Keyword Research : Find best keywords for your SEO

Keyword research is the first and most important part of your SEO strategy. Before you start writing content for your website, you will need to identify suitable high-volume search terms.

Keyword Research

The SEO (سئو) keywords will inform the direction of your content, ensuring that the content produced will be relevant and easily searchable on Google. And that is, in summary, what keyword research is all about.

It’s usually a pretty time-consuming task and involves a lot of effort to pour through details, numbers, and comparing long lists of keywords. But it’s incredibly important to do it well. A thorough keyword research will be the foundation of your SEO strategy and content development.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing.

Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.

The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy. However, keywords themselves may not be as important to SEO rankings as you may think.

Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics — by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.

Keyword research also helps you to answer questions like:

How hard will it be to rank for this keyword?
How much traffic am I likely to get if I rank for this keyword?
What kind of content should I create to rank for this keyword?
Are people searching for this keyword likely to become my customers?

Finding the right answers to these questions will help you pick your battles wisely.

What are keywords ?

Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into search engines. They’re also known as search queries or “SEO keywords.”

What Are SEO Keywords?

Your SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines.

A website that is well optimized for search engines “speaks the same language” as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site. Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO.

In other words, you need to know how people are looking for the products, services or information that you offer, in order to make it easy for them to find you—otherwise, they’ll land on one of the many other pages in the Google results. Implementing keyword SEO will help your site rank above your competitors.

How to run a keywords Research

Most beginning search marketers make the same mistakes when it comes to SEO keyword research:

Only doing SEO keyword research once,
Not bothering to update and expand their SEO keyword list, or
Targeting keywords that are too popular, meaning they’re way too competitive.

Basically, SEO keyword research should be an ongoing and ever-evolving part of your job as a marketer.

1. Study your niche for finding the best keywords

Before you figure out what are the best keywords to optimize your page, it’s best that you start by diving deep to learn more about your topic or niche. It can give you out-of-the-box ideas and help discover angles to your marketing and SEO strategy that you might not have thought about before.

Here are a few ideas on how to study your niche:

Talk with your existing customers and get to know them better. Find out the terms that they use when describing your brand, company, product or service.
Try to think from the perspective of your potential customers. If you were to share the brand’s offering to a friend, how will you talk about it?
Get involved in your topic or niche’s online communities, like forums and social media networks. Read the discussions and find out any pain points that are mentioned regarding your niche.

2. Study relevant topics and keywords

Think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You’ll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you’ll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.

3. See your competitors’ keywords

Looking at which keywords already send traffic to your competitors is usually the best way to start keyword research. But first, you need to identify those competitors. That’s where your brainstormed list of keywords comes in handy. Just search Google for one of your seed keywords and see who ranks on the front page.

As you can see, even if you’re quite familiar with your industry, you can still find plenty of unique keyword ideas by studying your competitors that you probably wouldn’t have found.

4. Use keyword research tools

Keyword research and SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.

5. Define your goals before finding the keywords

A plan needs to always begin by defining the end goal. But before that, you should ask important and introspective questions like:

Who are you?
And What is your brand about?
Then, What makes you special?
What is your website about?
What promises do you make on your website?

Once you have effectively answered these questions, then you need to specify what is your brand’s mission. Do you want to increase the number of subscribers? Or do you have a sales target by a certain date?

It’s important to define your goal because it will provide a direction for your SEO strategy and plan. The search terms that you will eventually use should be aligned to your goals, ideally segmented into different content marketing funnels. Your goals will also inform the purpose of your SEO copywriting and content.

Write down your goals. Draw charts. Document them. These will provide the framework and direction needed for your top-level content and online marketing strategy.

6. Identify long tail keywords

Seed keywords are often shorter search terms that are closely related to your brand’s main topic or category. Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are more descriptive and often related to your brand’s smaller buckets of sub-topics. Matching your target audience’s search intent to long tail keywords is far easier compared to seed keywords.

For example, if your website published content about golf equipment reviews, using long tail keywords like “what is the best 9 iron golf club” will attract a more relevant audience compared to the seed keyword “golf club.”

Long tail keywords usually get fewer clicks, but since they are focused on a specific topic or product, they often get a higher conversion rate.

Conclusion

Once you’ve gone through these steps, you should have enough insights to craft a good content and SEO strategy. You would also have gotten adequate data for SEO copywriting for your content.

Whether you’re running a content-focused blog, a small business, or a brand marketer, you will need keyword research to kick-start your content and marketing activities.

Doing keyword research can be a tedious and time-consuming task. But more often than not, it pays off handsomely in the long run.