How do you conduct keyword research and analysis for your SEO and SEM campaigns?

1 Identify your goals and audience

Before you start looking for keywords, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your SEO and SEM campaigns and who you want to target. Your goals and audience will help you define your keyword strategy and criteria. For example, if your goal is to generate leads for a B2B software company, you might want to target keywords that indicate a high level of interest and intent, such as "best CRM software" or "CRM software comparison". If your audience is mainly small businesses, you might want to focus on keywords that reflect their pain points and needs, such as "affordable CRM software" or "CRM software for small teams".

2 Brainstorm and research keywords

Once you have your goals and audience in mind, you can start brainstorming and researching keywords relevant to your products, services, and topics. To generate keyword ideas, you can analyze your existing content, traffic, and conversions to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, you can spy on competitor websites and ads to see what keywords they are targeting and how they are ranking and performing. You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest to evaluate keywords based on metrics like search volume, competition, difficulty, and cost-per-click. Furthermore, customer feedback and queries can provide insight into the words and phrases customers use to describe their needs and solutions. Additionally, platforms like Quora or Reddit can help determine what questions and topics your audience is interested in.

3 Categorize and prioritize keywords

After you have a list of potential keywords, you need to categorize and prioritize them according to your goals and criteria. You can use different methods and factors, such as keyword intent, relevance, difficulty, and value, to group and rank your keywords. For instance, keyword intent refers to the purpose or goal behind a keyword and should match the intent of your audience. Keyword relevance refers to how closely a keyword relates to your products, services, and topics. Keyword difficulty indicates how hard it is to rank for a keyword organically. Lastly, keyword value is based on the estimated return on investment (ROI) of ranking or bidding for it. When considering these factors, you want to balance your keywords between high-difficulty keywords that have high demand and potential with low-difficulty keywords that have less competition and easier opportunities.

4 Optimize your content and ads for keywords

Once you have your categorized and prioritized keywords, you need to optimize your content and ads for them. This means using them strategically and naturally in titles, headlines, meta tags, URLs, body text, images, links, and calls to action. Additionally, you should adhere to best practices and guidelines for SEO and SEM. For SEO, create high-quality content that provides value and answers queries; use primary keyword in title tag, H1 tag, URL, and first paragraph; use secondary and related keywords throughout content; avoid keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and thin content; use schema markup, alt text, internal links, and external links; monitor and measure performance; optimize regularly based on data and feedback. For SEM, create compelling ads that match keywords and audience's intent; use primary keyword in headline, display URL, and description; use secondary and related keywords in extensions and modifiers; avoid keyword cannibalization, negative keywords, broad match types; use ad groups, landing pages, bid strategies to segment and optimize campaigns; test and refine ads based on data and results.

5 Analyze your keyword performance and results

The last step in conducting keyword research and analysis is to analyze your keyword performance and results for your SEO and SEM campaigns. To do this, you need to use various tools and metrics such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Trends, Google Ads, and other software to measure organic traffic, impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, quality score, conversions, revenue, keyword rankings, trends, fluctuations, bids, competition, cost-per-acquisition, return on ad spend and more. By following these six steps of keyword research and analysis effectively and efficiently you can find and optimize the best keywords for your sales and marketing goals and audience.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?