Keyword research lays the groundwork for successful SEO. High-ranking keywords attract more visitors from search engines to your website. Keywords help guide the website’s content strategy and infrastructure. In order to ensure that you generate the organic traffic you need, you would need to know how to do keyword research first.
But before we get into the details of proper keyword research, you have to first understand what Keyword Research signifies for your SEO.
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are topics and ideas that will define the content posted on your site. As far as SEO is concerned, these are the words and phrases searchers enter in search engines, also termed “search queries.” If you boil anything on your website — all photos, video, copy, etc. — down to basic words and phrases, these are your keywords.
When doing SEO, you want your page’s keywords to be important to what users are looking for, so they have a greater likelihood of catching your content in the search results.
What Is Keyword Research And Why Is It Important For SEO?
Keyword research is the method of identifying and evaluating search words that people type into search engines in order to use the data for a particular purpose, sometimes for search engine optimization ( SEO) or general marketing. In depth Keyword research will reveal target queries, popularity of these queries, difficulty of ranking, and more.
This also offers useful insight into the questions your target audience currently searches for on Google. Insight into these real search terms will help inform content strategies as well as the wider marketing strategy. Keywords, however, may not be as relevant to SEO as you think.
If you’re not doing extensive keyword research, you’ll fall behind competitors who are savvier with SEO. Issues with poor search results include:
- Misuse of primary and secondary keywords leading to very poor Search Engine Optimization.
- Strong competition, which makes ranking in SERP very challenging.
- Irrelevance with the real material.
Keyword research tells you about the topics that people care about and, assuming if you use the right SEO tool, and how popular they are in your audience. The operative terms here seem to be topics — by researching keywords with a large number of searches each month, you can classify and organize your content into topics you want to build content on. Then you could use these topics to determine which keywords you want and target.
Next, we will learn a bit about the types of keywords.
Types of Keywords
There are usually two types of keywords — short tail keywords and long tail keywords.
Depending on the nature of your content, you need to select keywords with acceptable use of balance.
If you want more traffic to your webpages, you can use short-tail keywords. If your aim is to foster targeted sites, like a blog about making pizza, then you should consider to use long tail keywords.
What are some of the biggest distinctions between short tail and long-tail keywords?
Short tail keywords
- Contains less than three words
- High competition
- Not specific
- High search volume
- Lower conversion rates
Long-tail keywords
- Includes three or more words
- Low competition
- Very specific
- Low search volume
- Higher conversion rates
How To Find Easy To Rank For Keywords
Finding ‘Seed’ Keywords
Seed keywords are the cornerstones of keyword research. They describe your niche and help distinguish competitors. Insert seed keywords into any keyword research tool to find hundreds to thousands of keyword ideas (we will discuss more on that soon).
If you already have a business or product to advertise online, it’s easy to get seed keywords. Just imagine what people type into Google in order to find what you’re offering.
For example, in the case where you sell computer equipment, seed keywords could be:
- laptop
- computer
- Motherboard
- PC
If you’re struggling with seed keywords, then check the Google Search Console search results report. This will reveal up to 1,000 keywords you are ranking for already.
Don’t fret too much over seed keywords. This should only take a couple of minutes. When you have a range of ideas, move onto the next step.
Using Keywords From Related Search Terms
This is an innovative move that you might have already considered while investigating keywords. If not, filling those lists through this technique is a perfect way, especially for a beginner.
If you’re having trouble thinking of further keywords people may be looking for in a particular topic, take a close look at the search terms which appear when you’re plugging a keyword into Google.
When you enter your phrase and scroll below to the bottom of Google’s search results, you’ll find some search recommendations relevant to your initial input. These keywords may spark suggestions for other keywords that could also be considered viable and effective.
Like with Google Autosuggest, these are ideas that actually come directly from Google. You don’t have to guess if they’re very popular or not. Google is literally informing you that: “Lots of people are searching for these keywords.”
Then scroll down to the bottom to see THOSE results. It’ll also give you a new related keywords list. Rinse and then repeat.
Paid keyword research tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and UberSuggest will help you come up with far more keyword ideas that are based on exact match keywords and keywords match phrases based on ideas you’ve developed up to this stage.
However, these tools are premium tools and if you are looking for a free alternative which can provide you with long tailed keywords in bulk, then this tool might be a good option. It may also offer you viable alternatives which you might not have considered.
One Last Thing Before You Go
As keywords establish your site’s page, you can use them to coordinate your content and formulate a plan. The most simple step is to maintain a spreadsheet (your “keyword map content”) and identify your focus keyword for each post.
You can then create your sheet according to your own criteria, add the keyword search volume, page authority, organic traffic, and any other statistics that may be important for your business.
Ideally, you want to target a specific primary keyword on each page of your web. Generally, the homepage will concentrate on a very wide industry term and, when you build product pages, category pages and posts, it will dig down into the niche and address those specific requirements.
Be sure to reassess these keywords each couple of months — once every quarter is a decent benchmark, but some organizations tend to do it even more frequently than that.
As you gain ever more prominence in the SERPs, you may find that you can add yet more keywords to your lists to integrate them as you work to sustain your current online presence, and then expand in new areas.