Is keyword research still important? You might even learn something new about your competition and come up with some great content ideas.
Keyword research is still crucial, but so is optimizing your on-page content for the keywords you’ve picked. Choosing the right keyword is plays a vital role for websites as well as youtube. Google keyword planner, SemRush, ahrefs are some tools for keyword research.
Why Is Keyword Research So Important?
You may not be targeting ‘good’ keywords if your site ranks highly for specific keywords but you aren’t seeing the results of your efforts.
I’m sure you’re thinking something along those lines. Is it true that there are such things as good keywords? To be honest, sure!
Is it really worth it to be number one for search phrases that are only used three times each month? As a result, keyword research is a critical step in determining which keywords to target.
If you’re still not persuaded that keyword research is significant or relevant to SEO today, continue reading to learn *why* Keyword research is so crucial and how it may help your overall marketing strategy.
ALSO READ: YouTube Keyword Research: All you need to know
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is an iterative process of discovery and refinement. The goal of keyword research is to not only locate phrases that are relevant to your business and target audiences, but also to find ‘excellent’ keywords that will bring you a lot of traffic with less competition.
Why is Keyword Research So Important?
1. Find keywords with high search volume
I’ve been talking a lot about ‘excellent’ keywords, and one method to determine this is to look at how many people search for a particular term. The average monthly volume, or AMV, is the most widely used metric.
The more individuals who look up a term, the more likely your website will be found. It’s likely that your site’s traffic will improve if it ranks well for search terms with a high search volume.
To determine the search volume for each of your keywords, use AdWords’ Keyword Planner tool. Although the tool is free to use, it will only provide data ranges if you aren’t already paying for AdWord (PPC) campaigns in excess of a specific amount.
2. Find keywords with low competition
When researching keywords, it’s critical to consider the level of competition. When using Google Keyword Planner, you can see how competitive your keywords are.
‘The number of advertisers who appeared on each term in comparison to all other keywords on Google.’
Competition is graded as low, medium, or high depending on the location and Search Network that you have picked. Although the amount of competition for each phrase is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on those keywords, it can be a fair indicator of the overall level of competition, or the number of sites that target those terms.
The goal is to locate keywords that have a medium to low level of competition.
3. Assess the difficulty to rank
Although looking at a keyword’s ‘competition’ in GKP is beneficial for getting a fast sense of the competition, it doesn’t tell us the complete story. It would be pointless to target keywords if the chances of your site ranking highly for those keywords are slim to none. This is referred to as keyword difficulty or SEO problem.
This is referred to as SEO difficulty by KWFinder, and it is calculated using the following SEO variables from sites that have already ranked for those keywords:
Trust & Authority:Google search rankings are heavily influenced by the topical authority and trust that your site and pages have built up.
Backlinks:the number of external connections pointing to that site and passing link juice to it (links without the nofollow attribute)
Shares on Facebook: The number of times a URL has been shared on Facebook with the same term.
Keywords with a difficulty value of 0-9 are considered easy, while those with a difficulty rating of 50 or more are considered difficult or impossible. Essentially, if you come across terms that are currently being targeted by high-quality domains with a lot of traffic, such as Wiki or Amazon, we recommend going with less competitive keywords.
Examining who appears in SERPs and in what style might be helpful for determining keyword difficulty. The Ahrefs keyword tool, like KWFinder, assesses Domain Rank, Page or URL Rank, and backlinks to determine keyword difficulty. However, Ahrefs allows you to see what types of results are available in SERPs.
We can observe that a featured snippet, two AdWords, and a related question appear before all organic searches for the search term ‘house training a puppy.’
It’s simple to determine whether a keyword is worth targeting using keyword research. Is it worth it if, despite being in first place, your site only appears halfway down the first page of Google? Ahrefs makes it a little simpler to judge this, and I’d add that if a keyword has a low difficulty, moderate search volume, and little competition, it’s always going to be worth it, because people trust organic searches.
4. Find keywords with high conversion rates
The difficulty of a keyword can sometimes indicate that it is excessively wide. The more difficult a keyword is to rank for, and the higher the competition, the more difficult it is to rank for. These are referred to as ‘head’ keywords.
Head Keywords:Keywords that contain 1-2 words have a high monthly search volume, high competitiveness, and high keyword difficulty.
Long tail keywords:**Contain at least three words. Because they are more targeted, they have a greater conversion and click-through rate.
The following are some of the advantages of locating long tail keywords:
Less competition: Long tail keywords should be specific to the services and products you provide, resulting in lower competition.
Better targeted:These search terms will have a better possibility of targeting visitors if your long tail keywords are particularly targeted. The more accurately a term explains something, the more it will be relevant to your visitor.
Search intent:Long tail keywords are more effective at satisfying search intent and, as a result, can get highly targeted traffic.
5. Scope the competition
One of the first things I do when researching keywords for clients is look at their competition. Spying on the competition allows you to gain a better understanding of the keywords they’re targeting, as well as who they’re targeting and what they’re offering.
Their keywords might also provide you with useful information about their strategy. It might also give you a hint about the type of stuff they’re working on. So take what you’ve learned and apply it to your own content strategy. Don’t just replicate what they’re doing; instead, seek for ways to improve or update the material they’ve provided, or simply utilise it to spark your own ideas for content.
6. Get ideas for your content strategy
Keyword research can help you come up with fantastic article ideas. If you’re trying to improve your landing pages, don’t discard irrelevant keywords. Instead, keep track of any fantastic keywords you come across and use them to develop a content strategy.
7. Find new keywords
This may sound apparent, but it’s not always easy to figure out what search terms your target audience uses. If you’re stuck for ideas or are working on a site that you’re unfamiliar with, keyword research can help. There are a few options for accomplishing this:
Use your own site: Take a look at the items and services available and utilise them as seed keywords. To produce a list of comparable search terms, type them into your preferred keyword tool. AdWords group ideas, and Google’s Keyword tool will group suggestions. Simple!
Use competitor’s site: You can also type in the URL of a competitor’s website to see what search terms they have on their site.
Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords, start narrowing it down by eliminating those with low monthly search traffic and significant competition.
8. Understand trends
Knowing when people are searching for keywords can help you decide when to write a blog post or update your website. To gain an idea of peak hours, use Google Trends.
Unsurprisingly, the search term’s popularity rises just after Christmas, likely since this is the time of year when people present dogs to their loved ones. Make a plan to publish material or make adjustments to your website based on the information you’ve gathered.
Finishing Up
Keyword research isn’t only about finding phrases that your audience might be looking for; it’s also about identifying high-quality keywords that will benefit your site. If your keywords aren’t driving more traffic or converting more visitors (remember to use long tail search terms for this), it’s time to do some real keyword research.