Keyword Research is an essential part of SEO. It is important because if nobody is searching for what you are writing about, you won’t get traffic from Google. Choosing the right keyword that matches audience intent is the key.
But sometimes, finding the right keyword can be confusing especially for a beginner. Here we provide you with 101 guides to do keyword research that can win the organic search!
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of finding potential words that you want to rank in search engines. It is about understanding what your potential customers are seeking and what queries they might ask when they need to find something.
By doing keyword research, you will get valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google and avoid you in creating topics that nobody is searching for.
The process involves you analyzing and comparing keywords to find the best opportunities to win the competition and match with your potential customers.
There are two types of keywords that you might consider to use!
- Short Tail Keywords, is a phrase that contains 3 words or less. It is also known as “head terms” that means the first things that come up when people are deciding something. For example, when you are deciding to go eat something, you might type keywords like “food near me, restaurant near me, Chinese food, pizza delivery”. If you are trying to drive a lot of traffic to your site, short tail keywords can be your best consideration. As short tail is usually a broad term, the competition is high.
- Long Tail Keywords, has a little different compared to short tail keywords. It contains more than 3 words that are definitely a lot more targeted, not as broad as short tail. You may not bring in as much search traffic from long tail keywords since it is a lot more specific, but the traffic you do bring in is something that you are looking for.
How to Research Keywords?
When doing keyword research, there are some tips and ways to get you the right keyword that can bring your page into the top result page. So, what are the tips? Check this out!
- Study your niche
It is important to know who is your niche and how you talk to them. You can start by building a customer persona for your niche. Trying to figure out their work, their goals, and also their needs.
By looking at these customer personas, It will give you a chance to generate new ideas for keywords and help you discover angles to your SEO strategy that you might not have thought before.
Consider one of these steps to study your niche:
- Audience Research, talk to them to get to know them better. Try to find out the terms that they use when describing your brand, company, product or service.
- Identify Your Niche Pain Point, figure out what problems or hassles are your potential customer trying to solve? What’s holding them back from success? What barriers do they face in reaching their goals?
- Identify Your Niche Goals, this is the flip side of pain points. Pain points are problems your potential customers are trying to solve. Goals or aspirations are positive things they want to achieve. For example, what motivates your customers? What’s their end game?
At the end, you have always have to learn your niche to stay relevant with them. You might get involved in your niche’s online communities like forums, Facebook groups, or other social media networks and get to know their pain points or goals.
- Make a list of relevant topics based on your business
The main thing of building your website through SEO is to get traffic to your website and increase your brand awareness. You don’t want to mislead it, right? So, do keyword research that is related to your business, break it down into smaller topic buckets.
For Example, your brand is specializing in Financial Technology Company, that are focusing on digital payment, some topics that relate to your brand can be:
- (Brand Name) Pay Later
- Digital Payment
- Digital Transaction
The topic that you choose should be close to your brand and define your brand. It is something that you want your audiences to know about your brand.
- Find the search intent
Search intent is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. It is the reason why your audiences conduct a specific search in search engines. After all, everyone including your audiences are hoping to find something.
You might think that choosing the best keyword volume is a key to rank your page. But these days, it’s not that simple anymore! Google’s machine learning is trying to find the best answers for audiences who search queries and learn what are the things that are close to the intent.
If you want to nail the search intent, try to think what your audiences are looking for. For example, when you choose a keyword “Smartphone 2020”. Try to think of the audience intent when they search for that keyword.
Do they want to know the price of it? Or do they need complete information about the specifications? Try to figure it out by putting yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Looking for keywords with high volume is good, but it will be better if you can also find keywords that match with your audience’s intent.
- Identify long-tail keywords
We have learned what is long-tail keywords in the section above (if you need to read again what is long-tail keyword, you can click here). When you do keyword research, you might find that short tail keywords have a higher amount of monthly searches in comparison to long tail search terms.
Long tail keywords usually get fewer clicks, but since they are focused on a specific topic or product, they often get a higher conversion rate. Thinking about the audience’s search intent is the best way to identify long tail keywords.
- Check keywords search volume
After all of the things you do above, the keyword search volume must also be your consideration. Search volume matters because you want to attract new visitors and gain more traffic to your website. It is crucial to target keywords in your content that actually have real search volume.
If no one is searching for the keywords you’re targeting, no one will find your content. However, if you’re only targeting keywords with extremely high search volume, it will be difficult to compete with bigger sites and get your content ranking. Choosing the medium volume can get you a big chance to win the rank.
Choose Good Keywords
You’ve done so many things of keyword research. Now, it’s time for you to choose and pick the most relevant keyword that meets your needs and also your goals. Trying to compare all of those keywords with the goal that you want to achieve.
Use Free Keyword Research Tools
To help you get all the things done easier in keyword research. There are some tools that you can use for it. Check this out!
- Google Keyword Planner
This is the free tool that you can use all the time you do keyword research. You can see average monthly search volumes over time with specific timeframe parameters and also you can find the related keywords and ad group suggestions you’d expect from this kind of tool. It will help you a lot!
- Ubersuggest
The other free tool that you can use is Ubersuggest. Here, you can see the search volume for any keyword in any country and language over the course of the last 12 months. You can also see the keyword difficulty to measure the competition. In addition, Ubersuggest also shows you a simple view of the top 100 sites that rank for any given term.
- Keyword.io
Last but not least, keyword.io! This free tool can help you to do research in long tail keywords. You can find and organize thousands of long tail keywords from many
Goodluck!
