In simple terms, keyword research is the process of finding out the various words or phrases that people use to search on different search engines such as Google and Bing.
Keyword research is usually the first step to any successful SEO campaign as it helps you to understand what people are searching for, identify your target audience and the content that attracts them.
Seed Keywords
Seed keywords are words which have a high relevance to your business, but also have a high volume of searches on search engines. They are called seeds because they help grow your keyword list and expand it.
These keywords are the beginning point to keyword research as they help you to create a list of keywords that may turn into new content ideas.
You need to begin seed keyword research by asking yourself some basic questions about your business:
- What is my business and website about?
- What do I sell and how is it best phrased?
- What keywords are currently present on my website?
- What keywords do I want to rank high for?
One of the easiest ways to generate new seed keywords is to Google search keywords you want to rank high for. If you can, try to ignore large sites (like Wikipedia) and ads, and try to find sites that specifically focus on your keyword topic. Using keyword research tools like SEMrush and Moz, you can look at the top 10 keywords those sites rank for. This will help you to find new keywords relevant to your business.
You can also use these keyword research tools to identify keywords that are currently generating some traffic for your business and have a good search volume. These seed keywords will become the basis for list building.
List Building
The more seed keywords you can find for your business, the better. These seed keywords help to create different lists of related keywords which can contribute towards new pages on your website or a new content section.
Every new seed keyword becomes a new topic, page, or idea and you use the list of related keywords correspondingly to create content that will generate traffic to your website.
An example is – if you have a marketing business and your website ranks high for ‘affordable advertising’ then you can use a keyword research tool to enter this seed keyword and find related keywords such as ‘cheap advertising services’ and ‘affordable Facebook advertising’ which can then help you to generate more relevant content for your website.
Competitor Analysis
Although finding keywords with high search volumes is great, it also means that those keywords are highly competitive!
Finding keywords with high demand and low competition is ideal, but this can sometimes be difficult. That is why it is important to spend time and effort on keyword research as it is the foundation for winning SEO.
On your keyword research tool, have a look at the ‘keyword difficulty’ measure for your seed keywords. This can help you to determine how hard it is to rank high for a particular keyword. The higher the score, the more competitive the keyword is.
Keyword Selection
There are 4 factors that can help you to determine which keywords you should prioritise and use for content creation for SEO.
As mentioned above, the relevance of your keyword and search volume play an important role in determining important keywords. Usually, keywords with a high relevance to your business and a medium search volume number are your best options. Although a higher search volume may be more attractive, it also means that it is highly competitive.
Keyword difficulty stated above is the third important factor in determining which keywords to prioritise.
Lastly, you also need to consider the organic click-through rate of your keyword. A high score means that more people click on the web results with that keyword which is a good indication of website traffic generated from a particular keyword.
So, make sure you spend some time on your keyword research as it is a major contributing factor for SEO which in turn will increase your sales and profit.