Google occasionally changes the way it ranks websites and shakes up the search engine algorithm. While we have witnessed many algorithm updates, there is one thing that always stays constant for brands trying to optimize their pages - keyword research.
Keywords are the words that describe the unique content on your page perfectly. Anything searched on a search engine is a keyword, whether a single word or a sentence.
Keywords are clues for google. Hence, when people look for related search queries, content creators should integrate keywords that are relevant to what people are typing in search engines so they have a high possibility of ranking.
What Is Keyword Strategy in SEO?
Keyword strategy refers to the approach of targeting specific keywords or phrases to improve your site’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). When you target the right keywords, you can not only improve your chances of ranking higher but also drive more website visitors and ultimately more customers. For this reason, it’s important to make sure your website is optimized for those keywords, and that you’re using them in your content strategy.
What Is Keyword Research?
The keyword research process helps you explore phrases that people use to find specific information on Google. SEO keyword research also involves choosing an exact topic and building content that focuses on targeted keywords.
What Is the Role of Keyword Research?
Keywords matter. They attract the attention of search engine algorithms. Search engines detect pages based on their relevance to specific searches. If your website ranks high, a keyword functions like the free traffic driver of your website.
Keywords are strategic factors that play a massive role in the development of a company. You decide what you’re fighting area is, and then try your best with content to break through. Complicating is that every site in your field could compete for keywords - the ones which rank most.
SEO keyword research assists brands in building their content strategies on accurate data and, as a result, outranking the competition.
Another problem is that crawlers no longer approach keywords when ranking sites. The quality of your content is all-important. But keywords are not dead, far from it. High-ranking sites still use search terms related to their target demographic.
Everyone should find out how people are reaching their pages, and that's marketing gold dust.
What Are the Types of Keywords?
Short Tail Keywords
When choosing a primary keyword, it is beneficial to target a short-tail keyword that is relevant to your business. However, it is also important to optimize all content for a mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords to generate the most traffic and leads.
Head keywords include a single general word and have a lot of competition. On the contrary, the Head keyword has great traffic potential, but it is hard to break through.
For example Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Translation Tools, and Copywriting.
Mid-Tail Keywords
Mid-tail keyword terms are 2 to 3 words long and are more specific than short-tail keyword terms. They tend to be moderately competitive key search terms because they cover a specific problem or location in great detail. For example, the phrase " Art gallery in manchester' is a mid-tail keyword term - more specific than the short-tail keyword term 'art gallery centers'.
Long-Tail Keywords
Long Tail Keywords consist of 3+ words or even an entire phrase. Long-tail keywords are specific, niche phrases people are more likely to search for. This specificity often makes it easier to rank these phrases, but the traffic potential is lower because fewer people are searching for them. However, if you can target the right long-tail keywords and optimize your content for them, you can see great results.
When you approach blog posts and other types of content, long-tail keywords often offer more value. This is because they are more specific and thus can be used to attract readers who are already interested in the topic at hand.
How to Search for Keywords?
Brainstorm Seed Keywords
Seed keywords lay the foundation of your entire keyword research process. They help you define your niche and identify your competitors.
Brainstorming for keywords is the process of generating ideas for potential keywords that you could target for your brand-niche site.
Start with thinking about search terms and phrases related to your topic or industry. You can then plug these seed keywords into keyword research tools to generate additional ideas and select a single keyword for targeting.
All you have to do is walk into your customer's shoes and think about what they would google to find your website.
Let's say you are a sneaker manufacturer your, list of seed keywords might look like this:
Shoes
Sneakers
Trainers
Once you have a list of seed keywords, you can generate more specific keyword ideas and expand your research.
Explore Your Niche and Expertise Field
By exploring your niche and expertise field, you can better understand the questions, problems, and topics people are interested in. Also, this will help you create content that is more relevant and helpful to your audience. Besides, it can also help you identify new opportunities for business growth.
Use Keyword Research Tools
You can use these tools to find keywords relevant to your business that people may be searching for online. Additionally, by using keyword research tools, you can find keywords that your competitors are not targeting and thus have an advantage over them.
It's also crucial to do some research on your competitor's keywords. This will help you uncover the keywords driving traffic to their site through organic and paid searches and give you the data on what interests their audience. The data derived from competitor analysis guide you to the right keywords for your business and gain a competitive edge.
