All peoples are familiar with the fact that keyword research is an essential part of any SEO campaign. Keywords determine your content, your competition, even your customers. But how do you find profitable, high-volume keywords without knowing your competition or without any research or expensive keyword research software? In this article, we’re going to talk about how to find the best keywords for your business.
Definition of Keyword Research
According to Wikipedia,” Keyword research is a search engine optimization (SEO) practice that professionals use to search and research search terms that users enter into search engines looking for products, services, or general information. Search engine optimization professionals first align web pages with those websites and then align web pages to achieve higher search engine rankings. Once they find a niche keyword, they can expand it to find similar keywords. A keyword may include one word, but sometimes no more; It is made up of many words. For example, the “search term” is a keyword, or “the best keyword research tool for SEO” is another.
Importance of Keyword Research
So what is the importance of Keyword Research? Well, Keyword research in SEO is as essential as oxygen in a person’s living. Searching for high-volume search terms is not enough. Don’t forget to make sure that the SEO keywords used in your content should match with your brand, product, or service that your customers are using. And here, keyword research matters. Once you have done enough with thorough research, create an SEO strategy because, with a good strategy, you can easily create a detailed action plan to achieve your goals. The keywords you use should be what your target audience is searching for. The more people search for a word, the more your site will appear. If your site ranks well for some specific search terms with high search volume, your site traffic will increase. Suppose you have chosen a keyword that is unrelated to your website or niche, and you have placed those keywords in your blog post. In this situation, your blog posts are likely to rank higher in search for short periods. Okay, but you can lose traffic.
How to Perform Keyword Research
There are too many ways to perform keyword research for your niche. You can do it manually or using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner. But whatever you choose, there are several essential steps that you need to take. From outlining your goals to implementing your keyword plan, follow these detailed step-by-step guides to do proper and thorough keyword research:
Study your niche
Before you figure out the best keywords to optimize your page, you need to learn more about your topic or niche. It can give you a basic idea and helps to highlight angles in your marketing and SEO strategy.
Let’s See a few ideas on how to study your niche:
You should talk with your existing customers and get to know them better. Find out the terms they use when searching for your brand, company, product, or services.
Try to think from your customers’ point of view. If you want to share a brand offering with a friend, how will you talk about it?
You can join online communities of your niche, such as online forums and social media networks. Read their discussions and find out any pain points mentioned about your niche.
Define your Business Goals
A plan always has to start by defining the end goal of your success journey. But before that, you should ask yourself some essential and introspection questions:
- Who are you?
- What is the niche of your brand?
- What makes you unique?
- What is the purpose of your website?
- What do you promise on your website?
Once you answer these questions effectively, you must specify what the mission of your brand is. Do you want to increase the no. of your customers?
Defining your goal is important because it will provide a direction for your SEO strategy and plan. The search terms you ultimately use should ideally connect to your goals. Your goals will lead to the purpose of your SEO copywriting and content.
Write down your goals. These will provide the necessary framework and direction for your top-level content and online marketing strategy.
Prepare a list of relevant topics.
Prepare a list and break it down into smaller subject buckets, depending on your brand’s main category and the goals you have achieved. List all the topics related to your brand that you want to rank on Google. For example, if you are a Digital Marketing Agency in India specializing in Local SEO Services, some of the topics related to your brand might be the following:
- Social Media Marketing Services
- SEO Consultation Services
- Brand Promotion Services
You should have topics that are important to your business and also relates to your buyer. Think about what kind of topics your target audience would search on Google? The buckets of these topics can be broken later by implementing keywords related to those topics.
Create a list of seed keywords
Seed keywords are short. They are usually words that do not have modifiers. A seed keyword can be as simple as “shoe.” It is a base, a starting place. Conversely, other keywords or certain SEO specialists may mean long-tail keyword phrases, which may include modifiers. An example of a long-tail keyword may be the “best SEO agency in India.”
Now, you’ve broken down your main category or niche into different sets of subtopics. You can start building a starter keyword list. These keywords should be related to your niche topics that your target audience searches for on Google.
The keywords or targeted keywords are important because they will form the basis of your keyword research. They define your niche and identify your competition.
If you wonder how to find or focus on your brand or product’s seeds, it is simpler than you think. You have to describe your offering intelligently that how other people on Google can find it.
Use Google Keyword Planner for Keyword Research
You might assume, “Shouldn’t keyword research begin using the Keyword Tool?” There is no right or wrong answer. But there is a clear benefit to researching search terms first and foremost from your brand or business point of view.
It saves you from being heavily influenced by keywords and helps you gain a broader perspective on your content and SEO strategy. Once you identify your goals, topics, and list of seed keywords, it’s time to use keyword research tools to refine your search terms.
An alternative is to use Google Keyword Planner. It will give you a lot of detail and help you in the right direction for your search terms. On top of that, it may also give additional views on related keywords.
All you have to do is type the subject (or seed keyword) in the given search box; the result will give you a list of alternative keywords, including proposals and questions.
Study Search Intent
Plugging in high-volume keywords to increase page ranking works very quickly. But Nowadays, it is not so easy. Today, Google’s machine learning search algorithm compares search terms with user queries to learn about search intent.
Search intent can be defined as the intention or reason about why people search for a specific word. There are many factors behind the user’s search habits, such as:
- What they’re looking for?
- Are they surfing the internet because they have a question and want the question to be answered?
- Are they looking for a specific website?
- Are they surfing an eCommerce website because they want to buy something?
Try to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Like, Why would they search for your niche?
Identify long-tail keywords in Your Content.
Seed keywords are short search terms closely related to your brand’s specific topic or category. However, long-tail keywords are more descriptive and often relate to your brand’s shorter topics. It is easier for long-tail keywords to match your target audience’s search intent than seed viewers.
For example, if you have published content about golf equipment reviews on your website, using a long-tail keyword like “what is the best nine iron golf club” has a more relevant audience than the seed keyword “golf club.”
Long-tail keywords typically receive fewer clicks, but they often receive higher conversion rates since they are focused on a specific topic or product.
Find out Your Niche Competitors
Keyword research can be a tedious and time-consuming task. But it pays off in the long run; Also, doing keyword research on your brand on Google is not enough. You also need to know what your competition is doing. The better you understand the content landscape of your industry, the better for your SEO.
By understanding the competitiveness of various keywords, you will be able to identify the search terms, which can be very difficult to rank. But you will be able to find keyword opportunity intervals. These opportunities come when you find related keywords related to your brand or industry at a low to moderate competition level.
To find such keyword opportunities, you can do keyword research on your competition. The keyword planner tool’s paid version has a competitive analytics feature that can perform the same task quickly. If you follow these tips, you will get enough insight to design a good content and SEO strategy. You will also get enough data for SEO copywriting for your content.