If you even have the slightest idea about SEO (Search engine optimization), there’s no way you haven’t come across keywords. Keyword research is extremely essential for any content creator before posting his content online. Keywords optimize your content and help ensure that your content appears on the top of the search list whenever a related topic is searched on the search engines.
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What are Keywords?
Keywords are the words that are most commonly searched by search engine users to find what they’re looking for on the internet. They help the search engines find out relevant content from all over the internet and deliver them to the users. Keywords play a vital role in SEO(search engine optimization).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is the process of making sure your content is appearing on top of the search list with the use of relevant keywords, images, and rules of search engines. SEO helps your content get organic traffic on search engines and social media platforms. Search Engine Optimization is essential to increase your brand or content’s visibility on the internet and increase its organic traffic.
Google and other search engines crawl through various websites all over the internet and find out the most relevant topics to the searched keyword. The most relevant content is then presented to the content consumers. SEO is a way to ensure that your content is optimized as per Google’s algorithm and is reaching the target audience efficiently and effectively.
What is Keyword Research and why is it so important?
Keyword research is the process of finding the most relevant keywords according to your content. This assists in using them in a way that optimizes your content with the help of SEO.
Keyword research is so essential because it creates the base of all SEO activities. With the help of the right keyword research, you can increase the ranking of your content on search engines.
Keyword research can now be called digital market research because it tells you how the market is functioning, what kind of questions are people are asking, and how to make sure that your content is reaching your target audience. Here are all the reasons why keyword research is important.
1. Attracts The Right Audience
Here’s how keyword research helps in attracting the desired users:
- You can analyze keywords based on their intent and then tweak content to incorporate these keywords. Once your pages start ranking, you will attract people in the desirable stage of the customer journey process and convert them.
- Since you are attracting your target audience based on their search terms rather than broader demographic details, you won’t be wasting time on irrelevant leads.
- Whether you earn leads or not, keyword research combined with a good content strategy definitely Increases your brand value and credibility.
2. The First Step In Customer Funnel
Keyword research is crucial for driving the necessary traffic for further marketing processes to be implemented.
- You can outrank competitors by providing more depth, keeping your information up-to-date, and by simplifying concepts. This can help you convert leads of competitors too.
- Keyword research gives you an insight into user trends and gives you more ideas for refining business offers, services, and products.
3. Better Than Traditional Channels Of Promotions
Traditional channels of promoting company services – such as TV ads, radio, and news papers – Give extremely good visibility, but they come with a lot of cost.
In comparison, keyword research is:
- Cost-effective
- Measurable Returns
- Easy To Refine Or Experiment With
Essential Elements Of Keyword Research
The main elements in keyword research are search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent. Let’s see how each element is capable of impacting your content!
1. Keyword Search Volume
The number of user searches defines the search volume for any keyword carried out monthly for a particular phrase, query, or term. The volume will define the traffic that will come to your page. Otherwise, there’s no point in ranking!
Try optimizing your pages for keywords with high search volume but low difficulty; this ensures the best results. Also, be extremely careful while adding keywords. Never add them in places where they’re irrelevant; this will backfire in terms of user experience as well as ranking.
2. Keyword Difficulty (KD)
KD refers to the strength of the competition in any particular query, phrase, or search term. Higher KD indicates that there are many high authority blogs ranking on the said keyword, which therefore means that your chances of outranking them are bleak. Other way around for keywords with low difficulty.
You can rank on even difficult keywords if your content or credentials stand out, but this is rarely the case.
3. Keyword Intent Or Relevance
Keywords can be categorized into 4 types of intent based upon the motivations of users searching those terms. They are as follows!
- Informative: When users want to obtain more information about a generic event, or phenomenon.
- Commercial: When users want to seek more information on brands, products, and services.
- Transactional: When users want to complete their purchase and find relevant pages for checkout using search terms.
- Navigational: When users want to find a specific website or webpage.
4. Keyword Seasonality
“Seasonality” simply means that keywords that were relevant during certain events, days, or weather conditions may not always be relevant. The search volume of all keywords changes depending on user behavior, but “seasonal keywords” are a little bit more sensitive to change!
For tourism, hospitality, and food and beverage sectors, this is especially true. While other companies may have to deal with seasonal keywords while promoting offers during holidays or festivals.
Conclusion
Here we are with all you need to know about keyword research and some of the best tools that assist in it. It’s time to use the information and begin your research to rank your content on the top. I hope someday when I’m looking for blogs on how to make dinner with roasted almonds I come across your blog on the top of the search list and have a roasted almond dinner, and if you do need more ways to rank your content on top, here is a brilliant article on how to use SEO efficiently.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q.1 How can I increase the visibility of my keywords?
Here are ways to do that:
- Find keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty
- Depending on keyword intent define what details you want to include within the content
- Although keyword research tools will always tell you the intent, but we recommend searching a term on Google and seeing what kind of pages Google has associated with them.
- Incorporate keywords in meta-tags such as description, title, and headers.
- Avoid keyword cannibalization.
Q.2 What number of keywords need to be used for SEO?
0.7% to 1% of your content should constitute primary keywords and secondary keywords should be included only once.
Q.3 What is the best keyword research technique in SEO?
Searching seed keywords on keyword planner tools and analyzing resulting keywords is the best technique. But in case some topics are too sensitive for Google to provide keywords on (there are few such forbidden topics), then you can take your competitor’s webpage link and see what terns their content is ranking for.
Q.4 How to generate keywords for SEO?
There are three ways of doing that:
- Either by typing seed keywords and extracting resulting keywords
- Or by using comeptitor’s webpage and finding terms hat they are ranking for.
- Or using Google Search Console to know which terms people are finding your pages for.
