What Is Keyword Research? The Best And Most Comprehensive Information About Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step in content creation and one of search engines’ most important parts of website optimization. Before creating website content, you need to know your audience’s search terms.

In this article, we will examine what keyword research is and how important it is. We also introduce you to the methods and practical tools for keyword research.

What is the keyword?

Everything you search in search engines contains keywords. Suppose you want to design a website but don’t know how to create it. The easiest and fastest way is to search. You may type the word “website design” or be more specific by writing “free website design”.

A keyword in the SEO field refers to a searcher’s words to find what he is looking for. These words are divided into two categories.

What is keyword research?

“Keyword Research” is a process of finding the terms used by users when searching for a topic and the “Search Volume” for these terms in various search engines such as Google and Bing. It is part of the SEO process. Keyword research is the best way to find keywords used by users and increase organic traffic. The importance of SEO keywords is very high. It is perhaps the most important step in formulating a successful SEO strategy.

Keyword research can be done through various tools. The primary purpose of this work is to find the best and most used keywords according to your business goals and produce content that fits them. Keyword research gives you access to a list of the most used keywords and phrases to improve your website’s search engine rankings.

To create this list, you need to find your audience’s interests in search engines. For example, you need to understand people’s terms when searching for your products, services, businesses, and organizations. You also need to understand what kind of content they are looking for when searching for these terms.

The keyword research process is never-ending, and it is necessary to repeat it continuously to stay up-to-date.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research is the only practical way to find out what users enter into search engines. To avoid writing content that no one is looking for, you should familiarize yourself with this research method. According to statistics, many websites make mistakes like this. According to statistics, about 91% of the pages on the Internet still do not receive any traffic from Google because of the lack of implementation of the keyword research process.

Keywords can be considered the building blocks of business growth and improving internet presence. Businesses that are not easily found on the Internet are unlikely to have much success. But you can’t use any arbitrary keyword to create content. To choose keywords, you must first research to find the best ones for your business.

Proper keyword research is significant because it helps clarify the key phrases used by users. Sometimes people use a different list to describe their products with the terms users want. As a result, users can’t find their websites easily.

To do this, you need to be familiar with the science and logic of keyword research. For example, if the search volume for a term is very low, “leads” cannot easily find your ads or content and become customers by visiting your website.

On the other hand, if the words you choose are searched for too much, it is possible that your page will not appear on the first page of search engine results (SERP) at all. Balancing the selection of different keywords can make your marketing campaigns more successful.

Why do we need keyword research?

Keyword research is essential in the following three areas of digital marketing:

1. in SEO
2. When planning a content strategy
3. In “Paid Marketing” campaigns

The importance of keyword research in SEO

The first and most significant reason to do keyword research is to optimize your website for search engines or SEO. SEO makes your pages rank better in the search results after “crawling” and “indexing” by Google bots and other search engines.

One of the criteria for search engines to rank web pages is to check the keywords of the business area and their relationship with user searches and the content of your website.

The keyword is a way to communicate with virtual world users. Today, more than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet; This means that you can reach more than three billion people with this global network. The wide spread of the Internet has caused the spread of digital marketing and related techniques worldwide.

Keyword research and analysis will show you what your company is known for and where your network traffic is coming from.

So it can be said that it is one of the most basic techniques of digital marketing, and it will never lose its importance. This importance becomes more robust when you consider that keyword research and proper selection and use of keywords will help you rank better in Google results. In addition to more site entries, you will gain more credibility with your online audience.

Although Google’s SEO algorithms are constantly changing, likely, keywords will never lose their importance.

What factors influence the choice of the right keywords?

One of the terrors of content producers is using the wrong keywords. Imagine that you have spent a lot of energy and time on something that did not have a good result, and you have to go through all the steps from the beginning. Read the rest of the article carefully so that such problems do not occur.

The relevance of the keyword: One of the most important factors in choosing the right keyword is the word’s relevance to your content. Our advice to you is not to sacrifice the coherence of your content for more visits. High site traffic is valuable when engagement is high.

Keyword search volume: The more a keyword is searched, the more likely it will succeed. This issue is very important for keyword research and choosing the right keyword.

Keyword difficulty: Keyword difficulty shows how hard or easy it is to increase the ranking of your website using this keyword. This factor is supposed to show you which of the words that came to your mind is better to spend time and energy on.

