You will be able to get a huge number of web traffic and reach your business goal by using a proper keyword. Before starting a blog or any online business, the first thing you should learn is the keywords and keyword research. Learning keyword research can be very beneficial for everyone planning to conduct online business activities.
So, here we are going to explore beginner guide for exploring some of the fundamental concept of SEO i.e keyword research. We will guide you through almost every aspect of it and you will get familiar with it even if you have never understood the purpose of keyword research.
What is Keyword Research?
To explain simply, keyword research is the process of discovering keywords that have the potential to drive targeted web traffic to your business. This is done commonly by finding our how your target users are landing your website.
We search answers for certain questions in search engines like Google and expect to receive the correct answers within the first page of the search which is known as Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
So, through keyword research, we will be able to find out the " words", " phrases" and " queries" that audiences are asking using the search engine.
So, like a blog or business, we can optimize or create new pages for helping the users to find the answers when we come to know their queries.
You can also run PPC ads on the platform like Google ads or Facebook ads to drive web traffics to your websites using the same keywords (queries).
Technically speaking, keyword research is the process of finding the " topic" or " ideas" and assign it a business value which is commonly used by target audiences.
Keyword Research guide for beginners with the example
Let us consider, I am trying to buy a watch for my best friend. So I will use a query " Best Watch" in the Google search for finding the best brand. Google is a smart and auto-completes lot of the frequently asked queries to help me ask the correct question.
Now, depending on my location and understanding I will pick the best one suggested by Google.
Search engine like Google keeps the log of how many times users asked for the particular query around the globe.
So, the process of keyword research helps to find out the most popular queries with the geo-location along with its frequency and asked within a specific time (ex: 30 days).
Now, you as a blogger or business owner should use these stats to understand which of these queries you should consider answering on your website. This way any target audience will be able to discover your website and the solution.
This way you will gradually start to receive traffic to your website and convert into ad sales, direct sales, or even as an affiliate sales.
With little effort and well preparation, you will be able to drive huge web traffic to your website and make the most out of your hard work.
Now, let's explore more with the help of an example:
Earlier I mentioned my example trying to search for the best watch. Now, let's consider I am the business owner of the watch or any other products. With the help of keyword research, I will be able to find data like which queries are people using to find the solution. Now, let's try to understand from the figure:
Keyword
A keyword is a query that people ask to find the best watch online. So when we do SEO this is the phrase which we will be targeting. So often call this a Focus keyword or Target keyword.
Trend
With Trend, you can find out if the keyword trend is going up, i.e if the keyword is being searched by more and more people or going down. For example, iPhone 12 could be a popular term in 2020-2021 but as the new iPhone has released this term will lose its value.
Volume
This is the rough estimate of how many people are searching for a particular keyword in a given month. This is a very crucial metric to consider as even if you assume the search term will be popular, search data will tell you otherwise. There will be a considerable difference even with similar keywords.
SD or KD
SEO difficulty (SD) or Keyword difficulty (KD) is an important metric that helps us to understand the difficulty in ranking for a targeted keyword on the first page of Google. Such tools compare all the existing ranking pages for things like " Backlink", " On-page SEO", " Domain authority" to name a few. The lower the rank the more it is easier for us to rank on that particular keyword.
Importance of Keyword research
Not all keywords are equal and contain the equal potential to drive a huge amount of web traffic. So, doing keyword research can help your blog or business in the following ways.
• It helps to find out the language that is used by your target audience on the search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo. We typically consider Google as a base because it is the word's largest search engine.
• We can discover untapped queries that help in getting paid customers from organic searches such as Google search, Bing, Baidu, and others.
• We can understand the market and customer trends. So, performing keyword research helps us to understand the direction of customers and the market in the current scenario.
• You will be able to get the target audience and receive high engagements in the form of sharing, comment, and even sales.
• You can gain competitive advantages if you will be able to incorporate keywords and SEO before your competitors. You can receive a solid advantage if done correctly and can earn al lot of backlinks as a first-mover advantage.
• It helps to reduce PPC cost as you can drive traffic to your website for free and such organic ranking can significantly reduce your digital marketing cost.
• Bloggers and marketers can increase their ad revenue by finding our keyword with high CPC.
There are several other advantages and importance of keyword research but we have listed the most prominent one. One great mistake that a lot of people do while doing keyword research is finding only a high volume keyword which is not true. Your main task is just to eradicate the keywords that are not going to benefit your blog or business. You should prioritize your keyword more for achieving maximum benefits in a short period of time.
Categories of keywords based on the users intent
Let's take a previous example query about the watch. The same queries can be asked by audiences with different intent.
a. A watch mechanic may be trying to understand how to repair.
b. Some people may be using this query for research purposes.
c. Some people may be trying to find out which is #1 watch currently.
So, the same query meant different when used for a different purpose in the above example. This is known as search intent. So, we can sub-divide keywords into different types of the user's intent. They are Commercial keywords, Translational keywords, Informational keywords, and Navigational keywords. All these types will determine which keyword will have a direct effect on your revenue.
The other categories of the keyword are according to the number of words – Short tail keywords or Head keywords ( Ex: Watch) and Long-tail keywords ( Ex: Best watch in Nepal).
Requirements for conducting keyword research.
You will require the following things for conducting keyword research:
• A keyword research tool for researching keyword (free or paid).
• List of Seed Words, SEO competitive domains/business, or more.
• A document (maybe excel) for capturing and cleaning up the keyword.
• Now, a system for delegating your final selected keywords (blog articles, video content, eBooks, or product page).
• Lastly, monitoring your ranking by using a various rank tracking tool.
You can grow your business organically by incorporating keyword research into your business marketing process.
So you should research, cleanup, execute or delegate, monitor, and optimize for growing organic traffic.
How to do Research Keywords for free
There are numerous techniques for doing keyword research. Now, let's go through some of the popular keyword research techniques.
1. Finding the competitor or the top site keyword
This is one of the easiest ways to find keywords that are working well in the existing websites. So, first of all, we will consider 2-3 top websites in the niche we are planning to target. For example " best watch". So will receive the top 3 page ranking for this keyword in the SERP. You can also repeat this process for your target keyword. Now, after finding those top websites, head towards the keyword research tool such as SEMRush.
Go to the SEMRush dashboard and enter the domain that you found out from the Google search. Now, SEMRush will display the keywords that the particular domain is ranking for. You can observe some vital details such as which keyword is able to drive maximum traffic to that website, the volume, SD or KD, and Keyword position. It will also provide information on which page on that site is receiving traffic for which keyword.
2. By using Keyword Gap for finding easy wins
This technique is one of the most underutilized keyword research technique that helps you to find out the keywords that your competitor are ranking for but you aren't. This can be idle for a website for finding low hanging fruits.
3. By using Seed Words
This method can be idle for new as well as an existing website but is more time consuming than the above methods. Even if this method is time-consuming, this method will help you to discover keywords that no one is targeting.
This method can be easily implemented with the help of various keyword research tools like SEMRush, Ahref to name a few. Go to SEMRush and click on Keyword Magic Tool. Now, enter your seed word and select the primary country that you wish to target. You can filter the result on the basis of various parameters such as:
• Exact match
This includes the exact match of the provided seed word and with the same order. If your seed word is Watch, you will get " buy a watch", " where to buy a watch" etc.
• Broad match
Broad match will include all kinds of words such as buy, new, and various suggestions of the word order. You will get all the keywords from the exact match as well as " buy the latest watch", buy watch new", " buy a new watch in the USA" etc.
• Related keywords and phrase match.
So, adopting these strategies you can easily find the relevant keywords for your blog or business and rank high on Google in no time.
Readers Comment