What SEO keywords to use – Searching for keywords to optimize your content and generate organic traffic to your website is easier than you think.

I have seen many articles on optimising content for good SEO rankings. However, I have never read anything that explains step by step how to search for keywords and select the ones that are relevant to develop your content.

In this post, I want to explain the process that we use at Splash to generate our posts and seek to generate organic traffic.

After reading a thousand blogs online and trying a thousand ways to search for keywords, these steps have worked the most for us, so they are tested by ourselves.

It is a process that may seem long, but it is adequate to position your website in search engines. I hope it will also help you search for better keywords, optimize your articles and generate more organic traffic.

Now that you have distinguished what keywords are, let’s move on to the steps that will help you develop a keyword research strategy and improve the rankings of your website.

1. Create a new Google Sheets sheet

The first thing you should do is go to Google Sheets and produce a new sheet. Give it a name and write “Keyword” or “Palabra Clave” in the first column and row.

Now that you have a new document, it’s time to start working on your keywords and understand which ones to choose. This document will help you in each of the following steps.

2. Identify your ideal buyer

I like to talk about ideal buyers ( buyer persona), not potential customers. Clients can be many. But your ideal buyer better defines who your strategy is aimed at.

Your ideal buyer is the person with the greatest urgency to solve a problem, with the highest purchasing power, and whose sales cycle is as short as possible. Seek to create your Buyer Persona.

Also, you must look for a niche market that is perfect for your ideal buyer.

You don’t want to make the typical mistake that many entrepreneurs make: find a problem that only one person or a tiny group of people have.

You must take the time to think about your ideal buyer before moving on to the third step.

3. Think like your customers

You must identify this person to think as they think. Think about the different ways they can search for the topic of your content or blog post.

Never use the Google Keyword Planner: it is a mistake that will limit you from finding different keywords that may be essential to generating organic traffic to your website.

Example of why not to use Google Keyword Planner as a first step:

I’ll give an example of why you shouldn’t use Google Keyword Planner as the first step in searching for keywords and optimizing your content for SEO.

Think of all the disputes that come to mind about soccer and write them down.

There are no wrong or good answers. It’s a brainstorm. We did that exercise in Splash with the team, and the keywords that came up as a result were:

  • Real Madrid
  • Messi
  • Stadiums
  • Spain
  • Pep Guardiola to Man City

Now, if you enter the Google Keyword Planner and type “soccer” as a keyword, you will realize that the most significant number of searches are focused on the following words:

None of the words we found in our exercise appears within most Google Keyword Planner searches.

Most soccer searches focus on finding “soccer scores”, but when you ask people about it, they will use other words.

This is a blunder. We often go directly to search for keywords instead of putting ourselves in our clients’ shoes and thinking like them. Understanding the topics that are of interest to them is a fundamental step.

4. Think about the search terms your customer uses

Define the topic of your blog post or content before searching for keywords. To facilitate the exercise, I will use this post as an example.

Write the topic of the post.

For this blog post, I thought I would write something related to “keywords” within Google Keyword Planner.

Be more specific

I’m not interested in discussing how to use this tool to generate ads or search only for long-tail keywords.

I am interested in discussing how to search for or choose keywords to write blog posts with a good ranking within Google. 

I want to write something that explains step-by-step how to research keywords before writing a blog post and help people improve their SEO rankings.

Google it

As the excellent Latino would say, now « Google it ». At the end of the search, Google will recommend more words or searches similar to your keywords.

When doing a “keyword” search, you will realize that many of the variations probably won’t help you as they have no relevance to your blog post.

This is key. Now write all these new ideas in your Google Sheets document. You can perform this exercise as often as you want or as necessary.

The idea is to have as many variables of potential keywords and ideas as before searching for your keywords in Google Keyword Planner.

Generate substitutes

Find different ways to say a similar thing. I do not consider myself a person with an extensive vocabulary. Words don’t come to mind so quickly, so I always rely on my great friend, the dictionary. I look for synonyms for my keywords.

In this case, I’m interested in finding synonyms for “select“, “search“, and “process”.