The main objective of SEO is to help your content rank high on SERPs for those keywords which are relevant to your niche. When you do proper SEO, you’ll be able to increase your organic traffic efficiently and create the best brand awareness.
Keyword Research – What Is It?
Keyword research is a unique process used by marketers to find out the popular phrases and frequently-searched words by their target audience. This process also enables marketers to prioritize their strategy of keywords through understanding the difficulty of their site to rank for various keywords.
The good thing about keyword research is that it is a crucial part of any organic or paid search marketing workflow. What’s more, it enables you to clearly understand your target audience, that is, their interests, questions, and needs.
How Do You Start Keyword Research?
When it comes to starting your keyword research, you need to do it with the right mindset and tools. There are three crucial steps you need to consider for making sure that there is a great foundation to your keyword research process. Check them out below.
1. Brainstorm The Seed Keyword Topics
The first step of keyword research is to brainstorm the seed keyword topics. The seed keywords are broad terms which describe the topic relevant to your niche audience. In this process, there are 3 strategies that we would urge you to use which include:
- Come up with broad topics relevant to your industry and target audience.
- Begin by thinking about some of the obvious topics related to your business and audience. These are either one two word terms. When you consider Toggl, for example, which is a time-tracking app, you can come up with various broad keywords. Such broad keywords would be: Time, App, Tracker and Timesheet.
- When doing keyword research, avoid keywords that are “too niche.” Therefore, we highly recommend that you think broadly and be more specific.
You can consider using reliable keyword research tools such as the Alexa Keyword Clusters Visualization in the Competitor Keyword Matrix. With this tool, you can enter your website and up to nine competitors in your niche. Once you’ve done that, go ahead and choose the Keyword Clusters tab to see a map of the keyword topics driving traffic to your website or your competitors’ websites.
Brainstorm some ideal sub topics within the broad topics relevant to your industry and audience. After you’ve gotten the list of your broad topics, go even deeper into these categories. Think of keywords ideal for your broad terms.
How To Build Your List Of SEO Keywords
When you want to build your list of SEO keywords, the first step is to have a list of your initial keywords. There are plenty of sources where you can get a possible list of keywords. However, you need to choose the suitable source for you, but below are some that can get you on the way there.
When we are building our initial list of keywords, we first attempt to capture the minimum for each of the keywords. These include:
- Keywords
- Monthly volume of the keyword
- Difficulty
- Competitiveness
- CPC
- Current ranking
Set Goals
Setting goals is one of the most crucial factors to consider. When performing keyword research, you will find hundreds of potential phrases and terms ideal for your strategy. However, it is essential to consider the keywords to use and the ones that you shouldn’t.
You should note that every keyword has its own results. For instance, some of the popular and broad keywords tend to have high search volumes and may drive a lot of traffic. However, less competitive keywords may drive less traffic but high conversions. Therefore, when you have set goals, it will help you to know the right keywords to target.
Develop A Research Template
It is essential to have a template that you can use for organizing your findings and even plan the content creation. This will also help you to track the performance.
Doing Keyword Research – Finding Keywords For SEO Vs SEM
SEO keywords are not similar to SEM keywords. These are two different processes, plus the intent and goals are also not similar. Therefore, you need to know how to do keyword research for both of these processes.
You can use keyword research tools to find ideal keywords to drive both organic and paid traffic. Below are 6 suitable ideas for your organic SEO strategy.
- Find competitor keywords – Try to find competitor keywords by first identifying industry leaders excelling in search and then research more about their site to find out the keywords driving traffic to them.
- Find top keywords for one competitor in the Site Keyword tool – For this process you need to enter the URL of the site on the Site Keyword tool. This will provide you with the keyword analysis of the website, and show you the keywords driving traffic to the site and other details.
- Find SEM Keywords – This involves keyword research for Adwords. First you need to identify competitors to help with PPC. Also find paid keyword opportunities. For this, you can use the free keyword tool from Google, and keyword research tools from Alexa. You can use keyword planner from Google
- When using the Competitor Keyword Matrix from Alexa, go through the reports to show the data of paid keywords only. This will show you the keywords your competitors are paying for to rank, and the visibility they have for the paid search terms. It will also help you find opportunities for keywords, since you’re able to see the popular terms that have not been by your competitors in paid search traffic.
- Come up with an organic keyword strategy – This includes the creation of SEO content such as landing pages or blog posts, optimized for specific keywords.
- You can create an annual content calendar if you want an efficient organic keyword strategy. Once you’ve done that, you can create content for SEO through the content writing tips.