What Keyword Research Tools to Use?
Google Keyword Planner (Free)
You can use the keyword planner to find unique keywords bonded to your business and see estimates of the searches they receive. Keyword planner is a free tool. But to use this component, you need to have a Google ads account.
Once you create the Google Ad account, you will see the valuable elements that it has:
Ahrefs keyword generator is a powerful tool for generating keyword ideas and identifying the competition level of those keywords. You can enter any target keyword or phrase, and it will pull the top 100 keyword ideas from its database of over 8 billion keywords.
For each keyword, the generator shows:
Search volume
Keyword difficulty
Related questions to search queries
The last time of keyword update in Ahref's index
The keyword generator pulls from Google and has free tools for Bing, YouTube, and Amazon. The keyword difficulty tool helps you identify the most competitive keywords to target. Ahrefs also offers a free SEO tool that allows unlimited searches without creating an account.
Keyword Explorer is a practical tool for keeping an eye on competitors' keywords and dethroning them from their top positions. With this tool, you will utilize a variety of features to improve your website's search engine ranking. These features include several relevant keyword suggestions, clicks and clicks per search metrics, and the ability to outrank competitors. Additionally, Ahrefs offers a competitive research tool called Site Explorer that allows users to see the website's ranking for a particular keyword.
It also has the world's largest index of live backlinks and is constantly updated with fresh data. The user interface is easy to use and provides all the information to make informed decisions about your SEO content strategy.
You can access these tools by creating an account and selecting Skip Trial. The Keyword Magic Tool allows you to sort keywords into topic-specific subgroups, apply filters to narrow or expand your search, and quickly export your findings from 20 billion keywords. However, the free account limits you to ten searches a day across all the complementary tools provided by Semrush.
When creating optimized content, keyword research can be one of two things. You can either hack away using Google's tools, patiently building up databases of relevant keywords for every single page, or you can use tools like SEMRush.
SEMRush offers an "all-in-one marketing toolkit", and that's great, but the tools we turn to most involve the keyword research process. Under the banner of "competitive intelligence", these tools let you paste in websites from competitors and extract the keywords they rank for -- a great shortcut to planning your keyword strategy.
While SEMRush offers a diverse approach to marketing tools, AnswerthePublic is much more focused. The name gives it away a bit - takes keywords and relates them to the kind of searches real people make.
By scraping Google's auto-suggest and question databases, the creators of this tool have come up with a uniquely valuable fusion. If you want to know what customers are searching for around the keyword "baseball caps", just plug it into the search field, and AnswerthePublic will deliver a wagon wheel of possibilities -- all in question format.
Answering questions is essential if you aim to rank highly on Google snippets, and this tool makes it easy to see which search queries are relevant.
The third tool we find ourselves coming back to is KeywordTool.io. Again, this scrapes data from Google's autocomplete function, doesn't cost a penny to use, and results in a bundle of potential long-tail keywords to insert into the content strategy.
The best idea is to combine AnswerthePublic and KeywordTool, as both use different databases and come up with slightly different visualizations. The keyword tool is great for constructing blogs and articles around trending search terms, while AnswerthePublic is about answering customer search queries.
Even better, KeywordTool also offers the chance to extract keywords for Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. So it's not just a Google-based tool, and it can be valuable when trying to crack social media marketing.
What Is the First Step in Keyword Research?
Current Keyword Analysis
If you are starting from scratch, you can skip this step.
The initial stage is to understand what’s the current weather in your keyword universe. Analyze to evaluate their performance and develop future goals. Use an SEO tool, even a free one to identify underperforming and successful keywords. Poor keywords may have high search volume but lower ranking and CTR.
Develop Goals
Defining your goals is essential to give you a sense of direction within your research.
The question is how to formulate goals for the keyword research process.
Who is your target audience?
What are the needs of your personas?
What are their secondary needs?
Why are your customers interested in your product?
What is the point that makes sure your users buy from you?
Create a Potential Keyword Wish List
Now you can go into brainstorming mode. Turn on your industry experience and answer the following questions:
What and how would they search when receiving information about product-related problems?
What and how would they search when trying to make an informed decision?
What and how would they search when buying from you?
Again, you have to activate your senses with quick thinking. Do not accept that your wish list would turn out to be valuable.
