Ok, so “good” is subjective, but not all keywords are created equal and it’s important to know how to decide which ones are the best for your site and for your goals — this is the basis of how to do keyword research. That’s where your keyword tool comes in. In my opinion, good keywords have four qualities:

• helpful to your audience and will attract your ideal client
• search volume
• search intent that matches the content you’re planning
• low competition (especially when your site is new to SEO)

Let’s break that down.

The Topic is Helpful to Your Audience

The most important thing to think about when considering a keyword to target is whether or not it's relevant to your audience. This is why one of the first things we do is identify our ideal client. Once you understand that, it should be easy to know whether or not a topic will be helpful or interesting to your people!

Now, sometimes you will be guessing, but generally speaking, you should know the types of things your audience will want to learn about.

Let’s say you teach watercolor classes online. Your ideal customer is looking for information about learning how to watercolor. Choosing keywords related to hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park probably wouldn’t be as good a fit.

Search Volume

Once you’ve confirmed the topic is one that your audience will find helpful or interesting, you need to be sure people are actually searching for the keyword or phrase you’re thinking about writing about. Seriously, you’d be surprised how many times people give me a few keywords they think their audience is looking for, only for us to discover absolutely no one is searching using the words they think they are.

Now, not every single piece of content has to be optimized for SEO, but if you want that content to be found via organic search, then you will want to make sure someone somewhere is searching for the keyword you’re thinking about writing about.

Let’s learn how to see if a keyword has any search volume. Type one of your keywords into the search bar in your chosen research tool and see what results you get!

Staying with the “learn watercolor” example, using Keysearch, here’s what you’d get.

There’s a lot of information here, and it’s likely that no matter which tool you use, you’ll get similar results, but they might just be organized differently. The first thing we’ll look for is how much search volume that exact keyword or keyphrase gets.

According to Keysearch, “learn watercolor” gets 880 searches per month in the US. That’s quite a bit! Any search volume is good — even 10!