How to Find SEO Keywords for Creatives
SEO is one of the best marketing strategies to get sustainable leads without spending a dime on ads.
Keyword research is the first step to building a winning SEO strategy.
Let’s walk through how to find and choose the best SEO keywords for your business.
Why Keyword Research Is Important
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are what people type into search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!...) to find information. They can be words, phrases or even questions.
For example, someone who considers hiring a life coach may type “life coach”, “life coach for entrepreneurs”, “how much is life coach” - all of these are considered SEO keywords for life coach.
Keyword research is all about finding the terms (words, phrases and questions) your ideal clients are using to search.
Simple as it may sound, finding the right keywords requires knowing your ideal clients and evaluating the market.
Why You Need Keyword Research
You might be in one of these scenarios:
You have ideas about your niche but not sure if it’s a profitable market
You want to create valuable content but don’t know what you should write about
You create great content, but few people find your work unless you actively promote them on social media
If any of those scenarios sound familiar, keyword research should be your new bestie.
Though most people associate keywords with SEO, keyword research is basically modern-day market research.
It helps you estimate the market size of your niche
It helps you plan and create content based on topics people care about
It helps your content reach the people who are searching for the exact topic without you doing any promotion
Keyword research is the foundation of SEO.
If you’re “doing SEO” (i.e. use Yoast plugin, pay someone to optimize your content etc.) without having the right keywords, you will get minimal results or a lot of traffic that doesn't convert at best.
You might pick a topic very few people are searching for. Or you may choose a popular topic that already has a lot of existing content, in which case your work will be lost among the sea of other websites.
Keyword research is how you make sure your content has high value and reaches the right audiences.
Keyword Research Process
Step 1: Brainstorming A Starting List Of Keyword Ideas
Start simply by coming up with words, phrases, and questions you think are relevant for your business and ideal clients.
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal clients. What might they be searching for?
Here’re some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
Keywords describing your services
List all the terms people may use to describe what you do. For example, if you’re a life coach, you may also list personal coach, spiritual coach, lifestyle counselling, self-esteem therapy, personal development…
Keywords describing your niche
We all want to work with people who get us and/or are similar to us. Your ideal clients might self-identify using phrases like life coach for new moms, business coach for artists, fitness coach for busy professionals…
If your business is local, you can also add terms related to your location (e.g. life coach in Santa Monica).
Keywords with your skills, techniques, or certifications
Your ideal clients might be searching for a specialty, like stress management, hypnotherapy, law of attraction, whole30 coach etc.
Pro-tip: Search engines know what terms often go together even if they’re not synonyms. Even if you don’t end up targeting these keywords, it’s still helpful to note them down and sprinkle them into your website content to strengthen your ranking.
Keywords related to challenges, pain points, and questions
The majority of people searching online are not ready to buy. If you only focus on the tiny percent of people who are ready to buy, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential future sales.
Ideally, you want to create content for your ideal clients early in their journeys so that they think of you when they’re ready to buy.
At this stage, they might search for specific problems. For example, they might search phrases like how to stop binge eating when stressed, cannot sleep well, how to find my passions, should I quit my job…
Keywords related to desired outcomes
Similar to challenges, your ideal clients might be searching for ways to accomplish a goal. Here’re some examples: lose weight fast, how to be confident, how to make more money, how to become a life coach…
Step 2: Use Keyword Research Tools
After the first step, you might get a list of 10-15 keywords.
There’s a lot of free and paid tools to help you expand this list.
The tools listed below are the most user-friendly ones that you can use even if you’re not tech-savvy.
✧ Google Suggestions and Related Searches
Difficulty: Easy
Price: Free
Go to Google and start typing one of the keywords from your starting list.
As soon as you start typing, Google will show autocomplete to save you time typing. Their suggestions are based on what many other people have searched for. This is the first source to get you more keyword ideas.
Once you’ve entered a specific keyword, scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll find even more suggestions.
You can repeat this process several times. For example, you search “life coach for moms” and see a suggestion for “self-care coach for moms”. As you click on that option, you can scroll to the bottom of the page again to find more suggestions.