Be careful not to confuse keyword difficulty with search rate.

Trend: Sometimes words are written in different ways (for example, the words “color” and “colour”) or a concept has different names, or even a phrase may become a trend in specific periods. To know when it is better to use which keyword, you should check its trend. Google Trends website is a free tool to check this factor.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): This indicator shows how successful a particular keyword has attracted clicks and shows you the average number of clicks per month or week. This is an essential statistic because not all words attract the audience to click similarly.

How to measure the value of a keyword?

How important is a keyword to your website? For example, if you have an online shoe store, have your customers landed on your website by searching for terms like “brown shoes” or “white mug”?

The keywords that users search for are usually available to webmasters, and keyword search tools provide us with the necessary information. However, these tools cannot show us how much traffic from these searches is worth to our website.

To understand the value of keywords, we must first understand our website, make assumptions, test those assumptions, and iterate.

You can do the following to see how valuable a keyword is to your business.

Ask yourself

Is the keyword relevant to your content? Will people find what they want on your site by searching for this keyword? Will they be satisfied with what they find? If the answer to all these questions is “positive”, you can go to the next step.

Search for your keyword in Google

Search for your desired keyword in Google and see if Google shows similar businesses in the results or not? Knowing which websites benefit from your target keywords will help you better view this competitive market. Also, you will understand what path you need to take to reach your goals.

Have you noticed the ads on the top and right side of the search results pages? Many of these ads use valuable keywords. In your ads on the search results page, you should go for the words most likely to attract the audience and convert them into customers.

Use Google Ads

One of the ways that can help you understands which words are valuable for your business and effective in improving your sales is to use Google Ads. Since it costs you money to set up a Google Ads campaign, you must have an optimal campaign with proper management to achieve two goals; improve your sales and find out which words you had more sales.

For example, let’s say you have a site selling laptops and use the following keywords for your site.

• Laptop
• Buy a laptop
• laptop price
• Asus laptop
• New laptop models

 

Based on the search of these keywords, your website has been shown 5000 times in Google results, and 1000 people have entered your website; Finally, 100 of these visitors bought from your site.

You can see which words these 100 buyers entered your site by searching, or in other words, how many customers each word brought to you.

For example, out of these 100 people, 50 people entered the site by searching for the word “buy laptop”, 20 people “laptop price”, 15 people “Asus laptop”, 10 people “new laptop models” and 5 people “laptop” and they bought from you. Now you know how valuable “buy laptop” is for your business because you have made more sales with this word.

One of the main benefits of using Google Ads is getting such information to the business. This is why search engine marketing is so popular with businesses.

Elements of Keyword Research

In order to conduct keyword research effectively, three main elements must be considered.

Relevance

In general, Google ranks content based on relevance. The concept of search intent has an important role to play in ranking your content. High rankings depend on your content meeting the searchers’ needs and being the best resource for that query.

Authority

Your website’s content needs to be enriched with valuable information so that Google will trust it. By incorporating useful content into your website and promoting it to generate social signals, you will be able to establish your website as an authoritative source by increasing its search engine ranking.

Unless your content is exceptional, you may not be able to rank your content. The Mayo Clinic and Forbes are two of the highest-ranking sites in the SERPs.

Volume

Ranking on the first page for a keyword won’t bring traffic to your website if no one searches for it. It’s like setting up a shop in a ghost town if no one searches for it.

Usually, the volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which is a measure that indicates how many times a keyword is searched by all audiences across all platforms each month.

How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy

It is my objective in this article to demonstrate how to conduct keyword research so that you can create a list of keywords to target that will help you improve your search engine ranking for the search terms that are important to you. By doing so, you can formulate a robust keyword strategy that will assist you in getting found online.

Step 1: Determine which topics are relevant to your business based on what you know about it

In the beginning, you need to decide what keywords you want to rank for according to generic topic buckets. Come up with five to ten topic buckets that you think will be relevant to your business and use them to help you determine some specific keywords later on.

These are probably the most common topics you blog about if you’re a regular blogger. Perhaps these are the topics that come up most frequently in sales conversations. Put yourself in your buyer persona’s position – what topics would your target audience search for so that you could get found for them?

