Did you know that Google gets about 292 billion keyword searches per hour? This just shows how important keyword research is for your business. This is why we are here with insights that will make Keyword research easy for any business!
So… you have got a great business idea!!!
An idea that you think can revolutionize the business world or can solve most people’s problems.
You hire a website developer and get the website up and running in no time. But after some time you realize that you still have not started getting the clients. As a result, you form this big digital marketing plan for your business about how to get more visits and more clients to your website.
The most important part of your plan revolves around paid digital advertising, or pay-per-click advertising, or cost-per-click advertising. Eventually, the sea of paid advertising starts drowning you in it, as it is humungous which expands not just to search ads like Google Ads and Bing Ads, but also to other types of ads like display ads and remarketing ads.
The process starts to seem too lengthy and complex but you are determined and continue working on it. You divide your paid advertising plan into various small actionable tasks starting with “Keyword Research.”
If you have ever done it in the future, you know what a time and energy-consuming task it is! It’s not as easy as it seems. It involves a lot of strategizing, analytical skills, and good researching skills to formulate that perfect list of keywords.
Combination of (Strategy + Analytics + Research) skills = Effective Keyword List
Therefore, undergoing proper keyword research is very crucial for any business. However, before we get into that, let’s first understand what keyword research actually is.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process that helps you research popular search terms. These are the words that people search for in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Keyword research helps in identifying the popular words or phrases that people often search for.
You include these words strategically in your SEO marketing strategy to be heard, be seen, and be loved.
Researching for keywords involves choosing a topic for your SEO marketing. The content is then focused on sets or targeted keywords that will help your business show up on the top of a search engine.
For example, if you search for ‘music’, you will get a set of keywords such as music video, music download, music ringtone, music player, and many more. These are a few areas that you can opt for.
When you research keywords, it gives you better knowledge and understanding of the level of demand for certain keywords. It also helps you gain knowledge on how hard the competition is to make them appear on the top search results.
Moreover researching keywords is not only a major part of search engine optimization but is also considered to be the main element for content marketing. After all, you will be putting these keywords in your content.
Now when you know what keyword research is, let’s understand why keyword research is important for you.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
According to a report, 68% of online searches are done on a search engine. Not only this, another report suggests that keyword-oriented search drives more than 1000% more searches than social media channels.
This alone shows how incredibly important keyword research is for a business.
When you research for keywords and find out the appropriate words, it serves as the primary means of communication with the search engines on the topics that you are covering.
Remember the more often you use the relevant keywords, your content is more likely to appear on the top of the search results.
This is what you want because a report suggests that, only 0.78% of people go to the second page of Google.
Therefore, researching keywords suited for your brand will help increase your reach and visibility. It will help your brand, be heard, be seen, and be loved.
Let’s take a look at a few benefits of keyword research.
Keyword Research Gives You Direction
You already know that planning is an essential part of any strategy before you start anything. This applies to keyword research too.
A report suggests that 69.7% of the search queries are made up of 4 or more keywords.
Therefore, researching for keywords gives you a focussed direction with which you can move forward in your business.
For instance, before researching you may not have an idea on which keywords to use in your content that helps it rank.
However, after researching, you are likely to get a set of keywords that people might be interested in.
Whether you want to choose a long-tail keyword or just regular keywords, Moreover which exact keywords will get you the result you desire, keyword research will tell you all about it.
Lessens Your Chance of Choosing Wrong Keywords
With keyword research, you become aware of the words that can help you rank your page on the top of the search results. Without this, you might end up choosing the wrong words for your business.
If you don’t do proper keyword research and use the hit and trial method, even if your content is top-notch, it won’t make it to the top of the search engines.
Therefore, Research keywords, choose the appropriate ones, and stay at the top. This will also help your business to be found in organic searches, which account for 53.3% of the website traffic.
Gets You In The Best Listings of Search Engines
The most advanced search engine is Google. When you research keywords and use them to your advantage, it gives you the most exposure because most people search on them for their queries.
Moreover, if you do your research properly, you can get an idea of competition in keywords. This helps you in making a strategy that is focused on choosing the right keywords.
For instance, if you type the word ‘house’, you can get other relatable keywords like the house design, house drawing, house colors, etc.
Understanding which keywords are working well for a particular search engine will help you be heard, be seen, and be loved on that search engine.
Takes Care Of Competition
Keyword research helps you in the success of your business by whether you should go with a certain set of keywords or not.
