What Is Keyword Research: A Beginner\’s Guide To Keyword Research
What Is Keyword Research: Keyword Research is the heart of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and plays a major role in Content Marketing as a whole. Keyword Research involves the task of conducting extensive research to find out what users are searching for – what words and phrases people are typing in into search engines like Google and Bing to find out information about a particular topic.
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What Is Keyword Research?
Getting a proper understanding of what keywords (search terms – words and phrases) people are searching on the Internet is a must for every content marketer. Without this, it is impossible to go about optimizing the pages so that they rank higher in SERP. The entire process of creating content depends upon Keyword Research.
Note that the term doesn’t mean finding out which keyword has the largest search volume – the most demanding keyword. It involves understanding the audience, their language, intent and needs, and the different ways they use language to search information about a particular topic. It also involves analysis of the findings like how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword and how to strategically place the keywords in the content so that it doesn’t look unnatural or forced. Remember, Keyword Density alone is not enough now. Search engines have become way smarter than they used to be a decade ago.
Why Is Keyword Research Important?
Keyword Research is important because it serves multiple purposes:
- It tells us what words and phrases people are using to look for a particular topic,
- Keyword Research gives ideas about new topics for blogs,
- It helps us understand our audience and their needs, their search intent better and thereby, help us provide them with what they are seeking for,
- Keyword Research helps us stay updated with the latest language used over the internet,
- It helps in creating targeted content
All of these, eventually, leads to generate high traffic to your website.
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How Frequently Should I Do keyword Research?
Keyword Research is not a one-time task. It must be done on a regular basis. This is because you need to:
1. Maintain Ranking Of Your Top Ranking Articles
There will be some pages of your blog which are in number 1 position for a long time. These articles are usually for keywords which are closely related to your products or services or which define your blog the most (like brand name). Of course, you wouldn’t want to lose those rankings. But search language and search terms change frequently. You have to stay updated with that and ensure that your top-ranking articles are in line with the ever-changing search landscape. This is where Keyword Research comes to the picture – to maintain the relevancy of your top-ranking articles to the search engines.
2. Improve Ranking Of The Articles That Are Not In Number 1 Position But In The First Page
Since these articles are already in the first page but not in the first position, there is always scope for improvement of their rankings, by improving their relevancy to search engines. So, Keyword Research…
3. To Improve Ranking Of Articles Which Are Not Driving Any Organic Traffic At All
All those articles which are not at all visible in the SERP, not in the first 10 pages, even if they are really good, are so because to the search engines, these are not relevant. One of the ways to ensure search engines find them relevant is by doing proper Keyword Research and strategically placing them in the content (among other things).
4. To Find Out New Topics To Write
Writing new articles on topics in your niche is very important. Because people’s needs change and you have to cater to them. Doing Keyword Research helps us to have proper understanding of what people are looking for. This gives us opportunities to write new articles.
So, yes. You should do Keyword Research very frequently.
How To Do Keyword Research For Your SEO Strategy?
Keyword Research cannot be mastered in one day, one week or even one month. It needs a lot of research, analysis, trial and error. Like I said, it is not just looking at the search volume of keywords.
- It all starts with a topic or an idea that represents your website/business/blog partially or fully.
- Once the topic is decided, you have to find out what exactly people are looking for in that topic. For example, if your blog is about SEO, you have to find out what exactly people are looking for related to SEO. There are multiple ways to check that:
- You can use Google Trends to see what are the trending topics related to SEO,
- You can start typing in SEO in the search box of Google and see what it is recommending. Example: SEO Tools, SEO Techniques, SEO Strategy, SEO Job Description, etc.
- You can search for SEO on Google and see the related searches at the end of the page, clicking on them will take you to a new SERP where you will be able to see more related searches. Example: What is SEO, SEO Tutorial, How to do SEO, Types of SEO, etc..
- There is also a section called “People also search for” in SERP; you can refer to that.
- You can also consider Wikipedia’s Table of Contents.
- Once you have a decent number of search terms, you have to find out the popularity of the search terms and the difficulty level to get them ranked. There are scores of tools, free and paid, available for this purpose. Google’s free tool Google Keyword Planner does a decent job at providing these information – search volume per month, level of competition (low, medium, high), etc. You can also use Keywords Everywhere – chrome extension to check search volume of particular keywords.
- Now, analyze the data that you have collected and based on that decide for which keyword you want your page to rank whether or not it is possible.
I hope I have been able to explain what is Keyword Research. This, however, gives a very basic idea about what is Keyword Research and how to do Keyword Research. I will write a detailed post specifically on how to do Keyword Research.
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Meanwhile, you can ask your questions related to what is Keyword Research in the comment section below. I will try to get back to you at the earliest.