What is Keyword Research?

Learning how to do keyword research is the most fundamental task performed in SEO, which involves identifying and analysing popular keywords that users enter on search engines. That’s not only confined to keywords, but also key phrases or sentences that affect the search rankings. When you figure out what people are searching for, you can focus on content including those researched keywords.

Google accounts for just over 70% of all global desktop search traffic, which means that it is the most popular search engine to date. 

Why is keyword research important?

The benefits that marketers reap from keyword research are, that they can understand what their target audience wants and how high is the demand for those keywords. Most importantly, it enables them to compete on those keywords in the organic search results. This ultimately allows them to direct their content towards optimisation.

Keyword research isn’t just about identifying particular and important keywords; in fact, it also helps us understand how people use language in different ways to search online for various topics and ideas. So what comes next after identifying key elements about keyword research?

This is only just one part of SEO; it is a major element that goes into your content marketing strategy. Why? It can give you a topic to write on for your next blog. This is why you need to keep updating your research with newer and popular keywords, learn more about your audience’s needs and adapt to the ever-changing search landscape.

Researching the keywords that users type into the search engine can help you create targeted content. Therefore, it will drive more organic traffic to your webpage, converting leads to sales.

Benefits of keyword research

  • Gives direction

Planning a strategy is always important when you’re starting a business, it’s the same for keyword research.
E.g. when you’re planning to write a blog for your website, and you like a particular topic or idea. You will research crucial keywords that will help you optimise your blog or article.

This is will allow you to focus on content that people are interested in.

  • Listing on Search engines

Where would you conduct your keyword research? The most advanced search engine is Google. Keeping Google in mind will keep give you high exposure.

Optimising your website specifically for Google is fairly difficult as compared to other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, but the results are highly rewarding as this would allow you to list prominently on google and increase website/webpage visibility across other search engines as well.

  • Targeting the right audience

Good keyword research means you’re targeting the right audience.
It goes without saying that for a business to be successful, it needs the right audience. Exactly why effective keyword research would enable you to target an audience that is catered to your business.

  • Highly valued skill

Keyword research is a skill that all online businesses require to improve their website content and overall SEO. That said, keyword research requires adequate knowledge and practice to be accomplished in this field.
Individuals are moving towards this skill to meet the increasing demand of employers in the digital marketing domain.

How to brainstorm a list of topics?

This is the part where you lookup for topics that your target audience might be interested in.

Let’s say you run a digital marketing agency and you want to attract relevant users to your website.

You have to think, “what are the topics or keywords that people search for that are relevant to my business”.

A few topics that would come to mind would be:

So based on this example, you need to come up with a strategy to look for the right keywords that your target audience enters on search engines.

Conclusion

Countless marketers and businesses approach their content without any strategy. This only makes their content efforts meaningless because the competition on search engines like Google is very intense, and businesses now invest heavily in SEO and digital marketing.

To make your business flourish online, you need to come up with a strategy or revise the old one to compete with other progressive businesses, so that your website stands first on Google’s search results page.