The Right Way of Doing Keyword Research

 

Most businesses today have a website. But a website alone cannot do you any good. To reap the full benefits of the online revolution, you need to make sure that your website ranks well on search engines like Google. However, with competition on the internet growing fast, your website needs a smart SEO strategy to rank well on search engines. But it is crucial to understand that your SEO strategy cannot become smart unless you do proper keyword research. You cannot rank well on search engines if you don’t know what keywords are crucial to your business.

So, what is keyword research?

The process of finding the search words or phrases that people enter on search engines is called keyword research. When you know what search terms people use to get to where they want to go, it helps you to come up with a relevant content strategy, which, in turn, helps you achieve your overall online marketing goals.

Whether you do your SEO on your own or hire an SEO services company, it is vital to know your SEO keywords to rank well on search engines.

So, what should you do to get found with SEO keywords?

To make things clear, let us take you through how to get started with keyword research, discovering new keywords, and picking the best keywords for your brand.

Getting started with keyword research

Things in the online world change thick and fast like your SEO strategy due to changing Google Algorithm. But one thing that has more or less remained consistent over the years is keyword research. However, the way of doing keyword research has certainly changed over time.

Keyword research is important because it lets you know the topics people are looking for on the internet. And, when you do it correctly, you get to know the popular topics among your audience. Proper keyword research allows you to know the terms or keywords that are getting high volumes of searches every month. When you know the high-volume keywords, you can design your content accordingly, and then you can use that content to target those keywords.

When it comes to keyword research, knowing the user intent behind the keyword is extremely important because it is the intent that helps you rank well on search engines like Google. You also need to keep in mind that carrying only the keyword on your webpage is not sufficient – your content needs to address the search intent of the user. Since the intent is extremely important for your ranking, you need to make sure that you interpret the targeted keywords correctly.

If you want to crosscheck the user’s intent in a keyword, you should key it in a search engine and check the results it throws up.

So, how should you go about doing keyword research? Here is how to get started with keyword research:

Start by listing down important and relevant topics keeping in mind the things you know about your business. Create a list of topics for which you want to rank. List down 5 – 10 topics that you think are relevant for your business. Based on these topics, you can zero-in on the relevant keywords for your business. While selecting the topics, think from your audience’s perspective. Think of what your audience would be looking for the most and select topics on those lines. For example, if you are a blogger, some of the topics that you might want to pick up are:

Blogging

SEO

Email marketing

Marketing analytics

Email marketing

Lead generation

You can find out the search volume for each topic, which will help you to streamline your content strategy. Depending on the relevance of each topic, you can create sub-topics and start generating the relevant content.

Next, pick up relevant keywords for each topic. While selecting keywords, think from the perspective of your audience – what they would be searching for and what they want. You should select keywords or phrases for which you want to rank for in the SERPs. For example, if you are an ERP software development company, then some of the keywords that you can think of are:

How to use ERP software?

What is ERP software?

How to find the best ERP software?

How to find out if you need ERP software?

These are some of the phrases that your audience might look for when looking for an ERP solution. You can take the help of tools to find out which keywords would help you rank well.

Don’t forget to take into account the keywords that are already driving traffic to your website. Take the help of Google Analytics to find out your going keywords. Repeat this exercise for all your topics so that you come with a final list of keywords that would help you rank well.