✧ Youtube and Pinterest Suggestions
Difficulty: Easy
Price: Free
There’s an increasing number of people searching for tutorials on Youtube instead of Google.
Similar to Google, Youtube will show you a list of suggestions as soon as you start typing.
Pinterest is also growing in popularity for visual learners. There’s a ton of great keyword ideas you can find here, especially if you enjoy creating visual content more than writing.
Unlike other social media, Pinterest is actually a search engine and its keyword suggestions are based on what other users are searching for.
Head over to Pinterest and sign up for an account to start using their searches.
Just like other search engines, Pinterest will show you suggestions on the search bar before you hit enter.
Once you’ve selected a keyword, you’ll find more suggestions right below the search bar. Select any of these and it will give you even more options.
✧ Google Search Console
Difficulty: Medium
Price: Free
A lot of people jump right into creating new content for SEO. However, if you have an existing website, chances are you already rank for certain keywords.
The fact that you’re already ranking means Google sees your website as a good fit for these keywords. These keywords will be easier to improve ranking rather than creating new content.
Review your existing website analytics to see which keywords you’re already ranked for.
To do this in Google Search Console, go to Performance on the left side menu. Scroll down and you’ll see a list of keywords under Queries.
Related: How to set up Google Search Console with Squarespace
✧ Other Tools
Answerthepublic.com is a pretty cool tool. They take search engine data and gives you keyword ideas in a visual format.
Their basic free version allows you to do three searches a day. You don’t even have to create an account. Simply head over to their website and enter a general keyword to get started.
Another free option you can use is Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a great tool because you can do both generating and evaluating keyword ideas here.
Step 3: Evaluate And Pick The Best keywords
By now you’ve probably realized there’s an awful lot of keywords you can target for. How are you gonna select the right ones for your business?
A good SEO keyword must have three characteristics:
High search volume
Low competitiveness
Relevant to your business
What happens when your chosen keyword doesn’t have one of these characteristics?
❌ Low search volume → You don’t get consistent traffic
❌ High competitiveness → It takes more time and effort to get to the first page of search results.
❌ Not relevant to your business → You may get traffic but these don’t convert into subscribers or clients.
So how can you check for search volume and competitiveness?
Head back to your results on Google Adwords Keyword Planner. You may have noticed there are 2 columns next to the keywords:
Average monthly searches: This tells you how many people search for this keyword every month. Aim for 100 - 1K. If your niche is small, several keywords with 10-100 searches per month can also work.
Competition: This tells you how hard it would be for you to rank high for this keyword. Aim for Low. If you really want a certain keyword, Medium is also acceptable.
The third criterion is making sure the keywords are relevant to your business.
Sounds simple, right?
The problem is because keywords are often short phrases, it’s very easy to misinterpret the searchers’ intention.
For example, “what does a life coach do” may sound like a question from your potential clients, but it’s also likely to come from someone who is exploring life coaching as a career.
A simple tweak to the keyword, “what a life coach can do for you”, is a much better option because it clearly comes from someone who is evaluating if they need a life coach.
Another consideration to look at at what stage of a client journey does a person search for this keyword. For example, “best life coach”, “life coach near me”, or “life coach pricing” all indicates a buying intention. In contrast, keywords like “what is life coach” likely come from people who don’t know much about life coaching yet and may never be interested in buying.
If you are not planning to create a lot of content but still want to get quality traffic from SEO, aim for keywords closer to the buying stage. They’ll give you a much higher chance at conversion.
In short, you want to pick keywords that are:
✔️ High search volume
✔️ Low competition
✔️ Likely to come from your ideal clients
✔️ Bonus point is it’s likely come from ideal clients who are ready to buy
Recap
1) Keyword research benefits coaches and solopreneurs in many ways. You cannot get SEO results without proper keyword research.
2) To do keyword research, start by brainstorming a list of keywords based on what you know about your ideal clients, then use online tools to expand that list.
3) Make sure each chosen keyword meets three criteria: high search volume, low competition, and relevant to your business
