How to Do Effective Keyword Research
Keyword research is an integral component of search engine optimization (SEO). It assists you in crafting content that attracts the right visitors and boosts your online visibility.
Keyword research should be done regularly to stay abreast of changes in the search language, your audience’s needs and queries. This is especially relevant when starting a new website, creating blog posts for existing sites or deciding whether or not to promote a product or service.
Before you dive in, take a few moments to brainstorm topics and questions your target customers might ask about your business. Doing this will provide you with a wide variety of keywords to choose from.
Use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to estimate the search volume for each seed keyword phrase. This will enable you to identify variations and plurals of your seed phrases as well as related terms. Doing this helps narrow down your list and ensure you’re targeting all pertinent terms relevant to your niche.
Ubersuggest is another useful tool in this process. This free tool will generate a list of all the keywords your potential customers might type into Google to learn about your business. You can quickly see which words are the most frequent, have the highest average search volume and are least competitive.
By tracking keywords, you can get an understanding of who is searching for those words and at what stage in their buying journey they are at. A term beginning with “how to” might indicate someone just starting out on their shopping spree who might just need basic info. On the other hand, a phrase beginning with “best” suggests someone is likely in consideration mode and might be ready to make a purchase.
Once you’ve finished this step, you’ll have a long list of keywords to select from and start creating useful, findable content for them. This is the beginning of an SEO campaign that will bring in the traffic and leads you desire!
Next, you must evaluate each keyword and assess its worth. There are many elements that go into calculating this value, such as how often people search for them and the difficulty of ranking for them.
As a general guideline, aim for keywords that are frequently searched but not so many that they become too competitive (meaning you won’t rank for them easily). This means focusing on long-tail phrases with high search volume but lower competition.
To do this, utilize tools that will tell you how much traffic each term receives and how difficult it is to rank for it. Some services, like Moz, even calculate the percentage of difficulty for certain keywords so that you have an approximate idea of how difficult those terms will be for your business to conquer.
