EXPERT TIPS ON KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR SEO
Keyword research is the impetus of any SEO campaign. Marketers conduct keyword research to identify search terms that prospective customers use to find local businesses and shop for online products.
Millions of businesses engage in extensive keyword research expeditions to improve their website traffic. This results in a lot of competition for industry keywords, so if you’re unfamiliar with effective research techniques, you could get left behind and have your business suffer as a result.
Keyword research is a straightforward task once you nail down the standard principles. Here is how you can spearhead the keyword research initiatives of your business.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is defined as the process of identifying words and phrases that people use on search engines. The end goal of keyword research is to use keywords to build relevant content that ranks well online.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
Keyword research influences all SEO tasks, from content creation to website optimization.
Image via Backlinko
Primarily, keyword research is used to integrate both short and long (long-tail) search terms into a website. This helps a website rank better for popular keywords, thus improving its SEO ranking and profitability.
Keyword research also impacts a content strategy by helping marketers find keywords to center content topics to write about. Online content that appropriately uses a wide variety of diverse keywords is able to rank for more online searches.
This is why keyword research is the precursor to any SEO campaign. Generally speaking, keyword research is the compass that navigates the direction of your entire campaign.
How to Find Keyword Ideas
For the purpose of creating online content, keyword research can be used to browse popular topics you can write about. This will help your website generate meaningful traffic that can be converted to sales opportunities.
For example, let’s say that you are the CEO of a digital marketing agency.
Before you can conduct keyword research, you’ll need to ask yourself, “what topics are my potential customers searching for that relates to my company?”
Standard topics that would come to mind are:
- Email marketing
- PPC
- Blogging
- Content Marketing
- SEO
Now that you have topics, you can narrow them down to find keyword ideas. A simple way to do this is by typing “content marketing” into the search engine bar.
By just scrolling down a bit, you’ll find a section that looks like this.
Without using a keyword research tool, you can discover keyword ideas you can implement into quality content. What’s more, is that you don’t have to guess if these keywords are popular.
Google is literally telling you that millions of people are using these keywords to conduct similar searches. This isn’t all. Let’s say you want to write about the different types of content marketing.
All you have to do is click the “types of content marketing” link and then you’ll be introduced to another set of popular keywords. Finally, rinse and repeat to receive a steady stream of quality keywords.
How to Leverage Non-Competitive Keywords
Not every keyword is created equal. If you’ve just begun your keyword research, you can’t reasonably expect to rank higher than a website that’s spent a decade using all of the keywords you want to rank for.
SEO is like real estate. The more effort you put into ranking for particular keywords, the better. However, if you want to spend your time and effort wisely, you should target long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are search terms that exceed at least five words. Long-tail keywords naturally don’t have a lot of competition. This is because people use different keywords to find the same things.
For example, a keyword like “law firm” will have a high keyword difficulty because millions of sites are using it. Conversely, a keyword like “affordable law firm Las Vegas” is more specific and likely will have less competition.
This means you won’t have to spend several months moving from the second page of Google. Therefore, if you want to spend your resources wisely, focus on targeting long-tail keywords to have your website show up for more searches.
Jumpstart Your Keyword Research Today!
As you can see, keyword research isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. Still, entrusting this process to a trusted professional is ideal to see tangible growth from your SEO campaign.
If you want to grow your online presence through effective keyword research techniques, you’ve come to the right place. Give us a call at 972–464–2797 to learn more about how we can help you today.
