The act of figuring out what language your target customer uses when searching for your products, services, and content.

1. Keyword or Query: What people are typing into Google or another search engine like YouTube or Pinterest. Not meta tags!
2. Search volume: How many searches are performed per month for this query, globally or in a specific geography.
3. Search intent: What is the searcher looking?
   • Informational: the person is looking for information
   • Navigational: the person wants to go somewhere. He might type in Facebook or YouTube, etc.
   • Transactional: the person is imminently looking to make a purchase. (High CPC)
   • Ambiguous: Depending on who I am, my intent could be different if I search for Apple for example.

Some research you could do if you were just using Google and an inexpensive browser extension called Keywords Everywhere

• Competitors: Anyone also ranking for the terms I want to rank for.
• Patterns: Similarities between sites and pages that rank for this term. (You might notice specific terms that people use. So you'll start to build up a vocabulary that helps you understand kind of the query space of your niche)
• Seasonality: Does this query have spikes during the year which can help me plan around it? This can help you make sure you're writing content in advance, so it has time to rank before that big search spike happens.
• Search Intent: What kind of content are people looking for when they search for this? e.g. I have a chocolate chip cookie delivery service. I have bought that keyword or tried to organically rank for it. Chances are I am not going to do so well. Because there is a mismatch between the search intent and what kind of content I am trying to offer. These people want recipes. And I'm trying to sell them some kind of delivery service.

"Chocolate chip cookies" query example.

How to do keyword research?

1. Start with a "seed" keyword
2. Explore, filter, and iterate on related keywords
   • Google searches related to my query
   • Google auto-complete
   • For search volume use Keywords Everywhere, Ahrefs, KeySearch
3. Find terms you might be able to rank for

Figuring out if you can rank

• Search intent
  • What does Google appear to believe the search intent behind this query is?
  • What are people really looking for?
• Backlinks
  • How many backlinks do pages in this Search Engine Result Page (SERP) have?
  • How relevant are they?
• Topical authority
  • Are most websites ranking for this topic ONLY about this topic?
  • How niche?