How to Analyze Keyword Research Elements?
When doing keyword research, it is crucial to keep in mind that not all keywords are created equal. Some may be more effective than others for your brand. The most important part of your keyword research is choosing the right ones for your business - those that will help you achieve your marketing and business goals.
There are a variety of factors you will need to consider when making this decision:
Competitiveness of the keyword
How much traffic it receives
What type of searcher is likely to use it
Relevance
Google uses a variety of factors to determine how relevant your content is. It includes things like the topic of your content, how well it aligns with the user's intent, the quality of your writing, and how much value it provides. To ensure that your content is as relevant as possible, make sure you focus on being on topic and providing value to the reader.
Relevancy is one of the most important factors that search engines like Google use to determine which pages will rank for a given user query. Many factors can influence page relevancy including
The topic of the page
Content value
The publishing date
Do you answer the needs of searchers? Your content will have the chance to rank if it's relevant.
Search Volume
Search volume indicates how many people are exploring search queries monthly.
Imagine that you rank successfully for a specific keyword, but it does not derive attention from searches. Does it matter? not. It sounds like opening a restaurant in an abandoned town.
Traffic Potential
Traffic potential pictures search traffic your website could receive if it ranked on Google. There is a situation when the query has searches but lacks visits to pages. So it means that relying only on the search volume numbers is not a good idea.
That said, you should take traffic potential into consideration with search volume.
How Can I See What Keywords People Use to Find My Site?
How to Target Keywords?
Despite all the turbulent changes that search engine optimization has gone through, keywords still stay strong. Content creators should follow these steps to succeed in keyword research.
Analyze Current Keywords
If you are starting from scratch, you can skip this step.
The initial stage is to understand what’s the current weather in your keyword universe. Analyze to evaluate their performance and develop future goals.
Use an SEO tool, even a free one to identify underperforming and successful keywords. Poor keywords may have high search volume but lower ranking and CTR.
Analyze Competitors
One of the popular ways to find valuable keyword ideas is by checking the competitors. But this time, you need paid tools to delve deeper. Also, we will teach you some free methods to uncover keyword opportunities.
Google the products and services you sell, and check who appears at the top. Do not forget to type alternative names and phrases people use to search for your products and services. But firstly, ignore the paid ads. They have not acquired the highest place through organic traffic.
To do this, enter Google the search term and then the site domainname. com (using the domain of the competitor brands). This search tells us the alternative keywords that the competitor ranks in Google for this product.
For a more in-depth approach, you will need keyword tools. We recommend using paid versions to understand the bigger picture. With them, you can enter a competitor’s domain and discover their highest-ranking keywords.
The best way to start using keywords is to find high-volume keywords from your competitors. By adding those to your content, you can gain a competitive advantage in the SERPs.
Use Low-Volume Keywords from Your List for Competitive Advantages
As search volume increases for a keyword, it becomes harder to rank well. To combat this problem, you should find and use keywords with lower search volume. These keywords are often less competitive so you can use them to your advantage for better rankings and more clicks.
Prioritize the Keywords
Do you want to get the most out of your content? Then it is vital to consider which keywords are more important in the market. You can achieve this by analyzing search volume and competition.
Find competitor keywords
You should find all the competitor keywords for your niche with a higher search volume to use them for competition. Use these keywords to outrank the competitors and gain more clicks from users.
Understand Types of Search Intent
Informational Search Query - people search for educational purposes. They want to receive information about specific problems but are not ready to purchase something. These search queries are looking for general facts, directions, explanations, etc.
For example:
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Where is Adidas Store?
How long does it take AI to generate an outline?
Comparison Search Query- comparing and evaluating two or more things by characteristics, differences, and similarities.
For instance:
Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing.
E-book vs. White Paper
E-commerce vs. Traditional Commerce
Transactional Search Query- It has a strong desire to make purchases.
For example:
Buy used Mac
The best tools for keyword research under 15$
Buy Adidas shoes in size 11
Navigational Search Query- A Navigation Search query occurs when someone searches for the name of the company.
Analyze Search Intent
Some people believe that you have to satisfy google to pop up to the top. But, you are analyzing the people's motives, and google knows the best what they want.
