Keyword Research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines intending to use that data for a specific goal, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
Keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is searching on their respective search engines. The insight that you get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.
People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online. So, if your content is successful in getting in front of your audiences as they conduct searches, you stand to gain more traffic. In addition, according to the inbound methodology, we don't create content around what we want to tell people; we should be creating content around what people want to discover.
In other words, our audience is coming to us. There are many benefits to conducting keyword research, the most popular reasons are, Marketing Trend Insight, Traffic Growth, and Customer Acquisition. Current marketing trend insight can be provided by directing effective keyword research and helping you center your content on relevant topics and keywords your audience is in search of.
When you identify the fitting keyword for the content you are going to publish, the higher you will rank in search engine results, it also means that more traffic will be attracted to your website. If your business has content that other business professionals are looking for, you can meet their needs and provide them with a call to action that will lead them to the point of purchase. Now, we shall move on to the steps in researching keywords for your SEO strategy.
Keyword Research Step 1: Make a List of Relevant Topics Based on What You Know About The Business
To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You'll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you'll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific focus keywords later in the process.
If you're a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently, or perhaps they're the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your consumers, what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? By knowing what they would search for, you will rank higher in the search engine results.
Keyword Research Step 2: Fill in The Topic Buckets with Keywords
Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it's time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably managing and doing searches for those particular terms.
The point of this step isn't to come up with your final list of keyword phrases. You just want to end up with a brain dump of phrases you think possible customers might use to search for content related to that particular topic bucket. We'll narrow the lists down later in the process so you don't have something too unhandy.
Keyword Research Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research & Analyze Carefully
User intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it's more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. It's easy to take keywords for face value, and unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface.
Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra careful about how you explain the keywords you target. Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post? Or do they want to know how to launch a website domain for blogging?
If your content strategy is only targeting people interested in the latter, you'll need to make sure of the keyword's intent before committing to it. To verify what a user's intent is in a keyword, it is a good idea to simply enter the keyword into a search engine yourself, and see what types of results come up.
Keyword Research Step 4: Research Related Search Terms
If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a certain topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll down to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input, these keywords can spark ideas for other keywords that you may want to take into consideration. Also, they may give out unexpected bright ideas that are not visible to you beforehand.
Try to work out a solution to everything, in this world, nothing is perfect, only better. If we stop trying to aim higher, we will never improve and get down to just an idiot that creates their limits.
Keyword Research Step 5: Utilize Keyword Research Tools to Your Advantage
Keyword research and SEO tools can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you've generated up to point. All tools help in your research, you should make use of them to gain the best results possible. Do not ignore them, just because you are not comfortable with bringing them into your play, make use of everything provided and try to put them together as best as you can.
