When I am a beginner like you and studying the terms related to market and media, I always thought why do we need to do keyword research?
What are some different ways to do keyword research?
And it’s completely okay if you have these questions too.
People suggest to me, to do proper keyword research to generate more traffic into websites, as well as more revenue.
I understand there is a need for this, but what’s the basic purpose? How is doing keyword research help me to rank over a site and find better Google Adsence, my audience?
Is there something like a magic spell that pulls my audience into my website only? If you are a beginner, this all seems like magic but understanding all the concepts regarding this got you to know it not the magic beans.
It’s a mixture of proper strategy and tactics, and the best part about this, is anyone can learn these tactics and use them. You don’t need any fancy degree to understand this concept.
The simple thumb rule of this is that the more you practise, the more you become a master in it.
But how?
I know for a beginner like you it seems hard like you are solving a big puzzle. But relax, in this article we will going to understand every basic term related to keyword research like
- What is keyword research?
- What is the importance of keyword research?
- Different ways to do Keyword research
- Types of Keyword research
Yes, You will get all the knowledge regarding Keyword research and its importance. So let’s move into the ocean to optimize your website.
What is Keyword Research?
Let’s assume you are going on vacation with your family, anywhere, maybe in Los Angeles. You all are excited enough to go there.
Now, what will be your next step?
Just book the ticket before thinking of anything else? Probably not. You search for the place, you search for the hotel rooms, you search according to your budget, you search for flights, check the dates and many more before finalizing anything. Something like this….
Everything you wanted to do, you search for that term first.
For place – you search
- Best places to be in Los Angeles?
- Best time to be there in Los Angeles?
- Best places to visit in Los Angeles with family?
- Popular places in Los Angeles?
For hotels – you search
- Best hotels in Los Angeles to live with family?
- Hotel in Los Angeles under $XYZ?
- Hotels in Los Angeles with best ambiances?
- Hotel in Los Angeles near the airport?
By searching these normal questions, you will get the best answers on your first page of google only, have you wondered why, why you believe in those top-rackers sites rather than the second or third page.
Because we expect from the search engine to show us the solution on the first page only, as a user we don’t want to research much, we want our best answer according to our search, and yes search engines do that, it’s done by writing SEO-friendly content.
Besides, how can this work in the backend? SEO collects data.
What data?
Data about the users searches and how they search the following term, their location, in which topic they search more and in which way.
I know this seems like a huge task but google search engines do that, collecting data and organizing it in such a way that they categorize all the information related to one topic only.
Like a hotel in Los Angeles under $XYZ? Can be different for different users, different in different locations. But by mentioning the correct keywords in your article to show your targeted audience.
Now, what is this target audience? These are people who can later or now will become your customer or you can say they help you to generate specific revenue.
How can we identify them? Your product and service refer to which age group, which location of people wants to buy this from you, what kind of help your product can do and what kind of people need this help ungently.
This all determined things concluded and your targeted audience clarified.
Writing an article for your targeted audience by using words that they wanna find out is known as SEO-friendly content.
Because now Google understands you wanna show this article to which kind of people and for which age group mostly, this help your site to reach a proper wide audience, and that’s why there is an importance of Keyword research.
Let’s understand the formal definition of keyword research?
It is a process in which you find those accurate words and phrases that your audience will use while searching for the topic you wrote off.
It is a combination of understanding your audience and their mindset about what is the easiest thing regarding the particular topic they search for, what kind of words they use, how they can modify the question and ask for it.
These all gonna help you to refine your phrases according to their search, and your refined phrases help Google to understand and provide accurate results to users.
For this, we need to write SEO-friendly content, now how can we do that?
Read: Best Chrome Extensions For Bloggers And Writers
These keyword research are more related to some words like keyword difficulty, volume of keyword, trend with keyword, intent of keyword. Let’s understand them all one by one.
Keywords with high competitor searches are difficult to rank.
1. Keyword Difficulty : Keyword difficulty is estimates of keyword competition, which means how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google.
By doing proper research around the topic, you get to know whether your topic (keyword) is easy to rank or not, this can be done through competitor research, and how others are writing about these terms.
2. Keyword Volume : It is a whole matrix table that shows how many users search for a specific keyword in a month.
More search means more chances that your site is seen by many and fewer searches mean it is seen or visible only to limited users.
That’s why people write and showcase their thoughts about the trendy topic because this catches a large number of user attention.
3. Keyword Trend: It’s the same as keyword volume, but in this every keyword is showcased in a graph and defines when they are at the hype, and when not.
