To start, think about your brand the way your customers would. What are your main products or services? Which of them is most popular? What is your differentiating factor? The idea is to get into the mind of the type of person who will be searching the keywords. More often than not, they will be searching for a specific product, service or benefit instead of your actual brand.

You should have a list of categories now. For example, Onboardly's categories would be "customer acquisition", "content marketing" and "online advertising". Those are the core keywords that are central to what we do as a company. An ecommerce company, like Manpacks, might have more categories than a service company because they can focus on popular individual products. For example, "men's socks", "men's underwear" and "men's razors".

At this point, you're looking for very general, highly competitive keywords. Highly competitive keywords show a lot of results when you search for them on Google. Generally, they're more difficult to rank well for organically and more expensive to rank well for paid. As a rule of thumb, these keywords should be no more than two (maybe three) words. Anything more is too specific.

To get started, here are some tools you can quickly adopt to find the right keywords, and variations of those keywords, for your content.

1. Google Analytics: This free tool, which we hope you already have setup, will allow you to identify organic search terms (terms that naturally appear because of their relevance) that are already driving traffic to your site. These keywords will provide a good baseline of core keywords you can benchmark against for future search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

2. Google's Keyword Tool: This free tool is a must. You can insert one or more keywords, or even a URL, to find related keywords as well as the level of competition for each keyword.

3. Google Trends: Insights recently merged with Trends, but they still provide a simple visual representation of local/regional interests specific to a country. It displays top searches and searches increasing in popularity, which is sure to help optimize your keyword list. You can use Trends to help craft marketing messages, examine seasonality, create brand associations and discover how to enter new markets.