Go to google, type any keyword you want, and look at these components:
Content-Type
Blog Articles
Landing Pages
Infographic
White Paper
Content Format
Refers to blog articles and landing pages
How-to's
Tutorials
List Posts
Content Angle
What are the benefits of your content?
Save Time
Save Money
Easy Read
Let's type SEO tools and analyze the results.
We can see that the ranking pages
Content-type - blogs
Content Format - lists
Content Angle - updated for 2021
Now you understand what you have to do if you want to create content for SEO tools. Create list-type blogs that's how you will satisfy the search intent.
The second example is a query - sports shoes
So, when people are searching for this query, they are in a shopping mood. E-commerce category pages are ranking on the SERP, and the content Angel refers to saving money.
Develop Keyword Hierarchy
1. Primary Keyword
2. Secondary Keywords
3. Additional Keywords
The primary keyword should be the main focus of the entire article. So the title and content should reflect and approach that.
Secondary keywords are like the primary ones but give little variations. Additional keywords are phrased or spelled differently than the two leaders of the hierarchy. Here you try to seize every opportunity to rank and get into the diverse minds of customers.
How to Make Sure You Beat the Competition?
Let's say we are a search engine optimization Consulting company. The first step would be to develop a list of niche-related seed keywords. In our circumstances, it would be search engine optimization, search Search Engine Optimization Services, Ranking, Indexing, Keyword Research process, etc.
We have to assess what phrases are worth keeping and targeting.
How to Choose Keywords Worth Targeting?
Generating keyword ideas
Checking SERP for broad terms like "search engine optimization tools" would take time. So, adding modifiers to it is the best option. If our primary keyword is search engine optimization tools, we can modify it by including the top, current year, and review.
Does your keyword have a search volume?
As search volume determines the popularity of the query, check how many people are looking for a particular keyword.
Examine the traffic potential of the topic
There are situations when the search volume of keywords is high, but traffic potential is minimal. For example, converting Mile to KM has a high search volume, yet traffic potential could not get near it.
Evaluate Ranking Difficulty
You have to be ready to compete against other brands for specific keywords. Competitors from a search engine optimization perspective are pages ranking top of Google for particular keywords.
Do some of the top-ranking pages fail to meet search intent? Check Content type, content format, and content angle.
What Are the Keyword Ranking Difficulty Factors?
Number of Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most significant ranking factors. If the page stands out with the number of keywords, it will be tough to compete. All you have to do is ask yourself whether you can generate more backlinks or not.
URL Rating Domain Authority
URL Rating (UR) gives you the backlink profile strength of a particular URL. This metric has the highest correlation with rankings. If the score is 75+, then you will face a tough challenge.
Business Value
Some keywords are more valuable for your brand than others. That depends on how closely keywords are related to your company's product or services.
The recommendation is to try and rank for branded educational and sale-focused keywords.
For example:
Branded keyword: greatcontent Services
Educational keyword: Best content writing services
Sale-focused keyword: Get content writing services
Where to Use Keywords?
Of course, you should distribute keywords through the text but look for other places to add keywords too. Remember, readability comes first. Include keywords if they fit naturally into the content.
Meta Description
Meta description helps Google to determine the relevance of the page. So putting keywords there is a good idea. Also, meta description helps searchers decide whether see the full content or not.
Meta Title
Titles tag is an HTML element that defines the title of a web page. The title tag appears as the clickable headline in search results and social sharing. It is the first-factor search engine crawler, and customers will check.
Within the First Paragraph
The first sentences of the blog should straightly address the problem and include keywords. So readers and crawlers would know what you are discussing.
Headings - H1,H2,H3
It will make your content scannable, and people will scan through your website quickly. They may also appear in featured snippets or answer boxes.URL
Create a URL with the below high-frequency keywords. Avoid using special characters, and make the URL readable. SEO-Optimize d URL is short and fresh, providing a pleasant user experience. This "small" detail can help the page push up on search engine results.
Take Your SEO Content to Another Level with greatcontent
Now you have a clear perception of how the SEO world works, along with keyword research. Keeping your content SEO fit requires flexing all muscles. That's why using external resources, such as marketplace like greatcontent, will save you time.
We were born with good content. We know how to create successful content marketing strategies and create your content with the support of over 30,000 subject-expert copywriters worldwide.
Our team would be happy to advise and work with you to create an SEO- oriented content that meets your wishes and needs.
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