Keyword research is the most powerful and important part of the SEO optimization process of every online business that runs a website. Know more about keyword research in this article.
When a person searches for something on the Internet using Google or another search engine, he or she uses keywords and keyphrases to find information of their interest. So when you’re planning SEO activities to increase the search results of your website in the ranking, you shall do proper keyword research (KR).
What is keyword research
A KR is finding out what exactly keywords (KW) and keyphrases people use to search online. It is important for you as a website runner or SEO optimizer to know these words to insert them into your website to improve organic SEO traffic.
After the task is completed, you will know:
- What people search
- How they do it
- How frequently they do it.
Eventually, as the number of visits to your website grows, the more clients you’ll receive as a result of conversion.
How to do keyword research and the reasoning behind it
Knowing, which keywords and phrases to insert to your web pages is of importance because, in this way, you increase the number of visitors to your website for free — it means, you use organic traffic growth, not a paid promotion, which is costly and not always effective. An eventual goal is to gain more profits through online sales, brand awareness, and authoritativeness of your website thanks to visits.
To do KR, you shall:
- understand your customers (what they might search for?)
- do the brainstorming given your knowledge of the industry and probable keywords people might search to find you or a product that you produce (or similar to yours)
- understand your competitors (what keywords do they have on their websites?).
After you do the brainstorming and write down all KW that clients might use, it is time to use professional tools that specifically provide you with super deep insight into what people actually look for. Great tools to work with are:
- Google Keyword Planner (a.k.a. Google Ads)
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
Bear in mind that some tools and/or functions in these tools are paid. Let’s take as an example Google Ads. Since Google is the most used search engine in the world, of course, it can give you alive and full statistics of what people search for.
Once you will have created an account and an ad campaign, go to Keyword Planner — Discover New Keywords — and enter those KW you want to find out. Shortly, the table of results appears, where the words you typed in are sorted by relevance, competition, average monthly displays, ad impression share, and costs of a bid. The expanded list below shows alternative words, which also could be used (the modifications of the original KW). This tool and other ones, like Ahrefs, also could show more data: keyword difficulty, regional relevance, intent, and modifiers.
You have to carefully select those KW and write them down in your spreadsheet to make a list. Their further usage on your website will depend on their relevance, difficulty, modifiers, the KW density in the text, the number of pages on your website, and other SEO promotion parameters. To make it more understandable, here are examples (let’s say, for a company that sells men’s shirts):
- A short KW: “blue shirt”
- A modified KW: “best blue shirt cheap”
- Regional: “buy a blue shirt for a man in Denver”
- Difficult: “online store to buy a man’s blue office shirt cheap in Denver, US”
- Intent-based: “blue shirt Denver” (navigational), “what tie is best for blue office shirt” (informational), “buy thebest shirt in Denver cheaper than $50” (commercial).
Modifiers and variations are various suffixes, prefixes, gender-based options, additional words, changes of word positions in a sentence, etc. — all that people use to specify their search. Because, you know, someone might want to buy a blue shirt for an office and another one wants to read what kinds of shirts are best for a boat party and which are cool enough. So, one simple KW “blue shirt” eventually turns into varying modifications, with many ‘tails’, levels of difficulty, and intents. And these all are analyzed by SEO tools and show how frequently people use them. So, although one key leads to a thousand options, the real relevance may cut down the usage to 20-150 KW. And, based on the type of your web page and commercial focus, you will pick those, which can be inserted into your web pages, skipping the rest, which wouldn’t add much use or add ‘garbage’ volume.
Also, you should see what KW are used by your competitors. In the Ahrefs tool, for instance, it works straightforwardly: enter the website’s name into the search field and in the Organic Keywords tab see what KW they use (and there are a lot of other data). In the Top Pages tab, you can see, which competitor’s pages attract more organic traffic by a keyword. You shall use that data to adjust to your website’s needs.
Conclusion
Doing the KR is the heart of professional services that provides SEO keyword research and analysis essential for the promotion of a website. Utilize information from this article to make your own study and start an effective SEO work.
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