Yes, you read that title right.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a battle-hardened veteran or a beginner trying to break into the world of digital marketing. With only three steps, you can bag a decent haul of profitable keywords — without spending a single cent.

Keep in mind that keywords are indispensable to the success of any inbound or outbound marketing strategy. This includes PPC campaigns, SEO, email marketing, or guest blogging.

Despite its absolute significance, keyword research shouldn’t take too much of your time.

After all, if you’re an entrepreneur, you probably already have a lot on your plate.

Without further ado, here is the three-step keyword research workflow that will kick your marketing into high gear:

Step 1: Expand Your Seed Keyword

As an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t need a special tool to come up with seed keywords.

These are broad terms that are relevant to your brand, your target market, and your industry.

For example, if your company sells organic diet pills, then “weight loss” could be one of your seed keywords. It’s something that resonates with the needs of your target audience and reflects the solution that your product offers.

If you are having difficulties coming up with seed keywords, then you may need to ask yourself if you’re really in the right niche.

Got yourself a seed keyword? Good.
It’s time to load up Ubersuggest and expand it.

Ubersuggest is a free yet powerful keyword research tool that you’ll need for the rest of this guide. It works by expanding a seed keyword into long-tail keyword variations, which are more profitable and easier to target in SEO.

To use Ubersuggest, simply enter your seed keyword, adjust its localisation, and click “Look Up.” You don’t have to register for an account or sign up for a newsletter to do so.

After a second or two, Ubersuggest will present you with hundreds of long-tail keyword suggestions along with important metrics that can help you find the ones that are worth pursuing.

To those who have never conducted keyword research before, here is a brief explanation of each metric:

• Search Volume
  The first metric that may get your attention would be the keyword’s monthly search volume. As you may have guessed, it directly measures the popularity and, to a degree, the profitability of a keyword.
• CPC
  If you’re researching keywords for PPC purposes, then you need to pay attention to the CPC or cost per click metric. Basically, it’s the average amount advertisers are willing to spend for a click while targeting a keyword.
• Competition
  Lastly, the competition metric is directly tied to a keyword’s difficulty. In Ubersuggest, this is measured on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0.

Although the search volume and CPC metrics are both self-explanatory, the competitiveness rating of keywords deserves a closer look.

The sweet spot in Ubersuggest is around 0.4 or less, which indicates that a keyword is still within reach for small brands and startups.

Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that there are at least five keyword suggestions that look enticing:

Sure, these keywords may get a lot of searches and have a low enough competitive ratings to be feasible. But remember that we’re only at step one in this three-step guide.

The next thing you need to consider would be the user intent behind these keywords.

Step 2: Sifting for Commercial Keywords

As far as search engines are concerned, there are only three types of user queries: navigational, informational, and transactional.

Navigational search queries are when a user types in a specific website, brand name, or person, which means they already know what they’re looking for. Informational queries, on the other hand, are mainly done for research purposes — hence the name.

What you want to attract are transactional search queries that are done by users who are ready to take action, be it by subscribing, making a direct inquiry, or purchasing.

With Ubersuggest, you can weed out navigational queries while picking out transactional queries at the same time. All you need to do is enter commercial terms in the “Filter Results” field while adding competitor brand names and other proper nouns in the “Negative Keywords” field.

In relation to the example above, some of the suitable commercial terms you can use are “services,” “prices,” and “cheap.” Let’s also include “Aussie Pet Mobile” since it’s an actual brand name for a mobile pet grooming company.

Take note that different commercial terms apply to different niches. If you’re selling products rather than services, some of the commercial terms you can include are “buy,” “purchase,” or “order.”

Step 3: Double-Check Keyword Seasonality

So, we looked for long-tail keywords and combed through the results to find keywords with transactional intent.

You could be eyeing on a couple of keyword suggestions at this point. But before you conclude your findings, you need to check for keyword seasonality.

Put simply, a keyword’s seasonality is its tendency to drastically spike in terms of search volume during specific months.

“Artificial Christmas tree,” for example, is seasonal between the months of October and December only:

Fortunately, keyword seasonality isn’t usually an issue for other niches. However, they can help you determine which keyword to prioritise in your marketing by observing their month by month growth.

For example, the keyword “cat grooming services” clearly shows a promising upward trend:

If you’re an entrepreneur and you discovered this keyword, you should seriously consider optimising for this keyword and offer this service. Just don’t forget to look for similar keywords for diversification purposes, which will maximise your chances of being visible on search engines:

Conclusion

As an entrepreneur, every minute of your daily life is valuable.

You can’t afford to waste hours staring at spreadsheets — unable to find a target keyword for your next marketing move.

Hopefully, the guide above helped simplify your keyword research workflow and generate a handful of profitable keyword opportunities. And if you liked this post, be sure to spread the love by sharing it on social media.

Good luck!