What is Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is a process that every website owner, blogger, a small business owner must do so that it starts the Search Engine Optimization of his/her website, blog, and product in the right order.
Keyword Research is a process that we use to create a seed list of starting terms, expand our list using keyword research tools, and use it on the best keywords on our site.
When you do SEO for your website, the first thing you should think of is what keywords to target on your pages, and then begin to optimize those pages around those chosen keywords.
- Keyword Research
The process of choosing those keywords is known as Keyword Research.
Keywords are the basis of SEO – short phrases that people use to search, google search words ranking.
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| Keyword Research |
Optimizing your content for Google needs to take into consideration how people search.
You should optimize your website content for the right keywords because that will be the difference between your website being found or not.
Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign.
Whether you want to use keyword research for building a niche site, come up with article ideas for your business website or simply want to gain more insight into what your customers are thinking, it takes a lot of time to find a good keyphrase to target.
Interesting sites will increase their recognition on their own, so offer quality content and services on your site.
Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.
Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.
Before you Start: Find out What Terms People Search
Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content.
Before you can optimize your site, you need to know what keywords to include on your site, which means identifying how your potential customers are searching.
How to choose which keywords to target?
The most important thing in the keyword research process is knowing how to choose the right keywords, and what the main criteria are that we should use to select the keywords we should target.
On the web, there are a lot of articles available where you can learn how to do keyword research, but unfortunately, a lot of them are not well explained or they aren’t on point and updated about keyword research.
Types of Keyword Research
There are multiple types of keyword research, and that is by taking into consideration the aim of the process why we are doing keyword research, and what is the main purpose why we are doing it.
We should take into consideration a lot of things, like what is your target audience, for whom you are writing your blog post, who are your potential customers or buyer personas, etc…
1. Keyword Research for SEM Campaign
Search Engine Marketing, shortly known as SEM, is a paid method of internet marketing to advertise on different websites the internet, with the main purpose of increasing traffic and conversions on the internet.
For SEM to be successful, the successful process of keyword research is also a must to be done and used to know what keywords to target in the SEM campaign.
2. SEO Keyword Research
Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization is the reason why I am writing this article, which is a service that we offer.
The process helps to identify keywords that we need to target on our pages and optimize around them so that we rank high on SERP (search engine result pages).
3. Keyword Research To Help Sell on Big E-commerce Online Websites
A lot of business owners, producers, and sellers, use big e-commerce websites to sell their products, and services online.
These online e-commerce websites are huge and have a lot of competition to be able to be seen on these sites it is needed optimization of the product listings is done, and in this case, the most important factor is to know which keywords to target in the listings.
4. Social Media Keyword Research
In these last years, social media have become very important for website owners, bloggers, etc, to increase traffic, conversions, sales, etc…
There are different types of research for the optimization of social media, and the most popular ones are Youtube and Pinterest.
Keyword Metrics To Be Considered for Keyword Research
When doing keyword research, there are a lot of metrics available in the keyword tools, and we need to know which ones to use to identify the best possible keywords.
1. Search Volume (Usually Monthly)
Search Volume is the most important factor in the process because we need to know how much are people searching on the internet for the keywords we are choosing to focus on.
2. Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC is important for the paid campaign of search engine marketing, but not only, because it is also important for SEO, because the higher cost per click, means that keyword has higher buyer intent and higher conversion.
3. Paid Difficulty
Paid Difficulty is a metric important in paid search campaigns and helps to know what kind of keywords to target.
4. SEO Difficulty
SEO Difficulty is one of the most important metrics in the process that needs to be identified.
It serves us to know the difficulty of a keyword to be ranked in search engine result pages.
Sadly, not all the SEO tools offer to reveal this metric, and even those that offer this, some of them are not accurate.
How To Do Keyword Research For SEO?
My tips for effective keyword research are:
Step 1. Choose the right seed keywords
When choosing the seed keyword try to think of two seed keywords that are somehow related, and do the search in Google for these keywords, and from the Google search page copy the keyword suggestions that come up in SERP after the search is made.
After that also copy the link of the first or second search result in SERP, and paste them all into a spreadsheet.
Do that also for the second seed keyword.
Step 2. Open your preferred keyword research tool
Go to your preferred keyword research tool and paste them all into the search field.
Start the keyword research campaign, and download the results in the spreadsheet.
Step 3. Remove all the duplicate results
After that remove all the duplicates from the spreadsheet, filter the results and remove all the keywords with less than three words, and remove also all the keywords with less than 100 search volumes.
If your tool offers SEO difficulty metrics, remove all the keywords with hard and medium SEO difficulty.
Step 4. Check keywords for their relevancy
Still, there should remain a huge number of keywords in the spreadsheet. Still, here you must start checking the keywords manually for their relevancy and remove all the keywords that are not relevant to the seed keywords that you have started the process in the beginning.
If the keyword research is done in this way, you will find keywords that are relevant, easy to rank and have a decent search volume.
I recommend you to check out our page about SEO Content Strategy also.
Step 5. Save the spreadsheet document
After the process is done, don’t forget to save the spreadsheet document, if it doesn’t get saved automatically!
What are long-tail keywords?
A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific keyword phrase that marketers use to try and attract targeted traffic to a web page.
To assist you in finding out how people search and what words they use, there are several sources for free tools on the web that you can use although the Google free tool would probably be the most up-to-date.
Keyword Research Tools – Free and Paid
The best free keyword research tool is Google AdWords provides a handy Keyword Tool that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword.
Your website stats package -Google Analytics is also an essential source of information to monitor the keywords that are successfully driving traffic.
Summary of Keyword Research Techniques
In general, to do free keyword research you need to follow this process:
- Create a seed list of starting terms-a seed list is your initial set of keyword ideas.
- Expand your list using keyword research tools- it’s time to expand your list. Open your favorite keyword research tool and start entering your keywords.
- Refine your list with competitive research
Now that you have a good list of keywords, it’s time to refine it and place it on the best keywords.
Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers.
You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.
You should design your site around your visitor’s needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.
Don’t use these bad practices:
- Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines that are annoying or nonsensical to users
- Having blocks of text like “frequent misspellings used to reach this page” that add little value for users
- Deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines.
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Burim
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