How can you identify the most relevant keywords for an SEO audit?

Know Your Audience: Imagine you're meeting your audience face-to-face. What words would they use to find your content? Think about their needs, questions, and problems. Consider their emotions, interests, and aspirations. These insights will guide you towards keywords that truly matter.

You first have to start with finding out the niche of your website or business, after finding out the niche of your site you have to find out the audience that is searching in your niche and wanting to avail services or buy your products. After finalizing the Niche and Audience you have to look for the search intent, with what search intent the audience is searching for your site or products. This will help you a lot in doing the proper keyword research and framing best keyword strategies.

Apart from using SEO tools for keyword research, seeking inputs directly from the audience - maybe social is a good option which most of the time is not looked into. Go to social media sites where your audience hangs out. Use your assumed top keywords in the site's search bar. See how many posts or discussions include these keywords. Add the current year to find current trends. Keywords that appear frequently in these online communities are likely the ones to target. This way, you'll speak the language your audience uses, increasing your chances of reaching them effectively.

Apart from the mentioned tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, SEMRush and Ahref. There are more good ways to find out or to make good keyword strategies, as you can use Google auto complete which will tell you what others searching for in that particular niche. Along with that, you must use Google Trends which will help you in searching the best search terms trending in the particular industry.

Honestly, we’ve had a ton of success with ChatGPT. It’s literally based on relationships of words and frequency. We’ve been using it to augment our initial keyword lists before we move to research and it has found some excellent areas for us already.

What is important here is to do an audit of your competitors to see which specific pages (content) drive the most traffic to their website. This will give you an idea of what type of content to create in your specific niche.

The most crucial question to ask about any keyword is whether it's relevant to your website. For example, if you don't sell motorcycle vests with armor, the keyword "Motorcycle vest with armor" might sound interesting, but it's irrelevant. Before you even think about the numbers like search volume or competition, you need to answer "yes" to these questions: Is this something your website's visitors actually care about? Does this keyword address a problem or need? Can you provide solutions or content related to this keyword that's valuable? If the answer to any of these questions is "no," then remove that keyword from your list. Relevance should always come first before considering any other metrics.

Consider User Intent: Imagine stepping into your audience's shoes. What are they really looking for when they type in those keywords? Are they seeking information, ready to buy, or comparing options? Understand their intent to tailor your content accordingly.

We don't just create one blog, article or page for just one keyword. The key is to group relevant keywords together. Choose the one with the most volume or the shortest length, this becomes your main keyword. All the other keywords are used to guide you to write good content. This one piece of content then gets traffic from a bunch of keywords that are relevant.

Organize your keywords into groups or themes. Imagine you're creating a treasure map to navigate your content strategy. This map will guide you in optimizing different sections of your website.

Consider some possibilities: ?? You can target high(er) volume, low(er) competition kws and build content around these, to be able to rank higher and faster for these and start accumulating those clicks for conversion. ?? If you already have content around particular kws keep them optimized and share them even if there is low volume for these as you will rank in top and this will still have a positive effect on your overall ranking. ?? Additionally you can check what content is not as useful and make changes to target different similar kws. No matter what you choose always see a broader picture instead a narrow one. Keep your focus but have more targets & re-check to see if you need to make changes as volumes and kws change continuously.