Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the words and phrases that your target audience uses to search for information, products, or services online. It is a crucial step for optimizing your website and content for search engines and attracting relevant and qualified traffic. In this article, you will learn how to research keywords for SEO in six simple steps.
Before you start looking for keywords, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your website and content. What is your niche, value proposition, and target audience? What are the main topics and themes that you want to cover? What are the specific actions that you want your visitors to take? Having a well-defined goal will help you narrow down your keyword options and focus on the ones that align with your purpose and intent.
Seed keywords are the basic terms that describe your niche, products, or services. They are the starting point for your keyword research, as they help you generate more specific and relevant keyword ideas. To brainstorm seed keywords, you can use your own knowledge, your competitors' websites, your existing content, and your customers' feedback. Try to come up with at least 10 seed keywords that represent the core topics of your website and content.
One thing I’ve found really helpful is looking for the ways that your customers and average Internet browsers describe your product or the thing you’re looking to create content for. Internal teams are often a little too close to their jargon or their descriptions and views of a product. Research calls, surveys or customer reviews can give you ideas for keywords that you may not have considered before.
Keyword research tools are online applications that help you find and analyze keywords based on various criteria, such as search volume, competition, difficulty, relevance, and trends. They can help you expand your keyword list, discover new opportunities, and optimize your keyword strategy. Some of the most popular keyword research tools are Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs. You can use these tools to enter your seed keywords and get suggestions for related keywords, long-tail keywords, and question keywords.
Here are a couple tactics I've used: 1. Look in your Google Search Console data for keywords where you already rank 2-20 and optimize ranking pages to hit #1 on Google. 2. Identify 5-10 established peers and use SEMRush (or similar tool) to look for easy-to-rank, high volume keywords.
Keyword metrics are a valuable source of data that can help you determine the effectiveness of a keyword for your SEO goals. Search volume is the number of times a keyword is searched for in a given period, while competition is the level of difficulty to rank for a keyword based on how many websites are targeting it. Additionally, difficulty is the estimated effort required to rank for a keyword, and relevance is the degree of match between a keyword and your website and content. Lastly, intent is the goal or expectation of the user behind a keyword query. You can use keyword research tools to analyze these metrics and compare different keywords based on their performance and potential. The ideal keywords should have a high search volume, low competition, low difficulty, high relevance, and clear intent.
A few things to keep in mind: - Keywords with extremely high monthly search volume will be too hard to rank for, so don't aim for ranking for words like "car" or "cancer." These keywords are way too generic. Try to be as specific as possible. - Keywords are specific to the country, so if you are working on a website that is translated into multiple languages, there will be different keywords that you may want to rank for based on the language or country you are targeting. - Watch out for keywords with high search volume that are acronyms or abbreviations because they may not be referring to content you want to rank for.
Once you have a list of keywords that meet your criteria, you need to organize them into groups and categories based on their similarity and relevance. This will help you structure your website and content more effectively, creating a clear hierarchy and navigation. You can categorize keywords based on various factors such as topic, subtopic, type, and modifiers. For example, if your website is about digital marketing, you could group keywords by SEO (keyword research with informational modifiers like how to, best practices, tips, tools and transactional modifiers like services, courses, consultation) and social media marketing (Facebook marketing with informational modifiers like how to, best practices, tips, tools and transactional modifiers like services, courses, consultation) as well as Instagram marketing (informational modifiers like how to, best practices, tips, tools and transactional modifiers like services, courses, consultation).
The final step of keyword research is to test and refine your keywords based on their actual performance and results. To do this, you can use various tools and methods such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, rank tracking tools, and keyword gap analysis. These tools can help you evaluate and adjust your keywords, identify strengths and weaknesses, and discover new keywords that you may have missed. Keyword research is an ongoing process that needs continuous experimentation and adaptation. By following these steps, you can research keywords for SEO more effectively and create a website and content that attracts and satisfies your target audience.