Why Is Keyword Research Important And How To Do It?

Firstly, let’s start off with understanding what are SEO Keywords?

The keyword is basically a word or a phrase that many people type in order to find what it is that they are looking for. SEO keywords in online content make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. Keywords help your content to rank higher on the search engine result page. Most keywords are discovered during the keyword research process and are chosen on basis of a combination of search volume, competition, and commercial intent.

For eg., if you are looking for something specific like “Guitar classes near me” then you can use these keywords to search. Always keep in mind KEYWORD IS NOT ONE SPECIFIC WORD. Considering the above example, you might think ‘Guitar’ is the keyword, but no it is not. The context is important as well. If you just type in “Guitar” in the search bar, it will show you pictures and information about guitar but when you type “guitar classes near me”, it will show you guitar classes that are near you.

Why is Keyword Research important?

When you optimize your content around keywords and phrases that often people search for, your website can rank higher for those terms. It is obvious, ranking higher in the SERPs can drive more targeted traffic to your website. This is why finding words or phrases people search for is the first step of any SEO campaign. SEO optimization without keywords is pretty much impossible. 

There are two ways to drive maximum traffic to your website, first is PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, which is paid. The other and only organic way for the same is Search Engine Optimization. 

In PPC, you pay Google to show your web page on SERP for specific keywords. For example, if you sell customized t-shirts, you could bid on that term and appear at the top of Google’s search results when people search for it. Google has tools where you can choose potential keywords to bid on. Google then exhibits your ad in the search results. Every time someone clicks that ad and lands on your website, you have to pay google money. But here the catch is you can differentiate paid results from organic (non-paid) results because they’re marked as Ads.

And as a result of this, people tend to click on the organic results more often.

In SEO, you optimize your web pages to rank in Google’s organic results. And it is Google’s job to rank you in the best, most relevant results for every search query for free. Organic search results drive more traffic to your website, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. Research has also proven that of all US searches, only 2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

How To Do Keyword Research?

Here we will layout the full process of keyword research for you which you can follow for SEO optimization.

Brainstorm a list of important and relevant topic:

Let’s say you run a digital marketing agency. Think of topics that are related to your company, topics like social media, content marketing, PPC, blogging, email marketing, etc. might come in your mind. Then further think of a particular topic your target audience might be most interested in knowing. 

After you decide to go ahead with a particular topic, think of subpoints your target audience might be more interested in. For that, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the topics my audience will be more curious to know about? 
• Which are the most searched topics related to my business?
• Which specific sector of my business is the audience more interested in knowing about?
• For which particular service I am receiving the best response?

After you find answers to these questions, you are all ready for doing your keyword research!

For this step, you can use various tools for your keyword research. Amongst all, Google’s keyword planner is THE most reliable as the data comes straight from Google, unlike most other tools. So you can be sure about the accuracy. But the big drawback here is Google’s keyword planner is designed to help people to generate maximum traffic from their google ad campaigns and not SEO. Nevertheless, you can still use it for a list of keyword ideas. 

Once you choose a tool for your keyword research, start typing in the topics and subpoints you noted in the previous step. You will see the result for the keywords. 

Now start jotting down keywords that have LOW COMPETITION and HIGH SEARCH VOLUME and terminate less important keywords that have vice versa results. 

And you are done! Now you are ready to create content around the finalized keywords!

Don’t forget keyword research is just a part of SEO. There are other major factors like relevancy, authority, backlinks, etc. which will affect your ranking on SERP. However, Keyword planning is just as crucial as any other factor, since it plays a major role to rank a page on the SERPs.