In the case of a company like HubSpot, which provides both marketing software and SEO tools, you may have a few general topics, such as:

• “inbound marketing” (21K)
• “blogging” (19K)
• “email marketing” (30K)
• “lead generation” (17K)
• “SEO” (214K)
• “social media marketing” (71K)
• “marketing analytics” (6.2K)
• “marketing automation” (8.5K)

Each keyword’s number in parentheses to the right indicates the number of monthly searches that that keyword receives. By reading this information, you will be able to identify the importance of these topics to your target audience and determine how many subtopics would need to be developed to make this keyword a success.

Step 2: Fill in those topic buckets with keywords

Once you have identified a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it is time to find keywords that correspond to those buckets. You believe these keywords are essential to rank for in SERPs because they are likely to be searched for by your target customer.

For example, if I was running a marketing automation software company, I would brainstorm some keyword phrases people would type in to search for that topic. They might include:

• 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

This step is not intended to assist you in identifying your final keywords. Instead, I would like you to write down a list of phrases that you believe potential customers may use to search for content within the topic bucket you intend to target. After that, I will assist you in narrowing down your list so that it does not get out of hand.

You may want to consider checking your website’s rankings for the keywords that appear on your site rather than watching how many keywords Google encrypts every day to come up with keyword ideas.

You will need website analytics software such as Google Analytics or HubSpot’s Sources report within the Traffic Analytics tool to accomplish this. You should analyze your website’s traffic sources and organic search traffic buckets to determine which keywords drive traffic to your website.

This exercise will need to be repeated for as many topic buckets as possible. If you cannot come up with relevant search terms, you can always reach out to your colleagues who are in contact with customers and prospects to inquire about what kinds of terms they use or the types of questions they regularly receive from them. Whenever you are searching for keywords, this is always an excellent place to begin.

Step 3: Understanding how intent impacts keyword research and analyzing it accordingly

User intent has become a significant factor in ranking high on search engines like Google. In today’s search engine environment, it is more critical than just carrying the keyword the searcher uses to locate the website to address the problem the searcher seeks to solve.

In SEO, keywords are often misunderstood and treated as mere words. However, keywords often have many hidden meanings important to your website’s ranking potential. Due to the importance of the intent behind your search regarding ranking potential, you must interpret your keywords very carefully.

Suppose, for instance, you want to write an article about “how to start a blog”. The term “blog” refers to either the blog post or the blog website, but the intention behind the keyword will influence the direction your article will take.

Is the searcher looking for how to create a blog post individually? Or is the searcher looking for how to launch a website domain that is dedicated to blogging? Check a keyword’s intent before committing to it if your content strategy is geared towards only those interested in the latter.

You can verify the user’s intent on a keyword by simply entering it into a search engine and seeing what types of results come up. Make sure the results are closely related to what you’re aiming to create.

Step 4: Search terms related to the research

It is a very creative step you might have already done when doing your keyword research. If you have not already done it, it can be a great way to fill out those lists.

Check out the related search terms in Google’s search results if you have difficulty thinking of new keywords for a specific topic. If you are having difficulty thinking of new keywords, you may want to check out the related search terms displayed.

Using the search engine, you may find some suggestions for searches related to your original search if you search for your phrase and scroll down to the bottom of the search results.

It may be helpful to contemplate other keywords that could interest you as you consider them.

Step 5: Make use of keyword research tools to your advantage

Several keyword research tools available on the Internet can help you develop new keyword ideas using the keywords you already have collected, including exact match keywords and phrase match keywords. It includes, but is not limited to, the following tools:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Ubersuggest
• Google Keyword Planner
• SECockpit
• Keywords Everywhere
• Moz
• KeywordTool.io
• KWFinder

How to Find and Choose Keywords for Your Website

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to refine your list based on which ones are most appropriate for your strategy. Here’s how:

Step 1. Use Google Keyword Planner to cut down your keyword list

Google’s Keyword Planner can assist you in obtaining estimates of search volume and traffic for the keywords you are interested in. Once you have gathered all the information you require from Keyword Planner, you can use Google Trends to fill in any gaps you may encounter.

