Keyword Research – Beginners Guide

Keyword research sounds like such an unsettling task, but to get a better search result you always need better keyword research. While Google keeps us on our toes with their regular algorithm updates, one thing stays quite consistent for Inbound marketers looking to optimise their website for search and that is Keyword Research.

SEO keywords inform the direction of your content, ensuring that the content produced is relevant and simply searchable on Google.

So what is keyword research all about?

Keyword research can be a time-consuming task and involves a lot of effort to flow through details, numbers, and a list of keywords. But it is important to do it well. Thorough keyword research will lead to a foundation of your SEO strategy and content development.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is the process of finding and analysing the actual terms that people enter in the search engines. The insights you get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy, also as your marketing strategy.

Why Keyword Research is important?

There are three essential SEO factors and Keyword research is one among link building and content marketing.

The Keywords used will show you a significant difference between a website that gets tons of organic searches and one that gets none. You can determine a profitable niche, find related markets, rank well in search engines for specific topics to drive traffic to your site by doing effective keyword research and promote your product/service by enhancing your marketing effectiveness.

How to do keyword research?

There are many ways to do keyword research, either manually or using a keyword research tool. But whatever the way you choose, there are a few important steps to take.

  • Study your niche
  • Define your goals
  • Finding Keyword Difficulties
  • Make a list of the relevant topics
  • Study the search intent
  • Identify long-tail keyword

1. Study your niche

Before you tend to figure out the best keyword to optimise your page, its best to learn deep about the topic or the niche. When you are doing it, it will give you out of the box ideas and will help you to discover new angles to your marketing and SEO strategy that you might not be thought before.

There are few ideas on studying your niche,

  • Talk with your existing customers and get to know them better
  • Try to think from the potential customer’s perspective
  • Get involved in discussions related to your topic or niche in online communities

2. Define your goals

A progress won’t start without a plan and it won’t end without a goal. A plan always begins by defining goals. In the Keyword research before defining goals, ask yourself a few questions like,

Who are you?

What is your brand about?

What makes you special and unique?

What is your website all about?

Once you got the effective answers to these questions, then you need to specify the brand’s mission. It is always important to define your goals because it will give direction to your SEO plan and strategy. The search terms that you are using should be aligned to your goals.

3. Finding Keyword difficulties

Understanding how difficult a keyword is to rank well in search engines is one of the important steps in finding the right keyword to target, like defining goals ask yourself three critical questions to choose better keywords:

How many people are searching for your website?

What is your level of competition?

How many sites are targeting the same keyword?

You may know what people are searching for, and you might have the best answers for them on your site and you used the best keyword, but if no one finds you because of your competition, then all your SEO efforts could be wasted.

4. Make a list of relevant topics

From the main category of your brand and the goals, you aim to achieve, Make a small bucket list of topics and make a list of all topics that are related to the brand.

They need to be the topics that are important to your business and related to your customer’s persona. These topics can further breakdown into the keywords that are related to those topics.

5. Study the Search Intent

Search intent is defined as the reason behind why people search for a specific term. In the good old days plugging in high volume keywords to bump up ranking for the page used to work pretty easily. But it is not simple anymore these days. Today, Google’s search algorithms compare the search terms with queries to learn about the search intent.

There are many factors behind people’s search habits, such as

  • Searching because they have a question and want an answer to it
  • Searching for the specific website
  • Searching because they want to buy something

Try to put yourself in the audience’s shoes. And think of the solutions. Once you got the idea of your search intent, you can use it to fine-tune your keyword research. Always be specific in finding the keywords that directly match your targeted audience’s search intent

6. Identify long-tail keyword

Normally the Keywords are often shorter search terms, that are closely related to your brand’s main topic. Long-tail keywords are more descriptive and often related to your brand’s sub-topics,

For example: if your website publishes content about hotel reviews, using a long-tail keyword like 10 best hotels in Chennai will attract more relevant audience than hotels in Chennai.

Long-tail keyword usually gets fewer clicks, but since they are focused on a specific topic or product, they get a higher conversion rate.

6. Use Good keyword research tools

It’s always advisable to use a keyword research tool, but it has to be after you are done with the research manually, it is best to start your keyword research in the old school fashion, by research you can get a wider perspective for your content and strategy.

You’ve now got a gist of keyword research that’ll help you to be precise on the right topics for your business and obtain you some short-term and long-term gains. Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every month.

 

Keyword research is the cornerstone of an effective SEO and content strategy. For more tips related to digital marketing, head over to Bunjy.co. We are a full-fledged digital marketing agency in Chennai.