Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.
Before you can help a business grow through search engine optimization, you first have to understand who they are, who their customers are, and their goals.
Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.
People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online. So if your content is successful in getting in front of our audience as they conduct searches, you stand to gain more traffic. Therefore, you should be targeting those searches.
You likely have a few keywords in mind that you would like to rank for. These will be things like your products, services, or other topics your website addresses, and they are great seed keywords for your research, so start there!
In the process of discovering relevant keywords for your content, you will likely notice that the search volume of those keywords varies greatly. While you definitely want to target terms that your audience is searching for, in some cases, it may be more advantageous to target terms with lower search volume because they're far less competitive.
Since both high- and low-competition keywords can be advantageous for your website, learning more about search volume can help you prioritize keywords and pick the ones that will give your website the biggest strategic advantage.
Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search. Most long-tail keywords have lower search volume than short or “head” keywords. They’re a little bit counter-intuitive, at first, but they can be hugely valuable if you know how to use them.
Ideas for new keywords: You can get ideas for more keywords using a number of online KW tools from Google to SEMRush, SpyFu and others. Another great source of long-tail keywords comes from your competitors. Use the KW tool to choose one of your competitors, see what keywords they're using and how they get their traffic.