Take an example of the cosmetics field. It’s a competitive area. If you enter this niche, you need to be very specific and choose the best set of keywords to focus on
For instance, you can choose something like body lotions or body creams. Then you can research what kind of competition you will be facing if you target these keywords.
To find out and analyze the competition you need to find how authoritative the other websites are, that are listed for the keywords you’re considering.
This way, you will gain a clear understanding of which keywords or keyphrases will you be able to target for better reach and visibility.
Helps You in Targeting The Right Audiences
With the right set of keywords comes the right audiences. When you do keyword research, you will have a clear idea of what your target audience is searching for.
Right audiences are the key to your business success. When you start a business, you always want to hit a target set of audiences who will take benefit from your products or services. It makes your efforts lesser and simpler.
Therefore, understanding what the audiences are searching for and incorporating those keywords into your SEO strategy will bring an amazing flow of audience to you.
For example: If you start a website for ‘basketball’. Writing about relevant topics such as how to learn basketball, Learning rules to play basketball, how to play basketball at home, etc. will always attract audiences who are basketball lovers.
This is a very simple example to give you clarity on this. So, good and effective keyword research will help you in focusing on the right audiences.
Gives You a Life Skill
Do not be in a hurry to find keywords. It takes practice as well as understanding the dynamics of finding keywords. Choose the best keywords. This comes when you do a long journey with your keyword practice.
This is a kind of indirect education that helps you to attain valuable skills. Once you have learned how to choose the best keywords, you can easily use them to rank your business.
You can also do this to any other website or business that you aim to own in the future.
We hope you got a basic idea of the benefits of keyword research for your business. Now, let’s understand how keyword research affects your SEO.
How Keyword Research Affects Your SEO?
Keyword research is an important part of your Search Engine Optimization.
If you are using an SEO marketing strategy and aiming at ranking better, keyword research will surely assist you in optimizing your brand and increasing its reach and visibility.
Through keyword research, you will be able to influence your website navigation, URL naming, and content for each page. This way, you will organically come on top of the search engines you are targeting.
For main navigation titles and page names, researching keywords will help you in determining which terms people are searching about your products and services.
Moreover, SEO has a long-term relationship with search engines. So you need to take extra care of this.
In a broad sense, it helps you understand how your target market describes your product or services. Also, it shows you how people ask for more relevant information on your topics by using search engines.
Implementing keyword research and optimizing your website content according to it improves your chances of showing up in the top search results.
Besides all these, SEO helps in building better customer relationships, increases your authority, improves the experiences of your customers, drives more people to your website, and many more.
So if you want to experience all these keywords play an essential role. Stay focussed on which words to use and keep optimizing your website to garner greater engagements.
How To Do Keyword Research?
Now that you have understood the importance of keyword research, the next step is to undertake keyword research.
Your keyword research starts with a topic or an idea. You can also go with some tools to familiarize yourself with topics and related words that seem to be important for the target audiences.
After you identify your topics and words, you can use them in your content to showcase their relevance.
Here is the process that you can follow for keyword research:
Make a List of Relevant Topics Related to Your Business
To kickstart this process, start by making a list of topics that you want to rank in. These topics will be related to your business. After this come up with specific keyword ideas related to the topics.
For instance, if you are in the vegan industry, you will be mostly target keywords relevant to the topic of the vegan industry or veganism as a whole.
So, make a list of all the relevant topics you can think of in the vegan industry, and think of the keywords you can use for them.
Put yourself in the position of your buyer persona and think from their perspective. This will help you come up with effective keywords for your business.
Study and Research Your Niche
Once you made a list of relevant topics for your business, start by diving deep into researching and learning about those topics or niches.
This helps you to discover out-of-the-box ideas. It also helps you in finding out varied angles to marketing and SEO strategy.
Moreover, you will also research what kind of keywords others in similar industries are targeting. This will give you further insight into the topic at hand and the keyword you will be using.
You can also get involved in online communities related to your topic or niche. It includes involvement in forums and social media networks.
These are rich in information and will give you a lot of insight on keywords too.
Fill the Relevant Topics With Keywords.
Once you have gathered topics, the next step is identifying the relevant keywords or phrases. These are the words that you think might rank in SERPs (search engine results pages).
For example, if people are looking for marketing automation, you can brainstorm other relatable words like the definition of marketing automation, tools for marketing automation, how to use marketing automation software, and many more.
