How To Do Best Keyword Research for SEO in 2021?: While Google keeps on watching our moves and digital marketing activities, it updates its algorithms from time to time to enhance the user experience.
And to keep up with the trends in digital marketing and be in the good books of Google, you need to take care of your keywords.
The idea is to use more specific and optimized keywords for your website content, including blog posts. To ensure that you are working on the best keyword list, make sure to do your keyword research right!
Why is it Important to Do Proper Keyword Research For SEO?
The key to improve your rankings and be on top of your competitors on the search engine result pages is to improve your SEO and boost your organic traffic. Even the ones that seem unimportant can help improve your conversions. Your keywords are the principal factor that drives traffic towards your eCommerce website. With SEO strategies evolving, the importance of keywords remains the same. So keyword optimization –
- Helps you to understand your target market and know what your audience wants
- Optimizes your website, thus boosting conversions
- Optimizes social media channels and other marketing platforms
- Provides insights into the factors that drive your content marketing strategies
- Enables you to set up ultra-targeted PPC campaigns
- Helps you to measure your progress
If you don’t have the right keywords at hand, you won’t have a direction in your online business.
Top 6 Ways You Can Do Keyword Research in 2020
With changing digital marketing trends, we need to make specific changes in our keyword research strategies. Here are the top ways that you must follow while doing keyword research in 2020.
Research related terms (Keyword Research for SEO)
The first step would be to ensure that you are on the right track and your keywords are relevant enough to drive good traffic. To get started, you can create topic buckets, for example, digital marketing, SEO marketing, marketing analytics, social media marketing, and so on. Next, start filling up these buckets with the keyword phrases you think would be relevant and essential for your business. Always make sure to step into the shoes of your customers before doing your research. For instance, in the SEO marketing bucket, the list of crucial phrases would include –
- What is SEO?
- How to do SEO marketing?
- Best SEO techniques
- How does SEO marketing work?
- Top SEO tools
- Lead nurturing, and so on.
Check out the competitors’ position for each keyword
To stand out in the crowd, you must learn and closely monitor your competitors’ activities and analyze their advertising techniques. Study for which keywords they are ranking higher and which buyers’ intent they are targeting. To do so, you need to put your seed keywords (primary keywords) into Google and check out the top-ranking brands. You will get good keyword ideas from your competitors, which would be enough to keep your SEO team active for months. However, you can always go beyond and find more ‘Competing domains’ to get a braider list.
Study your niche well (Keyword Research for SEO)
While doing your keyword research, you need to keep in mind that you are sticking to your particular niche or area of expertise. Do proper homework regarding the customer demands and market competition in your place. For example, if you deal with shoes, you need to be well aware of the types of shoes your buyers would prefer, and on which occasion they will choose which types of footwear. Do your analysis based on gender preferences and age group, and your competitors’ marketing strategies. While studying your niche, make sure to –
- Know the likes and dislikes of your customers and try looking at things from their point of view
- Go ahead and talk to your existing customers to know them better
- Closely watch the language your customers are using while conversing with your sales reps
- Participate actively in your niche communities on social media platforms and build strong networks for enhanced targeting strategies.
Analyze your keyword metrics (Keyword Research for SEO)
Studying the metrics for each of your keywords will help you get a good sense of direction in your business and enable you to decide the most relevant keywords that would have promising outcomes. You need to shortlist the most beneficial and high-ranking keywords from the list of thousands that you have generated. You can make the keyword analysis based on the following metrics –
- Search volume: This is the first and foremost aspect you must be looking for while deciding your keyword list. Use a reliable keyword research tool, such as Google AdWords or Google Trends. There’s no point in working on the ones with fewer search volume. Also, keywords show a spike in search volumes based on the particular occasion you are promoting it. For example, the keyword ‘Diwali gifts’ will have more work during Diwali.
- Clicks: Your keywords analysis tool must show you the rate of clicks a particular keyword gets in general, and of course, the one with the highest number of clicks is undoubtedly going to bring in more traffic. The Google search results are divided into categories like –
- Knowledge cards
- Top stories
- Featured snippets
- Shopping results
- Images, and many more.
Therefore, pages are less likely to be clicked, simply because the result pages are giving the visitor the information he/she needs without visiting any particular page, such as the ‘knowledge cards’. So choosing such a keyword with lesser clicks will not be beneficial for your business.
- Cost per click: This metric comes in handy for advertisers rather than SEO professionals. For example, if you are running a PPC campaign, you can check out a particular keyword’s commercial intent. The cost per click is more volatile than the Search volume and depends on the market competition and the customer behavior associated with that specific keyword. Since it keeps changing even sometimes at the turn of a minute, you need to keep yourself updated about the CPC of your keywords using Google AdWords.
- Keyword difficulty: As per the buyer’s psychology, they won’t generally type in inflexible search terms. For example, a consumer would typically go for ‘restaurants near me’ or ‘eateries near me’ rather than ‘dining out places near my location.’ So choose the easy to type in the Google search box and are more commonly searched for.
Group your keywords (Keyword Research for SEO)
Grouping your long list of keywords is a significant step in the research process as it helps to give them a good shape and your marketing campaigns a solid ground. You can group your keywords in the following ways –
- Based on parent topic: With the rise in market competition, you should not merely stick to only one keyword having just a single page. To get your SEO right, you need to have a host of relevant keywords at hand, and one page should be able to rank for many other keywords based on their relevance to your topic. To group your keywords based on their relatedness, you need to analyze which keywords already have the top-ranking pages and then list down the ones related to the main keyword in each group and which, too, have the right positions on the SERPs.
- Based on intent: The second step in your keyword grouping process would be to group them according to the searchers’ intent. Make a mental map as to what might be the probable journey of your buyers. How can they arrive at your products or services? Your keywords must have relevance to the particular buyer’s stage your customer is in. For example, your visitor, who came to learn about the different types of houseplants, must be redirected to the various classifications, the description and the benefits of each, and not directly to the buy now button! Remember that there are five primary stages in the sales cycle –
- Unaware
- Awareness of the problem
- Awareness of the solution
- Awareness of the product
- Completely aware
- Based on business value: Now, you need to figure out which keywords will best reflect your business value and increase brand awareness. These keywords won’t bring in many conversions but will create the right brand image, which is essential for strengthening your customer relationships.
Prioritize
There will be a sea of keywords generated by your keyword research tool, and you can’t probably use all of them. Moreover, not every keyword would drive equal traffic. It would help if you prioritized them at the time of generating keyword ideas and grouping them further. Ask yourself the following things while prioritizing your keywords –
- What is the traffic potential of this keyword?
- Will I rank with this keyword? How fierce is its competition?
- How many resources will I need to create a competitive page on this keyword and promote it effectively?
- Will the keyword only increase brand awareness, or will generate good quality leads? What might be the rate of conversions for the keyword?
You can even add scores or rate each of your keywords according to their priority levels, based on which you can easily choose the ones that yield more fruit and have the best ROI. in fact, the keywords having the best ROI will rank higher and drive more conversions.
Key Takeaway
In conclusion, it is worth noting that your primary goal should be to be in the eyes of your potential target market by ranking higher on the SERPs. And there is no easy solution or shortcut to get there. You need to optimize your keywords well and do your research thoroughly. It might be a bit time-taking process but is fruitful for your business in the long run. Little efforts taken now will pay back in large numbers.
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