Accurate keyword research is imperative for a successful digital marketing strategy. Keyword research is indicative of market demands and tells you what consumers are searching for and therefore interested in.
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The information will also give you an idea about your content conversion rate; to some extent, it’s like a content ROI. If you create content that includes the right keywords, you will rank higher on Google or other search engines. Keyword research is the key tool for you to present your message and rank it higher than other competitors.
Relevant keywords allow you to connect with your customer bringing more traffic, opportunities and ultimately conversions.
How do you find the right keywords for your business? We’ve broken the answer down into smaller parts, keep reading, and we will share some tips and help you understand how to find the keywords to help your SEO.
How to Research Keywords?
1. Identify Your Business Goal
First, you need to understand what your goal is. Most likely you want to drive more traffic to your website, but your goal should be more defined than that because the traffic needs to convert to an action for your business to be a success. To monitor success and evaluate your strategy, remember that you need to be able to track your goal; establish your performance data, e.g. your sales goal, ad clicks, and impressions, etc.
Your business goal will help you refine your keyword lists and optimize your keyword strategy. Remember to identify your goals based on the real situation of your business and your marketing strategy.
2. Build a Seed Keyword List
At this stage, you have to build a keyword list related to your business and your website on the basis of your brand, business scope, and basic keywords of your business. This keyword list should be the springboard for all your keyword research. It will play a great role in deciding the success of your marketing strategy.
There are several ways to create a seed keyword list,
- Brainstorm keywords related to your business, think about what generic terms you might use to search for your products or services.
- Explore relevant keywords on search engines such as Google.
- Assess your competition and analyze their keywords
- Get the keywords from relevant topics
You can name the keyword list as “xxx Keyword research. ” This is the foundation of your keyword strategy from which you can build, expand, and refine.
3. Research the Keywords and Check Their Competition
Once you have created your seed keyword list you need to research each term; check the search volume, competition, and the searcher’s intent. This research helps you evaluate and identify opportunities as some keywords enjoy higher search volumes per month, and some are much lower, some have higher competition, and some of lower competition.
You aim for the high-volume keywords in your marketing content. Remember to align the keyword with your content. Choose the highest-volume keyword and evaluate all the keywords on your list.
Except for the search volume, you also need to research the competition of the keywords in your list. How competitive are these keywords? Will you be able to go up against the websites or millions of paid ads in the search engine result page? The high-competitive keywords will help you meet your expectations. Normally low-volume keywords will enjoy a higher chance to rank quickly and drive more traffic to your website.
Additionally, you can check the search intent of searchers to evaluate your keywords. Check if it is informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional; be creative with your keyword research.
Given these factors to consider, you can group your keywords into different groups based on your research about the search volume, competition, and search intent. For instance, group them based on the opportunity to rank higher- high opportunities keywords, medium opportunity keywords, low opportunity keywords, etc.
4. Expand Your Keyword List
The keyword list that you have evaluated is narrow; now you need to expand your keyword list with different keyword types or keywords suggested by a keyword tool.
You can use head keywords, body keywords, and long-tail keywords to diversify your keyword list. Brainstorm possible keywords, and add them to your list. You can also use keyword tools to suggest more terms. Download them and add them to your list.
Conduct competitor research to get the keywords of your competitors and include them to reach your goal. Also, look at their feedback to glean other relevant keywords. Long-tail keywords are also able to be incorporated into your keyword strategy. No matter what you use to identify more keywords, remember to keep them relevant to your business; this is the fundamental point of a successful keyword strategy.
5. Refine Keyword List
You need to optimize and refine your list; whether it’s the keyword strategies or the keyword structures; remember to optimize them according to your evaluation on relevance, search volume, and competition.
To some extent, researching keywords is researching the market. You can change or adjust your keyword relevance, competition, search landscape, and semantic grouping. These are the key factors for you to hone your list.
Firstly consider the keyword relevance and cut down on those that are irrelevant. For instance, if the searches of 1000 people focus on 20 keywords, it’s likely that you can drop the rest of the keywords that are less interesting to them. Use the keywords of high relevancy to perfect your ranking.
Utilize online keyword tools to target the keywords based on their competition. It may offer you a better insight to win a higher ranking. Understand the competition, and you will have a much more concise measurement of your keyword performance.
A search landscape shows the results of the keywords on your search engine. Enter certain keywords into Google, and check and see what comes up. Scroll down until you find your targeted page. Also, remember that negative keywords have a role to play.
Group your keywords based on the semantic meaning. Create columns and group them semantically. For instance, a term like “website creation,” “website creation for free” and “website creation manually” may be grouped under “website creation”.
6. Keep Consistent Keyword Research
Consistent keyword research plays a great role in your online presence and makes sure that you keep your keywords in line with the user’s search intent. Experience will tell you what your customers are likely to buy. For instance, you enter “Hire a teacher” on Google, and the results will be very generic from sites like Home Advisor and WikiHow, etc. However, if you search “Hire a teacher in China” the results will be very different. You can see the different intent behind the search term.
Long-tail keywords will help you to reach your audience quicker and generate a more specific and effective communication. Long-tail keywords add relevance, and due to being specific they leave a great impression.
7. Keyword Research Tools
There are many keyword research tools for you to utilize. They are designed to help you find more keywords and research the market and other special functions for the implementation of your keyword strategy.
Moz
It is a fantastic keyword explorer which pulls in data from a wide variety of sources including Google Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, and other resources. There’s a handy import and export function in this tool, and it’s easy for you to connect with your prior work and ongoing tasks with other tools.
Google Keyword Planner
It is one of the most recommended keyword research tools. You can search for new keywords with a phrase, website or category, get the search volume data and trends, multiply keyword lists to get new keywords, and get click and cost performance forecasts.
BuzzSumo
This tool is best for topic research. You can search for a variety of topics, and get the most popular stories about the topic by filtering the data, language, country, and concept. You may even know the number of shares in the listed topics on the search result page.
SEMRush
Similar to Moz and Google, it has the keyword research and keyword ideation tool, where you can search the volume, cost-per-click, and SERP appearance. The difference lies in its monitoring and analysis function because you can enter your domain or URL to check the performance of your website including the organic and paid search traffic, inbound links, etc.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a really good keyword tool from where you can get a variety of useful data on each keyword. The tool can generate keywords, and there are some great analysis features too.
KWFinder
This tool offers real-time keyword SEO difficulty and generates long-tail keywords related to your marketing content. This tool increases your competitiveness in your marketplace.
After reading this, you should have a clear understanding of keyword research. We hope that it will be helpful for your business and that you have picked up some tips that you can incorporate for success!
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Sharline Shaw