Repeat this exercise with all your topics and keep exploring the keywords. It will surely help you find all the relevant words that you are looking for.
Pick Keywords With the Highest Potential
Once you have analyzed a list of keywords or browsed through keyword suggestions, the next step is you can apply filters for keyword metrics. It can include search volume, keyword difficulty, traffic potential, clicks, etc.
It will help you in finding keywords with the highest with high search volume, but comparatively low difficulty. It is also a good way to find long-tail keywords. This altogether will help you bring traffic to your website.
Understand the Intent Behind Keyword Research and Then Analyze
If you want to rank high in the search results, you need to know your user intent. It is a very important element that improves your ranking ability on Google. So be very careful about how you interpret those keywords.
For example, if you are searching for how to write a blog post, it can mean 2 things- blog posts or blog websites. You may not know what your user search intent is behind the keyword search.
So to verify that you can simply enter the keyword in the search engine and see what people search for.
Make sure the content you write is closely related to the intent of the keyword.
Use Keyword Research Tools
To help you with your keyword research process, there are many tools you can use.
For instance, you can use Google Trends to know what topics and keywords are hot and trending in your line of business.
Moreover, when you search a certain keyword or key phrase on Google, there is a suggestion section below which gives you a set of similar keywords people searched for. You can take inspiration from there.
Furthermore, your competitors are a great source of keywords. Research, read, and analyze what they are doing and improvise it for your own business.
Moving a step further, Google Keyword Planner is the most well-known tool for researching keywords. Moreover, it’s free to use. You can use this too.
We will talk about tools in detail later.
Group And Map Keywords To URLs
Researching keywords is not just about finding what your target set of people are searching for. It is also about understanding how you will target those keywords.
If you have noticed, your homepage does not always rank for the services you offer. So businesses tend to create different pages for different services.
So the best way for you is to analyze the latest top-ranking results for the keywords. And also linking keywords to URLs will help you gain a top ranking in the search query.
Tips for Choosing the Right Keyword
Now, you know a lot about keyword research. You know its importance and you know where to begin. So, let’s raise the bar a little.
Think Like Your Customer
First of all, you need to think from your customer’s perspective to create an initial list of keywords.
Ask yourself questions like, ‘I want to buy a refrigerator, what should I type in Google.’ This will give you a clearer idea of what to focus on.
You can also ask your friends, family members, or even customers to get their opinion on what words or phrases they choose to search for relevant products or services.
Analyze Search intent
Analyzing the search intent helps you to identify and choose relevant keywords based on people’s searches. This will help you in choosing the right set of keywords to target.
Search intent is divided into 3 types:
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- Navigational – the user wants to find another web page
- Informational – researching a topic
- Commercial – desire to make a purchase
For example, if people are searching for ‘low-cost geysers’, they intend to buy a geyser that is of low price. It is very different from ‘repairing geyser’ queries. Also, understand your customers’ intent behind their search.
One aspect is commercial and the other one is informational. So understanding and analyzing search intent becomes very important for you.
Plan Your Buyer’s Journey
Planning the journey of your buyers means the point where your customers hear about your product till making their initial purchases and even post-purchase actions.
The different stages of a customer’s journey include awareness, consideration, and decision. In technical terms, it is called ‘buyer’s journey.’
Awareness is recognizing problems by your potential customers. They may not have a name for their problem but they know that a problem exists. This is their awareness of their problem.
In the consideration stage, your potential customers give a name to their problem and start researching its probable solutions.
While in the last stage, which is the decision stage, your potential customers take a long list of possible solutions and think of taking a decision or action.
At each stage, the set of keywords will be different. Therefore understand the buyer’s journey well and choose keywords suited for each stage of this journey.
Study The Competition
Understanding competition is very important for you to choose relevant keywords. It will help you in taking a place in the Google search results.
You can start by making a list of your competitors. Then visit their websites and thoroughly observe their target set of keywords.
You can read the content and view the meta tags to identify the keywords they are targeting. This process will not only give an idea of the words used by your competitors but also broaden your keyword ideas list.
Understand the Keyword Type
Before going deep into this, make a note of the types of keywords. This will help you get a better understanding of keywords and help you make choices appropriately.
There are 3 types of Keywords
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- Head keywords: Head keywords are one or two words long. Try searching for ‘Anniversary cards’ and you will get the idea.
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- Body keywords: Body words are a bit longer, usually two to three words. For example, brother birthday cards.
