Keyword research is the process of finding all of the possible words, phrases and search engine queries which may be relevant to your business and your customers in order to develop a keyword strategy. It’s one of the basic tools used to rank higher on Google and drive more organic traffic to your website.
This strategy is all about knowing your target audience and understanding their perspective. Carrying out proper keyword research can provide valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google, their popularity, search volume, and general intent, that you can use to tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.
Why is Keyword Strategy Important for SEO?
Keyword research strategy helps in-
- Promotion
- Traffic growth
- Link building
- Search engine ranking
- Traffic and lead quality
How to Research Keywords for your SEO Strategy
Here is a simple process:
1. Topic Selection – To begin with, simply ask yourself: ‘What topics do people search for that are related to my business?’. Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
2. Knowing the target audience – Next you need to understand who are asking those questions, their demographic and what words they use when searching for your product or service.
3. Building your SEO keyword list – Identify some keywords / phrases that fall under that topic and you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.
Consider these three main factors for choosing good keywords:
- Relevance
- Authority
- Volume
4. Keyword Trends – Check if the interest and traffic to this keyword is currently in trend or should increase over time and optimize your site / content accordingly around that term, it’s synonyms or related keywords.
5. Business Fit – The keywords should complement your business to increase the chances that someone searching for a keyword will become a customer.
6. Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – Ranking on the first page of Google is not going to work if people don’t click on your content. So knowing the estimate of how many clicks you’ll get from a first page Google ranking is important. For which, you can look at the SERPs for your keyword. Or you can use tools that estimate organic CTR.
7. Difficulty – If your site is new (or doesn’t have a ton of links yet), target low-competition terms at first. Then, as your site grows in authority, you can start to target more competitive stuff. Also check for a mix of head keywords and long-tail keywords.
8. Traffic – Traffic shows us how many people search for that term during one month.
9. Consider more keyword sources such as –
- PPC keywords
- Google Analytics keywords
- Google Search Console keywords
- Google Ads
- Related search terms
- Keyword gap analysis
10. Research your competition’s keywords – Check for volume of these keywords and relevance to your product or service. Your competition’s keywords can be the key to growing in the first few months.
A great source for research on competition is: similarweb.com
As the old saying goes; if it ain’t broke, don’t break it.
When all is said and done you need to evaluate your keyword research list. Consider searcher intent, match keywords to personas and conversion potential. Evaluate organic keyword opportunities. Classify the keywords by — categorizing, sorting, and grouping. And put your keyword research into an action plan.
Still can’t figure out how to develop a great keyword strategy or just don’t have the resources to conduct a thorough research? Let’s have a chat and see what Market It can do for you today.