Performing a Keyword Research for Your WordPress Website

Keyword research is not a SEO tool but also a versatile assistant in the creation of your content strategy. Keyword research should be performed for any website that aim to constantly grow its audience and engage the existing one. Basically, it is one of the first tools you should use while creating your WordPress project.

Some website owners rely purely on their sense of the audience and its demands. Unfortunately, this method is very unreliable because the audience`s wishes are constantly evolving and changing. Today`s trends can lose their popularity tomorrow. That is why you should be well-informed about user requests every day.

Lots of tools have been already created to help website owners with the task of constant keyword research process. These tools perform deep analytics of user requests and behavior to provide you with the full map of active trends. We have gathered the most versatile and popular tools for keyword research for your convenient decision making.

Why Do You Need a Keyword Research?

There are 3 essential reasons to use keyword research as the important tool for analytics: finding popular keywords to attract more traffic, look for content ideas, investigate your competitors. Most of WordPress website owners use keyword research only for the first reason because it is the most understandable and obvious one: you look for user requests and create some content towards their demands. But that is definitely not the end of the story.

Content ideas surround us. But it is not always easy to rank them from the most important and trending to the least ones. Keyword research is one of the best tools to determine the popularity of a definite topic in a definite period of time. Trends are changing very fast but with automatic keyword research tools you can catch them easily.

It is also very interesting to see what other people do in the same topic or sphere of knowledge. If you have ever tried to do it manually, then you probably know the unbelievable difficulty of such a task. Fortunately, automatic keyword research tools have covered this problem too. You can easily investigate your competitors` keywords and even discover their content strategy with some knowledge and experience in the sphere of web analytics.

Now let us move towards the tools that provide such a magnificent service of keyword research and look closer at their features and opportunities.

SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the most popular and versatile tools on the modern market. Its popularity is based on the winning combination of simplicity for beginners and the depth of analytics for advanced website owners. SEMRush gives you 10 free keyword searches after the simple registration (only email is required). Afterwards the service requires monthly or annual fees. The prices begin from $99.95 per month.

The work flow within SEMRush begins with a keyword or phrase you enter to the main search form. You can also enter an URL or a name of any domain to investigate them. The first screen you will see after entering a keyword is the overview of the most popular analytics: number of average searches, average price for paid advertisement and the number of search results.

If you want some deeper analytics, then you should scroll further to investigate phrase matches and related keywords. This section gives you nearly unlimited opportunities to search for new content ideas with the most powerful traffic attraction potential.

To see what is going on among competitors, scroll further to the next dedicated block. It will show the keyword density and visibility for each of the competitors` websites. You can even track whether your competitors have paid advertisement related to the given keywords.

And this is only the overview of the surface features of the least expensive pack. You can dive even deeper with Guru, Business or Enterprise plans from SEMRush.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the worthy competitors of SEMRush. It also has simple and clear interface hiding virtually unlimited analytics` opportunities. Ahrefs offers the complete set of tools for SEO specialists within keyword and backlink research blocks. Rank tracking and web monitoring will give opportunities to follow the trends in real time.

Competitive analytics block gives full set of features to investigate your competitors by search engine rank, word density, paid advertisement campaigns and lots of other parameters.

Additional content research block is a versatile tool to observe your competitors` content within a detailed review. You can see not only keywords` density and other SEO parameters of the text but also social sharing counts media influence impact.

As for price, Ahrefs is very similar to SEMRush. The cheapest monthly fee is also $99 and the annual fees are also available to save you some money. The 7-days trial period can be provided for $7. It means that you can not try the product for free but rather for a moderate fee.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a kind of unique project for content ideas investigation that offers its service for free. It has less features and opportunities compared to Ahrefs and SEMRush but focuses on one goal to reach it in the best way possible. The tool also has paid Pro version which allows a user to set up country and language for the keyword request and save reports with high resolution images to your computer or Cloud.

AnswerThePublic is based on Google and Bing`s auto suggestions to form a mind-map of possible questions, words and phrases connected with the keyword you have entered. The search results can be downloaded as the picture of created mind-map or as text data within a CSV file.

Common Keyword Research Tips

As you can see, there are limitless opportunities to analyze keywords and created attractive content on its basis. We have just gathered some more tips on how to start keyword research with the above mentioned tools to get a desired result as fast as possible:

• Try to enter your WordPress website URL to SEMRush or Ahrefs to investigate the initial information about your project. You need to know what is happening now and how search engines see your website content for the moment being. This will be the best start for any further analytics.
• Start with broad and common keywords but then move to more narrow entries. It will give you the opportunity to find your niche faster and more precisely.
• Search for keywords that answer user question or provide them with some crucial decisions. AnswerThePublic`s service will be the perfect tool for such an investigation.
• Do not limit your content only with text around investigated keywords. Create audio, video, infographics and other interactive content to awe your website visitors. FAQs, documentation and landing pages around popular keywords could also be a good decision.
• Track the performance of your keywords with Google Analytics tools. This information is crucial to evolve your keyword research strategy in accordance with the ever changing trends.