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- Long Tail keyword: Long-tail keywords are phrases having 4 and more words. These words or phrases aim at producing focused results. For example, ‘Birthday card for best friend.’
So, understand these keyword types, research on each, and choose the one you would want to target more.
Link Keywords With the Landing Page
First of all, you need to optimize your landing pages to link them with your keyword selection. Otherwise, this won’t be effective.
Since these landing pages show targeted content, you need to optimize them. Keywords that you choose will fit in the page title, headings, and alt image tags.
Remember, when you keep your landing page in mind while choosing keywords and optimize it well, Google will not only rank your page at the top but will also help you in generating greater leads and conversions.
What are the Various Tools for Keyword Research?
You are more than pro with keywords now. However, keyword research may seem like a task on its own.
Don’t worry though, there are a lot of tools that will assist you with keyword research.
I have compiled a few that will be really helpful to you. Let’s take a look at these.
Tool 1: Google Trends
The first step that I generally recommend to everyone, and which I think is a must and shouldn’t be ignored at any cost is to do a little research on Google Trends. This is a very great platform provided by Google to spot trends.
Whatever is your business idea, search various terms related to that on Google Trends and analyze what kind of trends are appearing there.
Let’s say you are starting an electric vehicle business, all you have to do now is to search for some closely related terms to your business and study the relationship.
In this case, search for terms like climate change, global warming, non-renewable energy, electric cars, etc.
You will find that climate change is showing an increasing curve, which implies people are getting more and more aware of climate change and are actively searching about it.
This means that it’s a good time when you can pitch in your electric vehicle concept to your audience.
Trend Identification = a1*b1*c1…/a2*b2*c2…
Where a1, b1, c1, and so on are search terms that share direct relation to your business, and a2, b2, c2, and so on are search terms that share indirect relation to your business.
For Example Electric Vehicle = Climate Change * Electric Cars * Solar Energy * Global Warming…./Non-renewable Energy * Coal* Fossil Fuel Energy…
This might not give you the exact answer but will still help in shaping your thoughts for the success of your business.
Google Trends will also help you in identifying fads.
Google Trends can also prove very useful in informing you what you should and shouldn’t do. If you have already entered a bad business, it will give you time to expand your business to other areas before the demands fall to zero.
Tool 2: Google Keyword Planner
Once you are done doing your initial research on Google Trends, the second step will be to take advantage of Google Keyword Planner. This is another powerful tool by Google to ease the process of Keyword Research.
All you have to do is add the word/words related to your product or service and hit the search button.
Google Keyword Planner will then show you an exhaustive list of keywords with other useful information like how many searches are happening for that word and other words related to your search terms, and what will be the cost you have to pay for a click.
The important question here is which keywords to include and which keywords to exclude.
The simple solution to that involves a lit bit of analytical skills. Nothing too scary though.
Let’s start by focusing on the columns that are important for the success of our keywords. Check the following priorities:
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- 1: Low CPC
- 2: High Volume
- 3: Low Competiton
Keyword Inclusion Number = Search Volume / CPC*Competition
For example: Let’s say CPC is $15, Volume is 4000, Competition is .3, the keyword inclusion number will be = 4000/15X0.3 = 888.8
You can easily add this formula to your excel sheet and calculate the Keyword Inclusion Number, sort it out in descending order, and include as many top numbers as you want.
Another thing that you can do at Google Keyword Planner is a location-based search for your product/service/idea.
Let’s say you want to start an electric scooter business.
A location search will show you that California in the United States is the hot market for that business right now which will give you plenty of ideas for targeting your customers and forming the right location-based keywords.
Tool 3: Google Suggestion
The terms that you see at the bottom of google when you search anything are known as search suggestions. Those are the terms that people are also searching for and are also related to your business.
You can use those terms in your keyword research.
Tool 4: Competitor as your keywords
You can also use your competitors’ brands as one of your keywords. For example: as a Nike shoe seller, I can add terms containing Adidas shoes in my keyword list.
If a person is searching for Nike shoes, the chance is that he can show interest even in Adidas shoes. The customer is still in the decision-making process and hasn’t reached the last stage yet and you still have the chance to influence his/her decision.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
The secret to success in business isn’t doing what other successful people have done; it’s by avoiding the mistakes made by businesses that have failed. Instead of repeating their mistakes, now we can learn from them and best ensure business growth and commercial success.
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