Keyword research is one of the essential SEO strategies. It is a must that your keyword research should be detailed and deep enough to understand what the target audience is looking for online, their problems, and of course, solutions and answers to their problems. Moreover, you cannot even plan your content strategy without proper keyword research. Therefore, keyword research is imperative for better online performance and search engine rankings for SEO experts.
If you don’t want to get lost on the search page results, technical SEO, backlinks, etc., you must know how to do it correctly. Else, get in touch with an experienced digital marketing agency to provide you with the best SEO services with guaranteed results.
Let’s take a look at what keyword research is, why it is important and how to do it for SEO.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is basically the process of finding the queries and words that people search on search engines to find answers to their questions/concerns.
Keyword research is the first step in the SEO process. With the help of keyword research, SEO experts can easily determine what their audience is looking for and develop a content strategy based on keyword research. Additionally, keyword research is pivotal in creating content pieces that are better for search engine result pages (SERP) and overall website performance.
Why is Keyword Research so Important?
Many of you must have Googled this question – Why is keyword research important? Isn’t it?
As a beginner, it is absolutely understandable to do such research work. If you can’t figure out why keyword research is important, then below mentioned are the points you must read.
1. Help you rank better on SERP
Ranking on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is one of the main goals in SEO strategy. And keywords help you to rank your website or web pages. Most importantly, keyword space helps you identify the topics and content pieces through which your website can be ranked better.
2. Prioritize Keywords
Once you identify the keywords, you have to prioritize them as per your website. Prioritizing keywords is not that easy because different metrics include search volume, traffic, CPC, etc.
First, check if the keywords you are finalizing have volume or not. Second, check if the keywords are relevant to you industry/brand? Don’t just look out for high volume keywords. Third, check if the long-tail keywords are the more relevant or short tail. Overall, it should be based on your business research, ideation, continuous optimization etc. Therefore, prioritizing keywords is necessary to determine how to use them further in your content strategy.
3. To understand your Target Audience
Keyword research is also important to understand the psychology of your target audience and what they are searching on Google and other search engines. Basically, it is the biggest hint of what your audience is searching for and how you can solve their queries.
Don’t plan your strategy based upon what you think your audience wants to know. Do keyword research and gather vital information about your target audience, their search queries, problems, and answers.
4. Map out keywords for specific web pages
When you do keyword research, you’ll come up with a comprehensive list of keywords for general as well as specific pages. For specific pages, you will have to map out certain focused keywords that can be used to rank the specific page.
You can use multiple focus keywords for a specific page—no need to worry about the combinations and numerous focus keywords usage.
Steps to do Keyword Research for SEO
Here is the real deal.
Check out how to do keyword research for SEO.
Step 1 – Determine your Seed Keywords
Seed keywords are usually short, unlike long-tail keywords. For example: if you are selling bikes, your seed keywords can include Chinese bikes, foldable bikes, affordable bikes, bike accessories, etc. So, ‘Bike’ is the seed keyword, which will help you categorise your keywords list and branch out to more specific ones.
Seed keywords are based on your:
(A) Nature of your business/industry Niche
(B) Services/Products you are selling
(C) Keywords you think you want to rank your website on
Thus, determining the seed keywords is a must. You can also go through your competitors’ web pages. Else, go through their meta title and meta description to understand how they use seed keywords, and it will help you a lot in your SEO strategy.
Step 2 – Try different sources for keywords.
Once you know your seed keywords, you can try and explore different sources to make a comprehensive list of focused keywords you want to target on your website.
You can try keyword tools to make a list. Here are some of those tools:
- Ahrefs is one of the most popular and reliable keyword explorer tools. You just have to put your seed keyword in the search bar, and there you go. It will generate a list of all the possible keywords as per your industry.
- Google Keyword Planner – Google has its own keyword planner for the SEO experts to use and narrow down their keywords list. It is easy and trustworthy because Google uses its years of data to deliver results.
- Keywords Everywhere – Another reliable and prominent keyword research tool that saves your time to do it all manually. It provides you keywords based upon search volume and CPC with accurate metrics and competition data.
Just explore the keywords tool you think is relevant for your business. It is definitely good enough if it provides you with an extensive list of keywords and SERP’s terms.
Step 3 – Make a list of Negative Keywords.
Once you prepare a list of extensive keywords, you have to filter out all these keywords. The first step in filtering your keywords list is eliminating the repetitive keywords and removing the duplicates from your keywords list. Secondly, you have to generate a list of negative keywords.
What are negative keywords?
In the beginning, you created a list of keywords on which you wanted your website to rank on. On the other hand, you prefer negative keywords that you don’t want to rank.
Negative keywords are as important as your seed keywords or focused keywords. It is another SEO process that SEO experts generally follow to rank on SERP.
For instance, your seed keyword is ‘bikes.’ Negative keyword is ‘Worst bike seller/shop in Florida.’ Don’t use this keyword directly. If you are into advanced and premium products, you can include ‘affordable bike accessories shop in Florida,’ or ‘cheap bike accessories.’
Step 4 – Categorize Keywords as per Search Intent
Another term! SEO is not an easy nut to crack, and you have to go into depth to understand the technicalities and basics of SEO for better results.
So, search intent is why people are searching for a specific query or the reason behind the search query. When you understand the search intent, you’ll be able to classify your keywords based on search intent. And, when you categorize the keywords based on search intent, you are providing solutions/answers to the audience they are searching for.
Search intent in SEO is another complicated topic. Before you head on to keywords classification, please do enough research on the search intent of the keywords to make sure you’re tapping the right audience.
Vital Takeaways
Keyword research is undoubtedly a tedious process. But you cannot deny the fact that it is so impactful and beneficial when it comes to brand awareness and organic growth of a business.
Here are some vital takeaways from this article:
- Start your SEO strategy with proper keyword research utilizing tools to understand user behaviour and requirements.
- With keyword research, the right audience will find your website, and you have to make sure you provide them with good quality content (Problem-solving content strategy).
- SEO experts utilize the organic SEO strategy because it is substantial and works best in the long run business growth.
- Always make sure you exhaust all your seed keywords/focused keywords to avoid losing any opportunity.
If you have any other SEO strategy or keyword research tactic, share it with us in the comments below, or connect with us on social channels. We’d love to talk about SEO anytime!