4. Keyword Intent : Means content is written for which purpose, it is of four types.
- Commercial Keyword (written for the purpose to sell things)
- Transactional keyword (written for the purpose where users are ready to buy this product)
- Information Keyword (written for the purpose to educate them about a particular subject or topic)
- Navigational Keyword (written for the purpose to navigate your query page – type of long tail keyword)
But how can I know these things about my keyword?
There are many keyword research tools available in the market, spend time there so you can understand the matrix of your searched keyword easily. Some of these tools are:
By knowing all these terms, and using and optimizing correctly you can simply pull your target audience into your site, and more audience means more traffic, and more traffic converts it to more revenue.
What is the importance of keyword research?
Let’s move to our next important factor to understand, we know what is this keyword research but why is this needed?
Why is understanding metrics around these things important?
Simple answer.
Writing SEO-friendly content and doing proper keyword research help us to get some benefits. Some of them are:
1. KNOW THE MARKET INSIGHTS
Doing proper keyword research ensures you about the market you are working on, helps you to figure out the pattern users need from you, what one thing in your niche that people want to know more, what’s trending right now, what is the least interesting thing, how you sell a considerate thing.
All the answers can be forecast just by doing simple keyword research, without this you are a mere person who is trying to sell their product or service but doesn’t know who is gonna buy it.
2. KNOW THEIR PAIN POINT
Words have magic, and nobody can deny this fact. People say things not to just say but to simply justify their point of view to others.
After knowing the importance of keyword research and doing it properly you know what you wanted to show them, as you already know what they want.
Hence write in such a manner that it converts your words into a point of view you wanna show to them. They want this product prior to reaching your site, but now they understand why it is 101% important for them to buy this.
Your words create a craving, a craving of taking action about the product or service you show them.
3. MORE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE
Keyword research not only impresses your audience but also impresses google to rank your site at the top. And the higher your site would rank means more traffic is generated on your website, more traffic means more target audience, and when the right product reaches the right audience, clearly revenue increases.
4. GOOGLE ADSENSE
Lastly, as your site gets more traffic in your site, your site attracts more ads from google. Ads are the next thing why people want their sites to rank high because more ads generate more revenue.
Google AdSense is a way from which you can earn money, as google provides some ads to your site according to the niche you are working on. Advertisers pay for these ads as they want to promote their products on high ranking sites.
You will earn money through this method as it works on the CPC model, Cost per click. How many visitors come to your site and click on those ads, and every click pays you something from google AdSense.
Now what are these CPC? And how can you find high CPC keywords
Simply means, pay for each click on your ad, but how can you find a high CPC keyword? Some mandatory ways are;
- Use long-tail keyword (explained below)
- Focus on customer-centric keywords rather than information-based keywords.
- Use tools like Spyfu and Semrush.
Ways to earn through CPC via google AdSense, there is a bidding method that google uses to proceed on. It is of two types;
- Manual Bidding : you choose your bid amount and google tries to pay that much by equally dividing into every click.
- Automatic Bidding : google sets a bid for you all by itself and then pay you according to that.
Different ways to do Keyword research?
There are some ways from which you can easily and accurately do keyword research, as now you know why doing this keyword research is most important for you and your website. Now move on to how you can do this.
Of course, there are several ways to do keyword research but in this, I am sharing some of the most common and popular ones, which also we used in this website “CuckooBlogger”
1. YOUR KNOWLEDGE REGARDING YOUR BUSINESS
Assume yourself from a buyer’s perspective, think you want to buy or know about the product in your niche area.
Now guess what you know about the product as a layman, write those terms that came into your mind related to your niche, now think if you want to buy this product, what you search as you are unaware of the product.
What do you type first to get the best result from google SEO?
Write all those as these are primary keywords a user can simply use or type to get the accurate solution.
You can also check those terms volume to get to know how many times these phrases are searched over the month. You can also check its trends and other metrics to understand if these phrases are actually useful or not.
If not, don’t write in your collection of keywords, and if yes write down, the keyword name, keyword volume, and keyword size. This helps you to understand which keyword is highly used as compared to others.
2. COMPETITOR SEARCH
This is one of the easiest ways to do keyword research, is to do competitor research. Steps to do that:
1. Search for the topic you wanna write for. Examples – places to visit in Los Angeles.
Saw which sites are ranking on the top 3 or top 5 of the first page of google. Record their domain name.
2. Search their domain name in these tools:
- Semrush Dashboard
- Website Auditor
- SEO Spyglass
- Link Assistance
- Rank tracker
3. These tools help you to know what kind of different keywords a particular domain uses, and also how they mix and max keywords to form a long-tail keyword. By using these tools you will get the help of:
- Know which keyword has the maximum traffic
- The volume, trend and keyword position on the site
- Which keyword provides traffic on which page maximum
Following these steps and checking particular names with these tools help you to generate the idea that which keyword is working high in the market.
