What is keyword research and how to do it? Post-18
What is keyword research and how to do it?
What is a keyword?
Before knowing what keyword research is, we need to know about keywords. If we can get an idea about keywords, keyword research will become easier for us.
Simply put, keywords are what we search for in search engines. Keywords can be a single word (health) or sometimes a combination of many words (what to do to maintain good health). Keywords act as the main driver to bring a webpage to rank. To do well in SEO, you need to have a good knowledge of keywords. You need to have an idea about many types of keywords and know about their use.
Types of keywords
There are many types of keywords depending on the size, type and usage of the keyword. However, today we will mainly learn about the main 3 types of keywords.
Short-tail keywords
Short-tail keywords are short in size. Usually consist of 1 or 2 words, such as shoes, laptop or flowering plants. The search volume of all these keywords is very high and due to the high Keyword Difficulty, there is a lot of competition.
Long-tail keywords
A long-tail keyword is a specific phrase, which is usually made up of 3 or more words. Due to the low Keyword Difficulty of long-tail keywords, it is possible to easily get a rank if you research well. But the search volume of long-tail keywords is also relatively low, which is why more visitors are not obtained. However, the visitors that can be obtained through long-tail keywords are easily convertible. The importance of long-tail keywords is immense for e-commerce and service websites.
LSI keywords
The full form of LSI keywords is Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI keywords are basically keywords related to the main keyword. Let’s say “mango” is a keyword, for this the LSI keyword can be “sweet fruit”. That is, LSI keywords work as a support for the main keyword and play a major role in ranking a main keyword.
Apart from these 3 types of keywords, there are many other types of keywords, one of which is branded keywords, non-branded keywords, international keywords, competitor keywords, product keywords, navigation keywords, seed keywords, negative keywords and more unique ones.
Role of keywords in search engine optimization
Keywords basically act as a bridge between visitors and a website, which is why keywords are called the foundation of SEO. What is the general visitor searching for, and what keyword are you trying to rank for in search engines? The ranking of a website depends on these 2 factors. It is possible to generate organic traffic quickly and successfully through the right keywords.
What is keyword research?
The basis of a successful SEO campaign is keyword research. Now we know what keywords are. We have understood how important keywords are. Now when talking about keyword research, we have to say that keyword research is a process. In this process, an SEO expert has to understand what the visitor is searching for? Why is he searching? Will he search in the future? Small things like this. Also, which keywords are relevant for your website, which keywords will people find you if they search for them. What is the search volume, keyword difficulty of the keyword, etc. Also, after doing proper keyword research by maintaining the set of all kinds of keywords, it is possible to generate organic traffic through the correct use of those keywords.
Why is keyword research important?
Let’s say you have an e-commerce website. You are looking for good visitors or sales there organically. Maybe you are getting good visitors by adopting various SEO strategies! But are you able to sell to those visitors as expected? This is where the keyword research game begins. Suppose one person searches, typing “apple” and another searches “what is the price of an apple?” Which of these two searches do you think is more likely to lead to a sale? Surely the sale will come from the search that asks for the price. Hopefully, the matter has been cleared up, what can be the result of the right keyword research.
Also, things like search intent, organic ranking increase are directly related to keyword research. Keyword research is also very important for things like increasing the visibility of the website by preparing content based on what visitors are giving importance to, what they will give importance to.
Considerations of Keyword Research
The main considerations of keyword research have been briefly discussed, hopefully you can get a good idea from here.
Search Volume
To put it simply, Search Volume (SV) is the number of times a keyword has been searched within a given period of time. If the Search Volume is high, then the importance of that keyword is given, but here the KD or competition of the keyword has to be taken into account. It is also important to see whether that keyword is compatible with your website or webpage or not.
Keyword Difficulty
How difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword is expressed by Keyword Difficulty (KD). Basically, Keyword Difficulty can be called the criterion of competition for a keyword. Usually, for new websites, we target keywords with low Keyword Difficulty.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Usually, the amount that advertisers pay for a click on an advertisement triggered by a keyword is called Cost Per Click (CPC). This CPC can give an idea about the market value of a keyword.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
After searching for a keyword, we see many results on the SERP page. But we do not click on all the results. This is the main content of CTR, that is, the rate of how many visitors entered your website after searching for a keyword. Suppose your website has come to the SERP page for a keyword 100 times and the visitor has entered your website 5 times, then your CTR for that keyword is 5%. Through this, it is possible to get a clear idea about the keyword.
Rules for keyword research
Rules for keyword research 3
Keyword research is a process, each person does keyword research differently. But now I will give an idea of a general rule for keyword research.
Brainstorming
Many complex tasks can be solved easily through brainstorming or intelligence. We will brainstorm in the initial stage of keyword research and make a preliminary chart about the overall topic of our website. What product or service are we selling, what are our visitors searching for, what will they search for in the future, or what changes are we going to make to our service or product line. In addition, we need to make a preliminary list by considering how many pages and what pages our website currently has.
Using Keyword Research Tools
After making an initial list, we need to use some tools. Through tools, we can easily find out the Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, etc. of a keyword. As a result, the research topics become easier. Popular tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Ubersuggest are used for keyword research.
Competitor Analysis
Competer keywords can be done through tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Through this, it is possible to do something good by identifying the keyword gaps of competitors and utilizing the opportunities.
Filtering the keyword list
The last step in keyword research is keyword filtering. Keyword filtering means selecting the best keywords from the keywords we have found by following the above processes and discarding the rest. While filtering, there are a few things to keep in mind, such as the necessity, the type of keyword, and the future of the keyword. Finally, we will use the keywords that we will filter correctly.
