Keyword research for businesses is essential if you want your SEO Campaign to be successful. This article is an easy guide to how you can research keywords methodically.
Keywords – the cornerstone of successful search engine optimization (SEO), yet one of most overlooked areas in digital marketing. Good keyword research is an indication of intent to succeed in a stiff competitive space. In an ecosystem where it is not easy to drive traffic to a website, keywords play a very important role.
In fact according to several data released by prominent organizations, internet referral traffic happens primarily through Google – in other words through basic keyword search. This simply means that you cannot ignore the relevance of keyword research for businesses especially when ranking favorably on Google is a priority.
Keyword research is a meticulous process to find search query strings that most people use to look for information. Keyword research is the best way to find what’s trending, what’s not and everything in between. Every day over 5.5 billion searches are made on Google. Needless to say opportunities are endless, audience traction achievable and market penetration not impossible if you focus on keyword research.
Why Stress on Keyword Research
Users type keywords to search for information on search engines and that’s one of the primary reasons why you should be investing on keyword research. But that’s not all. There are other reasons why you should stress on finding the most rewarding keywords and key phrases. Let’s take a look.
- SEO – Search engine optimization is almost impossible without efficient keyword research. If you are keen to draw rewards from organic search to your site, you have to help Google bots in effectively crawling and indexing your site. Google crawls mainly by indexing keywords.
- Content Strategy – SEO is incomplete without relevant content. In fact one is incomplete without the other. You cannot expect even a 300-word blog to enjoy good ranking on search engines if relevant keywords haven’t been used. Your quality post may end up being undiscoverable.
- Paid Campaigns – Even when you aren’t expecting organic traffic to your website and are relying on promoting your brand through paid campaigns, you have to make relevant use of keywords. If a keyword (that you are using in your campaign) has a low search volume, then it will get little traction, meaning your campaign will fail and you will be wasting your budget.
Keyword Intent – How They Help Reach Your Target Audience
Why are you using a keyword? What are you expecting out of its usage? How will it affect your brand? What is your brand’s aim? These are some of the questions which you should ask yourself and your campaign managers before embarking on keyword research. Understanding the intent of the keyword and why you would use those very specific words can make a whole lot of difference to your digital marketing campaign. For example, if you want to promote your resourceful blog on cooking, you can use a keyword such as “easy snack recipes” but if you are a confectioner whose intent is to sell food items, keywords such as “café near me”, “restaurant near me” would be more relevant.
How To Begin Keyword Research
The easiest way to know what keywords to use and what not is to manually make a broad list. Of course you need a starting point, which in most cases would be the broad categories of your product or service. Categorizing broadly will help you focus on several types of keywords, all at once. For example, if you are a restaurateur, your broad categories would be the cuisines you specialize on, drinks served on your menu, main course menu, starter menu, desserts and so on.
Once you have identified your broad categories, your real job begins! First you must assume to be the customer and list all possible keywords you would use to search your product or service. If you do this painstakingly, you would be able to create a long list. Is it enough? No! Now you should be using keyword tools to find specific keywords that are trending. If they are relevant to your marketing intent, you use them. If not, you move on to find better keywords.
When keyword research is done thoroughly, you can expect your SEO strategy to yield results, your content to make more sense and your brand to become recognizable. Do keep in mind without the foundation of keywords you cannot expect dividends in intent marketing.
If you are struggling with your keyword research and SEO campaign, feel free to contact us – The Cyrusson Team would be more than happy to guide your campaign in the right direction and get your ranking ASAP!