It helps you make a proper outline or draft of your content, then revolves your content around these keywords. But do not use too much as it looks overwritten in the whole article.
This whole process is also known as Gap Research of competitors.
3. KEYWORD SEARCH
Rather than do competitors’ research by tapping their domain name in these tools, you can directly put your primary keyword into these.
Plus select the country, where you think your target audience resides the most, select and then tap on the search bar.
These tools help you to know about all the related questions users ask while knowing about the term you searched for.
It’s a very simple method, go through those topics, you can also mix and match one or two phrases and make them one long-tail keyword.
It is suggested to do both the research(step 2 and step 3) prior to continuing writing to your actual content. It helps you to know your audience better, what they see most and what they search for most.
4. TO KNOW THE INTENT OF YOUR KEYWORD
As I mentioned above too, there are 4 ways your content can revolve around. After knowing your proper primary and secondary keywords, and after creating a draft outline for all the keywords included, you select what kind of content you wanna write whether it is information intent, transactional intent, or any other one.
According to your keyword intent, choose your main keyword which should be 4-5 in a particular write-up, cut off the remaining keyword that doesn’t match with your writing pattern.
5. ON-PAGE SEO GUIDE
Now what is this, this is a simple practice for optimizing web pages, to get real organic traffic on your site. So how can I do this? Simple by optimized titles, images, and meta tags.
And this is an ongoing process, you need to optimize it regularly to look your site is relevant, accurate and updated by the time.
There is the whole concept regarding on-page SEO, but from a beginner’s point of view you just need to know this simple fact, it helps Google to understand whether your content is relevant to show users or not.
Read: How to start a blog
Types of Keywords?
Now as we reach the point where we know every basic thing related to keyword research, now we understand the types of keywords and by knowing the difference between these keywords, we get to know when to use which keyword.
Different keywords target different audiences and get through different funnels of marketing to reach the proper audience. So let’s know all of them one by one;
- Short tail keyword aka Primary Keyword
- Two-three words keywords
- Are also known as primary keywords and main keyword
- Use as a theme keyword
- Highly competitive
- Drawback: Don’t convert well
- Advantage: easy to use in the content
- Long tail keyword
- More than 3 words included
- More specific than a short tail keyword
- Lower search value because of their length
- Drawback: use for targeted intent only
- Advantage: high conversion rate
- Short term Fresh keyword
- Means the trendy keyword
- Hyped for a limited time period
- Explosive search volume at one time
- Use while creating up-to-date content or regular content
- Drawback: no use after the trends end
- Advantage: high attention seeker, engage more audience
- Long term Evergreen Keyword
- Relevant all the time
- Common topic to use for
- Medium search volume as it searched anytime
- Must be informative and educational
- Drawback: high competitive rate as everyone knows about it and writes it
- Advantages: High conversation rate, as this keyword never goes down
- Location based keyword
- Have much known target audience
- Specific about city, state, or country
- Useful for small and medium business owners
- Delivery based business, travelling business
- Drawback: low search volume
- Advantage: low competition
- Latent Semantic Indexing(LSI) keyword
- Related to the main word in your nice
- Generate tricky sentences
- Consider as the main keyword but they are not
- Give more weight to the primary keyword
- Drawback: Specific search Intent
- Advantages: Low competition
- Question bases keyword
- Start from what, why, how
- Easily searchable
- Mostly used as secondary keywords or sub-headings
- Improve readability
- Drawback: high competition
- Advantages: High search volume and click rates
Yes there are some other types of keywords too, but these are the basic ones that need to be remembered at the time of doing keyword research. Because it is extremely important to know which type of content you are writing and what kind of keywords you need for that.
It is just that they both complement each other.
We do keyword research to impress Google SEO, and SEO has three simple pillars that are needed to be taken care of.
1. Authority – how much weight(keywords) is provided to a significant page of your site. Writing SEO-friend content helps your site to create authority online.
2. Relevance – is the user generally interested in your product, whether you have written extremely SEO friendly content if a user is not interested, they will not proceed to do any action.
That’s why Google shows your content only to those who are interested in reading and taking some action.
3. Experience – is the particular content that reaching to users provides them the best solution to their query, if yes google SEO shows a better experience with your website.
Thus these are some things that matter to google SEO to rank a site.
Finally, we came to a point, where we understand every particular thing regarding keyword research, difference ways to do keyword research.
If you are a beginner(that I am assuming you are), then this information is more than enough for you to carry on with an SEO writer, or blogger, or businessman or other person related to the market.
What do you think about doing keyword research, do you still find it hard work to do, or now it seems interesting to you after knowing these tips?
