When creating your SEO strategy, you won’t get very far without knowing and enforcing a bunch of keyword know-how.
Using the correct keywords for your brand tells both your audience and the search engines who you are and what you’re all about, ie what you’re selling or offering. So, it’s incredibly important that you choose your keywords with intention. How do you do that? You gotta do your research- keyword research, that is.
Today we’ll run down your keyword research basics.
What’s Keyword Research?
When performing keyword research, you’re looking for the best, most commonly used, words and phrases that users are typing into the search engines in order to find products or services that pertain to your business/industry.
After you have a detailed account of those terms and phrases, you can then use them to their full advantage within your SEO campaign. Optimizing keywords will boost your rankings while allowing your audience to find you easier.
Why You Need Keyword Research
Generally speaking, your keyword research will be the very first step you take when creating your SEO strategy. Having the correct terms and phrases is what gets you found by the people you want to find you. Not to mention how it helps Google know you- so yeah, it’s important.
Your keywords will be applied to all of your content pieces, including images, on-page SEO, blogs, promotions, branding. All things content are going to benefit from your keywords, which means YOU benefit from them.
The best part is that you can change your keywords at any time if they’re not actually helping you. Nothing is set in stone here. There are dozens of tools that can help you figure out what words are working and what words you can toss aside.
And if you need help determining what keywords you should be using, well, there’s some tools for that too. Start with these since they’re totally free, and if you need more insight, you can find tools with minimal investment down the road:
- Google Trends
- Keyword Sheeter
- Keyword Surfer
- Keywordtool.io
- Google Search Console
- Bulk Keyword Generator
While you’re figuring out your ultimate keywords, you’re also learning a bunch of stuff about your target audience, so if you haven’t already figured out your buyer persona, this is a great way to do it.
Your research will tell you who your potential customers are and how they’re searching for your products or services. Once you know what words they like to use, you know what words you need to be using. Makes sense to me.
Don’t underestimate your competition. They may be stealing your business through a stellar keyword strategy. So you should definitely see what words and phrases they’re using, you can do that organically by simply heading to their site and checking it out, or use a tool to delve a bit deeper, such as SpyFu.
The Keyword Research Facts
Indeed, there are several aspects to creating a strong and vibrant SEO campaign that gets you some high rank on the search engines and an organic following: content, on-page SEO, link building, technical SEO…
All of those are important to your SEO success, but if your don’t do your keyword research, none of that stuff will matter because you’ll be doing a lot of it incorrectly. You want to get traffic to your site- find the words that point your users there.
Keep in mind that sometimes the best keywords are the ones with the least competition, meaning, you can create your niche through a proficient keyword strategy. Stay open-minded, get to know your audience, spy on your competition, grab some good tools, and get to creating that winning SEO campaign.
If you’d like some help with your keyword research or are looking to create a larger audience through SEO, give us a call- we love this stuff.
