How To Research Keywords For SEO
If you look up ‘keyword’ in the dictionary, you get this result: a word or concept of great significance - a word that acts as a key to a cipher or code. If you take this word and its definition and apply it to SEO, you will see that it is of great importance to your marketing strategy and the ranking of your website.
Keywords play an important role regarding your website - you want targeted keywords in your content in order to drive traffic to your site. The more people who can find the information they need from your site are more likely to pass that information on, thus driving even more traffic to your site, creating your very own loyal band of followers. Let’s chat a little about keyword research and how it will most benefit you and your website.
Always start with the basics, and in this case, it couldn’t get any easier than to start gathering. Collect short-tail words that are distinct to your business. These are going to be the “seeds” of your keyword research, which you will use as a base to grow your keyword collection. Look internally, meaning, search your products and services for great keywords that will capture the essence of your business. And don't be afraid to search your competitor's websites. Look at their keyword tags, title tags, and description tags they use. This can be a treasure trove of keyword opportunities for your own site.
For now, go ahead and gather all the keywords you can possibly think of. However, don’t think you need to use them all. Each keyword may be valuable, but quality is more important than quantity. For those keywords that you don’t use, keep them in your bag of tricks to use for the future.
The next step is to gather even more. This time around you can branch out from your “seed” keywords and start to sift through the longer tail keywords you may have come across. These keywords may be in combination with your seed keywords that create sub-categories such as location, buying intent, and informational. You can also use this opportunity to search through the words that you do not want to use or be associated with.
Now it’s time to filter your keywords and evaluate them to see which ones offer the most usefulness to your website. This step is vital in helping you pick quality over quantity. In order to measure the value of a keyword, you will want to do a comparison of its search volume and competitiveness in relation to your business niche. Ask these questions:
- How many of your competitors are trying to rank for a certain term?
- How many searchers are actually inquiring about a specific term or phrase? How much search traffic is that keyword getting?
If this is completely foreign to you, there are tools you can use, such as Google Keyword Planner, that will help you measure the effectiveness of your keywords.
Last, but not least, it is time to monitor your keywords. You’ve painstakingly gone through the research phase to find just the right keywords for your website, you’ve included them in your content and are ready to go. Remember that you need to keep an eye on them periodically. It’s good practice to routinely go through your content and update ineffective keywords and add more optimal ones as needed. Live Imagination provides a keyword manager which allows you to track organize your keywords.
You are now schooled in the basics of keyword research. What it all comes down to is finding those words you want to be found for, check the effectiveness for these keywords, implement them in your content, and wait and see what happens.