The Best Way to Research Keywords for SEO

Excellent keyword research uncovers the terms, phrases, questions, and answers that are important to your users and customers. Your keywords should also support business goals like getting more pageviews, capturing leads, or selling products and services. To drive more truly qualified leads to your site, you’ll need to know how to do keyword research. learning to do good SEO keyword research and analysis is one of the most valuable skills you can build. In this article, we’ll define what keyword research is, why it’s important, how to conduct your research for your SEO strategy, and choose the right keywords for your website.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more. Competitive analysis is an area closely related to keyword research.

Why is keyword research important?


Keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.

People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online. So if your content is successful in getting in front of our audience as they conduct searches, you stand to gain more traffic. Therefore, you should be targeting those searches.

In addition, in the inbound methodology, we don't create content around what we want to tell people; we should be creating content around what people want to discover. In other words, our audience is coming to us.

keyword Research Benefits

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.



Efficient Working

Keyword Research is a vital part of finding what your target audience prefers. Once you know what your audience is looking for and finds important, you can use those keywords to your advantage and achieve desired goals.



Higher Organic Ranking & Awareness Of Company

Using popular keywords, being aware of competition keywords and having appropriate search volume is key to having a higher organic ranking. When the ranking is high, more people will come across your content, and general awareness of your business or company will increase,



Keeping Audience Engaged

Being aware of popular, trending keywords that drive more traffic to your website will help you know what your audience prefers. Further, making content relevant to your audience will keep your audience engaged and acquire a fresh audience based on the trends.



Increased Quality Traffic

Using keyword search tools to find keywords for business success is a practice everyone should follow. When appropriate keywords are used to make relevant content, the traffic it attracts will be of good quality.



Awareness of Trends

Using top keywords will give you an insight into ongoing trends. Being aware of old and new trends will give you an edge over your competitors as you keep up to date on what’s popular and important to your audience and use that to keep your content relevant.



Discover New Markets

Using appropriate top keywords and popular keywords will attract people that are interested in your product or service. Also, using these keywords will help better rank on search engines, making it a credible option for people. This way, you will be more likely to return clients and create new customers from different markets.

1- Volume


You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.

To estimate search volume, use Google’s Keyword Planner. Enter your target term, as well as its variations, plurals, and related keywords. Calculate how much traffic your site would receive if you ranked for each term and its variations. You can wind up ranking on the first page for a given term, but if no one ever searches for it, you won’t get any traffic.


2- Relevance


Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers' needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query.

3- Authority


Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, information content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks. If you're not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword's SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can't compete with (like Forbes), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional.

How to conduct keyword research

Now that you understand the importance of keyword research and have gotten acquainted with some of its most important terms and concepts, you are ready to get started. Follow these next steps to identify the keywords you should be targeting to attract the audience you want and create a foolproof keyword strategy.



Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.

In this first step, you want to create a spreadsheet with general categories or “buckets” for the keywords you wish to rank for. These might correspond to product categories or anything you believe your target audience would be interested in. If you blog from time to time, you may already have some topics you cover regularly.

Keep this list short and simple, with 5 to 10 topics at most. It can be helpful to imagine yourself as a buyer looking for a product or service.

To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You'll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you'll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.


you might have general topic buckets like:

"blogging" (19K)


"email marketing" (30K)


"SEO" (214K)


"social media marketing" (71K)


"marketing automation" (8.5K)


See those numbers in parentheses to the right of each keyword? That's their monthly search volume. This data allows you to gauge how important these topics are to your audience, and how many different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful with that keyword.



Step 2: Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.

Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it's time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.

For instance, if I took that last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company — "marketing automation" — I'd brainstorm some keyword phrases that I think people would type in related to that topic. Those might include:

marketing automation tools


how to use marketing automation software


what is marketing automation?


how to tell if I need marketing automation software


lead nurturing


email marketing automation


top automation tools

Although more and more keywords are getting encrypted by Google every day, another smart way to come up with keyword ideas is to figure out which keywords your website is already getting found for. To do this, you'll need website analytics software like Google Analytics or HubSpot's Sources report, available in the Traffic Analytics tool. Drill down into your website's traffic sources, and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site.



Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyze Accordingly.

Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it's more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used.

It's easy to take keywords for face value, and unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface. Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra-careful about how you interpret the keywords you target.

To verify what a user's intent is in a keyword, it's a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself, and see what types of results come up. Make sure the type of content Google is closely related to what you'd intend to create for the keyword.



Step 4: Research related search terms.

This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it's a great way to fill out those lists.

If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.

Conclusion

Keyword research enables you to understand the specific terms people are using to solve their problems and the context behind those terms. It is important to research keywords to dispel any misunderstandings or assumptions you may have about your users’ needs and the language they use to express them. Keyword research and SEO tools can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you've generated up to this point. Some of the most popular ones such as Ahref, SEMrush and etc are in the previous post.

Download this Article in PDF format

Arashtad Custom Services

In Arashtad, we have gathered a professional team of developers who are working in fields such as 3D websites, 3D games, metaverses, and other types of WebGL and 3D applications as well as blockchain development.

Visit Our Services

Arashtad Serivces

Drop us a message and tell us about your ideas.

Fill in the Form

Blockchain Development
https://blog.arashtad.com/?p=5270