Researching Keywords for Your SEO Strategy, Step by Step

Successfully ranking for the keywords you’re targeting won’t make much of an impact on your business if those keywords are not relevant to your audience and their buying journey. In fact, many companies end up wasting a lot of time and resources in this pursuit. That’s why a smart, thoughtful and data-driven keyword strategy is paramount to an effective SEO strategy.

Fortunately, you have everything you need to start conducting keyword research and setting your strategic direction now.

How to research keywords for your B2B SEO strategy

By following this step-by-step process, you can start figuring out what your audience wants to find, how they’re looking for it, and how you show up for them in the search results.

Check your current rankings

Before you start researching keywords, it’s always wise to run an SEO audit of your current rankings as step one. This can provide a baseline of what your website is showing up, which can help you understand where search engines view your domain as authoritative. 

Checking your website’s SEO rankings is fairly straightforward, and there is a wide variety of both free and paid online tools you can use to do it. 

Conduct a competitive analysis

An SEO competitor analysis is a review of how your competitors are showing up in search. This concerns not only business competitors (i.e. companies competing for your customers) but also SERP competitors (i.e. companies competing for your target keywords), which are not always the same. 

This process can tell you a lot about how competitors are approaching their keyword strategies – and how you can differentiate yours or overtake key rankings.

Look for opportunities using a gap analysis

As you’re analyzing competitors, keep an eye out for any opportunities they’ve missed – or “gaps” in their SEO footprint. These include topics that they aren’t showing up for, but that customers in your solution category are searching for.

An SEO gap analysis can be a great place to start your search, surfacing keywords your competition may have overlooked entirely. Many online SEO tools and expert partners can help you quickly surface gaps in your competition’s keyword strategy. At TopRank, we develop keyword glossaries that list competitor rankings for each keyword alongside your own rankings to easily see where you can fill in the blanks for your audience and build share of search.

Bonus: Create a topical map 

In modern SEO, it’s very important to demonstrate topical authority by covering priority subjects in depth and at length. You want search engines like Google to recognize your domain’s expertise and focus on a topical area by covering as many facets of it as possible, creating and cross-linking content for the core keyword as well as relevant longtail offshoots and variations. (This is often referred to as a hub-and-spoke model.)

A topical map can be a fantastic tool for this purpose, helping you clearly map out different keywords that are tied together by user intent. Our agency builds topical maps for clients as part of our SEO service offerings and they are amazingly useful for content planning.

Prioritize relevance and intent over volume

When it comes to finding keywords worth pursuing, you should always consider relevance and intent more important than volume — especially in B2B marketing. As any savvy practitioner knows, bringing a dozen of the right people to your site is much more valuable than 100 of the wrong people.

Keywords with relatively low monthly search volume can be valuable if the people looking for them have the right relevance and intent. As you search for SEO keywords, try to determine how the most educated, high-intent users are searching for products and services like yours. Chances are, you’ll determine that they’re using lower volume search terms to try to hone in on what they’re looking for more specifically. 

The most effective SEO strategies focus on a combination of high, medium, and low volume keywords of high relevance and match their content to intent accordingly, filtering users from higher-volume keywords to more specific product-related pages.

Balance volume and achievability 

Along with the average search volume that a keyword drives, SEO tools will also highlight the keyword difficulty. This is often expressed as a percentage, with 0% being the easiest and 100% being the hardest. Keyword difficulty is essentially a measure of how firmly entrenched the current top results are in the SERP for a given keyword. As keyword difficulty increases, you’ll need better content and more referring domains to compete with other results.

Keywords with high volume and low difficulty are often the “low-hanging fruit” worth prioritizing, but chances are you won’t find enough of those keywords to build out your full strategy. 

After that, you’ll have to pick and choose your battles by evaluating what’s valuable vs. what’s achievable. Striking the right balance will mean targeting a healthy combination of high-intent, low volume keywords with low or reasonable difficulty and higher volume keywords with achievable difficulty. 

Report, rinse, repeat

Effective SEO strategy is never “finished.” As you pursue the keywords you’ve surfaced, report on your ranking progress on a regular basis. Evaluate how effective your approach is to optimize your strategy over time, and continuously look for new keywords you can start targeting to round out your strategy and build your domain authority. 

SEO keyword strategy template

Consult the following checklist for each keyword you’re considering adding to your strategy. The more boxes you can check off for the keyword in question, the better an opportunity it represents. 

• Ranking for this keyword would improve your brand’s visibility and/or drive the right audience traffic to your site
• This keyword is directly relevant to your brand’s topical pillars
• When people search for this keyword, they are looking for information you have the expertise and authority to provide
• Users who search for this keyword are at some stage of your marketing funnel
• Your direct competitors are not ranking in the top 10 positions for this keyword OR you feel confident that your content could outrank theirs
• This keyword has enough monthly search volume OR the right search intent to drive quality traffic to your site
• This keyword has low enough keyword difficulty that a site with your level of authority could rank for it 
• You already have or could create compelling content that provides what users are looking for when they search this keyword

In all likelihood, most of the keywords you find will not check each of these boxes. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not worth pursuing. Use this SEO keyword strategy template to inform your larger SEO strategy and help you determine which keywords to prioritize first, not as the sole arbiter of whether pursuing a keyword could be useful.

Despite all the advanced tools and resources you have to help you, researching keywords for an SEO strategy remains as much art as science. Finding the right keywords to pursue is as much about understanding your audience and your industry as it is practicing good SEO — which is exactly why modern SEO advice like this is all about helping you do both.

For more help finding and pursuing the right keywords, check out our full guide on Why You Need a Keyword Strategy and How to Create One. 

 

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