Keyword Research and Analysis for Effective SEO
Keyword research provides valuable insights into the queries the customers are searching for in search engines like Google and Bing. The insights you get from thorough keyword analysis play a crucial role in your content strategy, as well as your overall digital marketing strategy.
Benefits Of Keyword Research And Analysis For Effective SEO
keyword research is more than scrapping some phrase suggestions and extracting excel reports with a list of guesswork. Keyword research is a key SEO and content marketing KPI and several metrics go into the analysis part, search volume, keyword difficulty, SERP positions, traffic potential and intent to count a few. Here are top 3 benefits of in-depth keyword research:
1. Understanding of market trends
Keyword research gives an in-depth look into current market trends. When you have a bird’s eye view of what’s already trending in the industry, you can find topics and keywords that your target audience is in search of.
2. Traffic growth
Keyword research is your number one resource for getting organic traffic through SEO. When you find the best-fitting keywords for your content marketing strategy, you get higher search engine rankings gradually - and higher rankings obviously mean more organic traffic for your website.
3. Customer Acquisition
Keyword research and analysis also fit into the customer’s buying journey. When your content is found by other professionals, you can provide them with a call to action that will lead them all the way from the awareness stage at the top of the funnel to making a purchase.
Keywords vs. Topics
SEO is a highly dynamic digital marketing domain and Google has always been an active player with its updates. It will continue to evolve in the future benefiting businesses that are providing helpful content for the right target audience.
Elements Of Keyword Research
Here are a few main elements you should look out for when performing keyword research.
Relevance
One of the ranking factors that Google prioritizes is content relevance. Again, the concept of search intent comes in. Google and other search engines will only rank your content for a keyword that matches the searchers’ needs.
Authority
Authority is another important ranking factor in search engines. Google, Bing, and other search engines provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. To become an authority, you need to enrich your site with value-driven and informational content that lures in searchers. Value-driven content earns you social signals and backlinks that search engines see as a signal of authority. If you are targeting a keyword where the SERPs are loaded with websites such as Forbes or HubSpot, you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional.
Volume
Let's assume you rank successfully on the first page for a keyword, but it's not getting any traffic; why is that? That’s because the keyword you targeted didn’t have a decent amount of monthly search volume.
How To Find Keyword Ideas?
Studying Your Niche
The best strategy to find keyword ideas is to study your industry/niche closely and what problems your target audience is facing in that industry.
Competitor Analysis
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to keyword research. By reverse engineering your competitors, you can find lucrative keywords to rank for easily. Competitor analysis identifies gaps and weak points that your competitors are missing in their strategy.
How To Target Keywords
Identifying The Search Intent
Have you ever run a search query about something and didn’t find the information you were looking for?
Content-Type
Your content type also needs to be aligned with the keyword research you are performing.
How To Conduct Keyword Research For Search Engine Optimization
Now that you understand all the basics about keyword research and analysis let's uncover what it takes to conduct professional-level keyword research for your SEO efforts.
Follow these steps to find ranking opportunities that skyrocket your sales and customer engagement. You can always tweak the process, but remember to stick with the fundamentals.
Make a list of subtopics relevant to your topic
In the first step, you need to subcategorize the products or services you are offering and break down your niche into small chunks. These subcategories will include the keywords you want to rank for.
As we mentioned earlier, you need to find keywords for your strategy that your target audience would be interested in. If you are already familiar with blogging or content marketing, you might already have an idea about what we are talking about.
We always recommend keeping this list short, with 5-10 topics at most. Place yourself in the buyer’s shoes and imagine what you would look for when buying that particular product/service.
General categories for a website that sells men’s apparel might include:
- Gym apparel
- Affordable suits
- Oxford shoes
- Apple Maps
- Style trends for the season
Expand each topic with a list of phrases you think your customers use
After you have all the subcategories, you need to identify relative terms and phrases for those categories. These phrases are search terms that your customers might type in to find your product/service. The phrases can include location, model number, or anything else related to the category. Keyword research tools like Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and more help you look through the organic traffic of a website and identify what keywords customers are already using when running a search query.
This list is more like a brainstorming opportunity rather than a final list of keywords. It will give you insights that make your keyword research more focused and targeted.
For the men’s apparel website above, we can add the following under the category “Affordable suits”.
- Most affordable suits for the season
- Tuxedo near me under $200
- Used prom suits near me
Find related search terms
There are many creative ways to add to your keyword lists.
- Type in your keyword and run the search query. Scroll at the bottom of SERP, and you can see all the related keyword suggestions for that keyword. If you want more keyword suggestions, you can also incorporate the suggestions from the second page of SERP.
- Google Keyword Planner and Google Search Console are free web performance tools that also help with keyword research. These tools also insights into customer trends and monthly search volume for a keyword.
Below is a list of paid keyword tools that you can use in your SEO strategy.
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- SemRush
- BuzzSumo
- Ubersuggest and more.
Analyze the strength of your short and long tail keywords
For this step, you can use Google Keyword Planner or any other paid keyword research tool mentioned above. Here are a few things you need to study to analyze the strengths of your keywords:
- Is the keyword the exact match for the search term customers are using?
- How high is the monthly search volume? If the keyword has a low monthly search volume, that means your customers aren’t searching using that phrase or search term.
- What is the keyword difficulty? Make sure the keyword that are used isn’t flooded by competitive players in the market. High search volume with low competition is the sweet spot you want to hit!
Verify search intent
Lastly, you need to ensure that the keywords you have added to your list all match the search intent you are looking to target in your strategy. As we mentioned earlier, relevancy and search intent make a huge part of your keyword research.
Type in each of the keywords in search engines, and see if the search results are matching is the intent of the keyword.
Conclusion - Keyword Research For SEO
Keyword research and analysis are the crux of a successful SEO strategy. The keyword research process takes time, but it pays dividends when done effectively. We hope we have answered your question about why is keyword research important for any business, and suggested you free and premium tools that can help do the same.
If you still need help with keyword research and analysis, book a call or get in touch our team of search engine marketing experts who can help you with creating your yearly keyword targeting and tracking strategy to execution.
