If you’ve been in SEO (search engine optimization) long, you have undoubtedly heard the phrase “Content is King.” In many ways this is absolutely true; fresh, quality content that appears regularly is essential to a good marketing strategy. Without it, clients are likely belly up in the water.
But content didn’t become king on its own.
Rather, content is better described as the protege of keyword research. Because without a strong keyword research component, both content marketing and web page creation may not produce the desired results. Keyword research is important for exposing content gaps and opportunities for site owners. Furthermore, quality keyword research can drive improvement in search result rankings and visibility to web consumers of the site owner’s product. For this reason, learning how to do keyword research is critical, and it is not as easy as you would think!
Drill down the basics
Keyword research can be defined as the process of identifying terms and phrases people enter into search engines to find information they are looking for on relevant web pages. Ultimately it is a SEO tool for determining how consumers are connecting with a client’s products and how to improve the experience. It can also be used to identify which words or phrases are important in getting consumers to the site and if they align with the client’s long-term goals.
Read: SEO Strategies for Bloggers – A Guide of SEO Best Practices
Keywords are important across every piece of content on the website because individual pages, rather than the entire site,are ranked for their keywords in the search results page. In the SEO world,there are number of different types of keywords that can be used throughout each page:
- Head keywords, which are a single word.Because of the numerous different reasons a consumer may type a single word into a search engine, these keywords are often highly competitive and have a low conversion rate. For example, if you type “dog” into your search engine,are you looking for a specific dog breed, veterinary information, or who ate the most hot dogs at this year’s hot dog eating competition?
- Body keywords, are 2-3 words. They generally narrow down the consumer intent and content is more likely to be more easily linked to what they are searching for. For instance typing “hot dog eating”will rule out any results related to pet dogs. This makes body keywords moderately competitive with a mid-level conversion rate.
- Long-tail keywords, are longer phrases that get to the heart of what the consumer is looking for such as “hot dog eating contest results 2018.” Content is easily aligned to consumer desires, giving these keywords a much higher conversion rate and client’s achieving a high ranking is less difficult. An estimated 70 percent of web page traffic is generated by long-tail keywords.
Often times the goals of keyword research can be confusing. Ultimately, the goal is an increase in sales, not simply an improvement in traffic to a website.
Find the right keywords
There are many thousands of variations in keywords that can exist and individual web pages can rank for each one. Keeping client intent in line with consumer intent when it comes keywords is an added test to keep in mind. This is part of what makes keyword research so challenging.
The consumer intent basically takes into account the reasons why a specific search query is conducted and what the end goals are. Aligning the intent behind visits to a client’s website and the intent of the visited web page can greatly influence ranking in organic searches. Search engines are improving the way they interpret searches and user intent, which means matching client intent has never been more important.
Other aspects to finding the right keywords to focus on include search volume and keyword difficulty. Search volume is a metric that basically summarizes the potential volume of traffic to a web page a keyword could generate in a given time period. It can help focus marketing strategies. Keyword difficulty takes into account how competitive a keyword is and how difficult it would be to improve a client’s ranking.
Dive into keyword research
With the metrics necessary to find the right keywords, it is time to dive into the meat of it and do some research to evaluate keyword rankings and build a marketing strategy.
First thing is first, develop a list of seed words. These seed words are simply a list of keywords and phrases that are likely to be relevant to the website and business. They include keywords that the business is already ranking for, as well as new ones that will be targets for improvement. Compiling a list of terms can be done a number of ways such as by:
- Brainstorming all terms directly associated with the product or service
- Considering consumer intent
- Evaluating additional search terms using a search engine
- Analyzing competitor keywords
- Researching niche topics for additional keywords and phrases
Next, work into keyword grouping or clustering by evaluating the actual opportunity associated with each one and grouping high, medium, and low opportunity words together. Going even further, divide these opportunities into those that align with business goals and lowest research investment costs. Finally, cluster similar keywords and work to increase the market share of all variations of the same word or phrase.