Using the Keyword Planner will flag keywords with low or high search volumes, preventing you from maintaining a healthy mix of terms. However, before you delete anything, you might want to look at the trend history and projections in Google Trends. You can find out if there are words with low volumes that you may want to invest in now – and reap the rewards in the future.

You may have a lot of terms and need to narrow them down somehow. In either case, Google Trends can help you determine which terms are trending upward and, therefore, worth your consideration.

Step 2: Put low-hanging fruit at the top of the priority list

The high-hanging fruit is the type of keyword that has the best likelihood of ranking well on Google when we talk about high-hanging fruit

Generally, large companies target keywords with high search volume, so since they are established brands, Google typically rewards them with authority on various topics.

Additionally, you should look for keywords with little competition. Keywords without many articles competing for the top position will automatically give you the top position by default if no one else is looking for it.

Step 3: Find out the monthly search volume(MSV) of your chosen keywords

When writing content, you want to ensure that what you write is built around what people want. Using MSV will enable you to accomplish this.

You must determine the most searched keywords and related keyword clusters every month. However, obtaining the most searched keywords and related keyword clusters is challenging if you do not have tools like searchvolume.io or Google Trends. Although these tools can provide some information for free, they are not always accurate.

Step 4: Consider SERP features when choosing keywords

Google uses several feature snippets in the SERPs to highlight an item if it is used appropriately. The simplest way to figure out if they are being used correctly is to look up the keyword you care about and find out what the first result appears like when you type it in.

Step 5: Ensure that each bucket contains a combination of head terms and long-tail keywords

Typically, the head term refers to a shorter, more generic phrase used in search engine results.

Depending on the person you are speaking to, you may find that these phrases are only a few words or even one word in length. Long-tail keywords, however, are usually more complex keyword phrases containing three or more words on average.

To ensure that you have both head and long-tail keywords, it is important to balance your keyword strategy with both long-term and short-term objectives. It is for this reason that people search for head terms more frequently than for long-tail terms. This means they may not always be competitive but may also be extremely difficult to rank in many cases.

If you don’t look at search volume or difficulty, which of the following keywords would be harder to rank for?

1. how to write a great blog post
2. blogging

If you answered #2, you are absolutely correct! However, do not get discouraged! Head terms generally have the highest search volume, meaning they have the greatest chance of sending you traffic. The traffic you will receive from the term “how to write a great blog post” is usually more desirable.

Why?

Blogs targeting a particular type of searcher are more likely to be successful than blogs focusing on more general search terms.

Since long-tail keywords tend to be more specific than short-tail ones, it is usually easier to determine what users are searching for when they use those keywords. Additionally, it is possible that a search for the head term “blogging” might be motivated by many different reasons unrelated to your business than merely searching for the head term “blogging.”

To improve your search rankings, you should ensure that your keyword lists are balanced to rank for both long-tail and short-tail searches. Even if you may be able to gain some quick wins using long-tail keywords, it is essential that you also try harder head terms over time.

Step 6: Take a look at the rankings for these keywords among your competitors

Although it may seem that your competitor is doing something, that does not mean you should too. In the same way, keywords may not be important to you just because they are essential to your competitor. However, knowing what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for can help you look at your list of keywords.

You should definitely work on improving your ranking for keywords that your competitors also rank for. However, don’t ignore the keywords your competitors don’t seem to care about. These could be good opportunities to own market share on important terms.

A balance must be struck between keywords that are more challenging because of competition and those that are much more feasible. Mixing these terms allows you to maintain a similar balance between long tail and head terms. This list should consist of keywords that will assist you in both achieving quick wins and achieving much more significant and ambitious search engine optimization objectives.

Is there a way to figure out which keywords your competitors rank for? The best way to find out what your competitors rank for is to manually search for keywords in an incognito browser and see what positions your competitors are ranked for.

Conclusion

The process of keyword research and obtaining a comprehensive list of keywords is one of the first and most important steps in any SEO project. Keyword search is the basis of creating new content and the “on-page SEO” of your site. Of course, one of the common mistakes of SEO experts is to do keyword research only at the beginning of the project. As mentioned, according to market changes, user requirements, the emergence of new competitors, and changes in Google’s algorithm, it is necessary to perform keyword searches periodically.

What do you think about keyword research? What tools do you use for keyword research? Write your questions and experiences in the comments section and share this article with your friends if you wish.