Why Is Keyword Research Important for SEO? | Keyword Research

What is Keyword Research? What are the most used Types of the process? And which Keyword Metrics we should consider when we do this important strategy.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is a process that every website owner, blogger, a small business owner must do so that it starts the Search Engine Optimization of his/her website, blog, product in the right order.

Keyword Research is a process that we use to create a seed list of starting terms, expand our list using keyword research tools, and use it in on the best keywords on our site.

When you do SEO for your website, the first thing you should think of is what keywords to target on your pages and then to begin to optimize those pages around those chosen keywords.

How To Do Keyword Research For SEO?

The process of choosing those keywords is known as Keyword Research.



Keywords are the basis of SEO - short phrases that people use to search, google search words ranking.

Keyword Research

Optimizing your content for Google needs to take into consideration how people search.

Keyword Research is a process with all techniques of searching the right keywords to incorporate into your site content.

You should optimize your website content for the right keywords because that will be the difference between your website being found or not.

Read also: Should we use keywords meta tags?

Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign.

Whether you want to use keyword research for building a niche site, come up with article ideas for your business website or simply want to gain more insight into what your customers are thinking, it takes a lot of time to actually find a good key phrase to target.

But, the time spends on research is time well spent.

Interesting sites will increase their recognition on their own, so offer quality content and services on your site.

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.

Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.

Before you Start: Find out What Terms People Search

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. 

Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic.

Before you can optimize your site, you need to know what keywords to include on your site, which means identifying how your potential customers are searching.

How to choose which keywords to target?

Knowing what are people searching in the Google search bar is not easy?

But still, it is a necessary task for SEO to find out those search terms.

The most important thing in the keyword research process is to know how to choose the right keywords, what are the main criteria that we should use to select the keywords that we should target.

On the web, there are a lot of articles available where you can learn how to do keyword research, but sadly a lot of them are not well explained or they do are not on point and updated about keyword research.

Types of Keyword Research

There are multiple types of keyword research, and that is by taking into consideration the aim of the process is why we are doing keyword research and what is the main purpose why we are doing it.

We should take into consideration a lot of things, like what is your target audience, for whom you are writing your blog post, who are your potential customers or buyer personas, etc...

1. Keyword Research for SEM Campaign

Search Engine Marketing, shortly known as SEM, is a paid method of internet marketing to advertise on the different websites of the internet, with the main purpose of increasing traffic and conversions on the internet.

For SEM to be successful, the successful process of keyword research is also a must to be done and used to know what keywords to target in the SEM campaign.

2. SEO Keyword Research

Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization is the reason why I am writing this article, which is a service that I offer as a freelancer.

The process helps to identify keywords that we need to target on our pages and optimize around them so that we rank high on SERP (search engine result pages).

3. Keyword Research To Help Sell on Big E-commerce Online Websites

A lot of business owners, producers, and sellers, use big e-commerce websites to sell their products, services online.

These online e-commerce websites are huge and have a lot of competition and to be able to be seen on these sites it is needed optimization of the product listings to be done, and in this case, the most important factor is to know which keywords to target in the listings.

4. Social Media Keyword Research

In these last years, social media have become very important for website owners, bloggers, etc, to increase traffic, conversions, sales, etc...

There are different types of research for the optimization of social media, and the most popular ones are for Youtube and Pinterest.

Keyword Metrics To Be Considered for Keyword Research

When doing keyword research, there are a lot of metrics available in the keyword tools, and we need to know which ones to use for the identification of the best possible keywords.

1. Search Volume (Usually Monthly)

Search Volume is the most important factor in the process because we need to know how much are people searching on the internet for the keywords we are choosing to focus on.

2. Cost Per Click (CPC) 

CPC is important for the paid campaign of search engine marketing, but not only, because it is important also for SEO, because the higher the cost per click, it means that keyword has higher buyer intent and higher conversion.

3. Paid Difficulty 

Paid Difficulty is a metric important in the paid search campaigns and helps to know what kind of keywords to target.

4. SEO Difficulty 

SEO Difficulty is one of the most important metrics in the process that needs to be identified.
It serves us to know the difficulty of a keyword to be ranked in search engine result pages.
Sadly, not all the SEO tools offer to reveal this metric, and even those that offer this, some of them are not accurate.

How To Do Keyword Research For SEO?

My tips for effective keyword research are:

Step 1. Choose the right seed keywords

When choosing the seed keyword to try to think for two seed keywords that are somehow related, and do the search in Google for these keywords, and from the Google search page copy the keyword suggestions that come up in SERP after the search is made.

After that also copy the link of the first or second search result in SERP, paste them all into a spreadsheet.

Do that also for the second seed keyword.

Step 2. Open your preferred keyword research tool

Go to your preferred keyword research tool and paste them all in the search field.

Start the keyword research campaign, and download the results in the spreadsheet.

Step 3. Remove all the duplicate results

After that remove all the duplicates from the spreadsheet, filter the results and remove all the keywords with less than three words, and remove also all the keywords with less than 100 search volume.

If your tool offers SEO difficulty metrics then remove also all the keywords with the hard and medium SEO difficulty.

Step 4. Check keywords for their relevancy

Still, there should remain a huge number of keywords in the spreadsheet, but here you must start checking the keywords manually for their relevancy and remove all the keywords that are not relevant to the seed keywords that you have started the process in the beginning.

If the keyword research is done in this way, you will find keywords that are relevant, easy to rank, and have decent search volume.

I recommend you to check out our page about SEO Content Strategy also.

Step 5. Save the spreadsheet document

After all the process is done, don't forget to save the spreadsheet document, if it doesn't get saved automatically!

What are long-tail keywords?

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific keyword phrase that marketers use to try and attract targeted traffic to a web page.

To assist you in finding out how people search and what words they use, there are a number of sources for free tools on the web that you can use although the Google free tool would probably be the most up to date.

Keyword Research Tools - Free and Paid

The best free keyword research tool is Google AdWords provides a handy Keyword Tool that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. 

Also, Google Webmaster Tools (now called- Google Search Console) provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site.

Your website stats package -Google Analytics is also an essential source of information to monitor the keywords that are successfully driving traffic.

Summary of Keyword Research Techniques

In general, to do free keyword research you need to follow this process:

1. Create a seed list of starting terms-a seed list is your initial set of keyword ideas.
2. Expand your list using keyword research tools- it’s time to expand your list. Open your favorite keyword research tool and start entering your keywords.
3. Refine your list with competitive research

Now that you have a good list of keywords, it’s time to refine it and place it on the best keywords.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers.

You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

Design your site around your visitor's needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

Don't use these bad practices:

1. Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users
2. Having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users
3. Deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines.

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