mind.
Let’s say you’re managing an online store and you want to market your kitchenware products. As an example, we will use the term “kitchen utensils” as your seed keyword.
You’ll just have to enter it in the query box, click the “Look Up” button, then wait for a few seconds for the results to be generated.
As you can see, our seed keyword has yielded over a thousand keyword ideas.
With that number, I am sure that you will be able to find a lot of keyword opportunities for your online or social media marketing campaign.
Now that we have a comprehensive list of keyword suggestions, the next step is to identify the top keywords that you can use.
For this task, you need to consider the metric that Ubersuggest provides so you can select the best keyword opportunities available.
Understanding the Metric Features
Ubersuggest provides the three most crucial metric information that you need to spot the best keywords in the list.
Looking at the results, you’ll notice that there are three other columns to the right of the keyword suggestions.
They are labeled as Search Volume, CPC, and Competition.
Search volume refers to the overall monthly average search of a particular keyword. This information will let you know just how popular a keyword is.
On the other hand, CPC or cost per click shows the average amount marketers are willing to spend for a targeted keyword. So, if you’re planning to run paid ads, it is crucial that you pay close attention to this data, especially if you’re on a tight budget.
Lastly, competition refers to the competitiveness rating of the keyword. Ubersuggest rates competitiveness on the scale of 0.0 to 1.0, with the latter being the highest.
If you’re managing a campaign for a startup business, it is best that you stick with keywords within the 0.1 to 0.4 range. You have better chances of ranking for the keywords within this range because of low competition.
Depending on what your priority is when searching for the top keywords, Ubersuggest enables users to either sort or filter the keyword ideas it provided.
Let’s try sorting the data.
For instance, you want to sort the search volume of the keyword suggestions in descending order. To do that, all you have to do is click on the “up” arrowhead on the search volume header.
After clicking the “up” arrowhead, you will now have the keywords sorted in the order that you want.
As you can see, with the keyword suggestions sorted, it is ultimately easier to spot potential keywords.
Now, let’s try to select the three most promising keywords from the list. When choosing your top keywords, keep in mind the following tips:
- Choose the keywords with decent numbers of volume searches.
- Make sure the CPCs are within your budget.
- Choose the keywords with at least 0.1 to 0.7 competitiveness ratings.
Following these tips, you should now be able to handpick the following keyword suggestions.
Once you’re done selecting your top keywords, you may now export them as CSV files that you can save for future use.
To do this, just scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on the “Export to CSV” button.
Now that you know how to sort the keyword suggestions and determine the ones with the most potential using Ubersuggest’s metric features, let’s try to refine our list a bit further.
Refining Keyword Suggestions
For this task, I will teach you how to refine your keyword suggestions by utilizing the filters found on the left side of the Ubersuggest results page.
Let’s begin with the Filter Results feature. In our example, you can see that Ubersuggest provided us with over 1000 suggestions.
The Filter Results option will let you filter the list to show only the suggestions that contain a particular term of your choosing. For instance, let’s filter the list so it would just show the keywords with the word “utensils.”
Now you will see that all the keywords in our list all bear the term “utensil.”
Aside from the Filter Results feature, Ubersuggest also has the Negative Keywords feature that will let you eliminate keywords that contain specific terms you don’t want to be included in the list.
This feature is particularly important if you want to avoid using the keywords already being utilized by your competitors.
Now let’s try putting the term “utensils” in the Negative Keywords box. Upon saving, your list should now look like this.
Both the Filter Results and the Negative Keywords features will help you refine your keyword searches so you could better spot other keyword opportunities.
Final Words
Keyword research is one of the essential foundations of digital marketing.
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a PPC, SEO, or social media marketing campaign. Without the right keywords to lead your campaign to the right people, your marketing strategy is bound to fail.
By using the guide above, you’d be able to breeze through your keyword research process and be able to come up with the feasible (and profitable) keywords to target for your social media marketing campaigns.
If you have questions, ideas, or strategies that you’d like to share, then please add them in the comments section below. Thank you.