What is Keyword Research
It is the process of finding and analyzing search terms entered in search engines with the intention of utilizing that information for SEO or general marketing. Keyword research can reveal target queries, their popularity, the difficulty of ranking for these queries, and more.
Understanding your target market and how they search for your information, services, or products will help you make the most of keyword research.
With the use of keyword research, you may find precise search information to address issues like:
- What are people searching for?
- How many people are searching for this?
- What format do they want to see that information?
The next section will show you how to get that information, as well as how to avoid common pitfalls in keyword research and create compelling content. A whole new world of strategic SEO opens up once you learn how your target audience searches for your content.
Before doing keyword research, ask the right questions.
You must first comprehend a company’s identity, target market, and objectives before you can use search engine optimization to help it develop.
Corners are frequently cut here. Because keyword research takes time and you can already know what you want to rank for, far too many people skip this important planning phase. Don’t do it!
Often what your audience wants and what you want to rank are two completely different things. Campaigns that concentrate on your audience and then use keyword data to refine those insights will be considerably more successful than those that concentrate on random keywords.
Here is one example: Bill and Ted’s, a vegan bakery and cafe in Austin, heard about SEO and was looking to increase traffic to their site and improvement in how and how often they appeared in organic search results. First, you would need to gain a better understanding of their clients in order to assist them. You could achieve this by posing questions like:
- What types of vegan food are people searching for?
- Who is searching for these terms?
- When are people searching for vegan food, etc.?
- Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
- How are people searching for vegan food?
- What words do they use?
- What questions do they ask?
- Are more searches performed on mobile devices?
- Why are people seeking vegan food?
- Are individuals looking for health-conscious food specifically or do they prefer the taste of vegan food?
- Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?
This last question is most important: how can you contribute to creating the vegan bakery content to build a community and satisfy everyone’s interest on this topic? These inquiries are an essential planning phase that will direct your keyword research and aid in the creation of superior content.
The Different Types of Keywords We Should Be Aware Of
Keywords By Length
- Short Tail Keywords
- Long Tail Keywords
Keywords By Intent
- Informational
- Navigational
- Commercial
- Transactional
Niche Keywords
- Brand
- Geo-Targeted
- Product
- Market Segment
Step 1: Make a list of relevant and important topics.
Start by considering the topics you want to rank for in terms of general groupings. About 5–10 topic groupings that you think are crucial to your business will be generated; later on in the process, you’ll use those topic groupings to help generate some targeted keywords.
Step 2: Fill in those topic groupings with keywords.
Next, think of some keywords that fit within the topic groupings you’ve chosen to concentrate on. These are keyword phrases that you believe are crucial to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) since your target audience is likely searching for them.
For instance, if I chose the final topic grouping for an inbound marketing software provider, “marketing automation,” I would come up with a list of possible keyword phrases that I believe users might enter in relation to that topic. These may consist of:
- marketing automation tools
- how to use marketing automation software
- what is marketing automation?
- how to tell if I need marketing automation software
- lead nurturing
- email marketing automation
- top automation tools
And the list can go on. Making your final list of keyword phrases is not the goal of this phase. You simply want to come up with a list of words and phrases that you imagine clients could use to look for material under that certain topic grouping. So that you don’t have a list too overwhelming, we will then refine the listings.
Step 3: Understand and Analyze How Intent Affects Keyword Research.
User intent, as I mentioned in the previous section, is currently one of the most important aspects of how well you can rank on Google. Today, it’s more crucial for your website to answer the issue a searcher was trying to solve than it is to merely contain the keyword they chose. How does this impact your keyword research, then?
It’s simple to take keywords at face value, but beyond the surface, they might mean a lot of different things. You need to be very cautious about how you interpret the keywords you target because the searcher’s intent is so crucial to your ranking.
Consider a scenario in which you are looking for information on how to start a blog for an article you plan to write. What a searcher is looking for when they use the keyword “blog”—which might refer to either a blog post or the blog website—will affect how your article is written. Are you looking for information on how to start a blog post individually? They may also be interested in learning how to start a website domain for the purpose of blogging?
You should confirm the keyword’s intent before using it if your content strategy.
It’s a good idea to type the keyword directly into a search engine to check what kinds of results appear to confirm the user’s intent. Make sure the content Google is displaying is closely relevant to the content you plan to write for the keyword.
Step 4: Refining your keyword list
Now that you have a solid keyword list, it’s time to cut it down and focus on the most effective terms. This is crucial if you’re creating a keyword list for SEO because there is a maximum number of terms that you can rationally optimize for. There are no set criteria to follow here; generally, you want to get rid of the less interesting terms. As you refine your list, take into account the following:
Keyword Type: You can certainly omit some of the less interesting audience terms if you ended up with 500 audience keywords but only 15 product keywords. Choose the ones that are most similar to your target.
Utilize the types to best understand the search’s intent as well.
Competition: Google assesses keyword competitiveness in the online tool from Low to High. This will be a number from 0 to 1, with higher values denoting greater competition, in your downloaded spreadsheet.
You can use these tools to uncover words that you could stand a better chance of winning. However, don’t obsess over these figures for too long. Though it could be more difficult, you shouldn’t let that deter you from pursuing more competitve keywords.
Search Volume: Checking monthly search volume (MSV) can help you in writing content that is focused on what readers want to learn.
The number of times a search term is typed into search engines each month is known as the MSV. You can discover the most popular terms among comparable keyword clusters for free using tools like searchvolume.io or Google Trends.
SEO is a process, it’s a skill that takes a lot of time and effort, but it is well worth the effort. It’s a skill that can be learned and one of those skills is doing keyword research. Get started today. If you have some questions on what you see here, or you want some help, visit us at www.aardvarkmg.com