Read: How to Outrank Your Competitors Using SEMrush
To build client understanding and buy-in, the next step is to generate a report that will help to communicate the findings of keyword research. Reporting will provide a clear methodology to the process and a concrete list of keywords, goals, and incremental improvements made over the up coming months. This step can also help to further align company goals with the associated SEO work.
There are a number of tools out there that can help the process of doing keyword research and help to capitalize on keyword opportunities for clients. Ultimately,keyword research is not as simple as it first appears. Getting it right takes a substantial amount of in-depth client research and creative thinking.
You may also like: SEMrush Traffic Analytics Tool Review: Is This Competitive Research Tool Worth the Price?
As you dive into keyword research, remember that there are a variety of different types of keywords that each play a role in building a client’s search ranking. Numerous metrics go into finding the right keywords, which is a first step in developing a seed list of words. This list can then be prioritized and clustered to develop the most useful content strategies and gain maximum benefit for the client.
Thanks for providing this great information, this is really useful.
Great article,
Content and the keyword play a major role in determining whether your article will be shown in the search result page or not. After finishing a blog we generally optimize it by including keywords. Some do it smartly while others may lack the skills. So it is important to know the correct way to optimize ii to get a higher ranking in SERP.
Yes, No doubt “Content is King” but researching matters the most otherwise content will not rank very easily. It takes lots of effort, time and analytics skills, etc.
You’ve explained everything very clear and simple words.
Thanks for that!
hiI sir
great post I have use ubersuggest for keyword research
hey , such a great article thanks for sharing, i love to read your blog posts, your writing skill is awesome, thanks again for this awesome article. happy blogging
Amazing blog, informative content keyword play an important role our ranking of top , say thanx to this amazing blog keep sharing .
Agree on your point that finding a right keyword is really tough job. It requires a complete research to understand things as you suggested very well in this post. Thanks for this nice read.
Hi,
I read your article and this is truly amazing, It has a lot of information, easy tips or useful information.
I do believe content and the keyword is the heart of the successful blogging, without those things there is no chance to be successful. finding the best keyword helps a lot to get a potential customer. we need to place a high priority at the time of finding and producing content to make it perfect.
First of all thanks for sharing such a nice blog post online. Keywords play an important role in ranking our website on top of search engine page results. Although there are many keyword searching tools available online and one should know how to use them properly. After reading this article I have surely learned a few new tricks which I will surely be using for my keyword strategy. Looking forward to more amazing blog posts in the future… 🙂
say thank you for this informative content . really appreciate your hard work i .
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I agree with you that keyword research is the crux of digital marketing as it is first and foremost method of targeting potential customers for your business.
Thanks for this post! I find that a lot of SEO writers are still choosing a single keyword and putting it in their content as much as possible. Your tips seem to make much more sense!
I agree with you both keyword and content are the important part of SEO marketing, I always choose long tail keyword instead of a short tail keyword.
It necessary to do keyword research,
It is good article
Very great article! With Out Keywords content writing is no meaning!
thanks
I like the helpful info you provide in your Blog.
Really explains everything in detail.
The Blog is very interesting and effective.
Thank you for sharing informative article.
Hi,
Yes, it is very necessary to do keyword research properly before writing blog posts. Thanks for the awesome tips on how to do quality keyword research.
Praveen
thanks so much for this good article thanks
Thanks for lovely information you work very hard god bless you lot.
Excellent Post.
I totally agree with this content on seo topic.
It is really helpful to people who doing seo activity.
Thanks for sharing your great knowledge with us.
Hey, Great article.
Keyword and content are the souls of the website. If they are not properly optimized then it would not be possible to stand out the website up from the competitors. proper strategies are required to conquer the field. Paid tools also help in finding the right keyword related to the niche.
Thanks for introducing us with more strategies, Keep writing more articles. Great job.