Nowadays, if you want to reach people, you’ll go on the internet. According to some research, the internet today uses approximately 4 billion people which is almost 50% of the world population. So, you can reach people worldwide without moving out of your house or a town, but you need to know the way your content can find your target group.
Keyword research is what keeps us connected with its target group – if we know what they are searching for through the search engines, we’ll know how to adapt our SEO in order to find us rather than our competition.
It’s natural that you have done some basic keyword research, but keyword research is not a temporary task – if you want to succeed you need to do it on a regular basis because with constant upgrading of search engines it can bring you more success than you can imagine.
In this article, we’ll talk about why investing time in keyword research can be a great benefit for any business.
What is keyword research?
If you want to improve SEO for any website, keyword research is the first step without which you can’t do anything further. Basically, it is the method of researching common, industry-specific words, terms, and phrases that are attractive that are leading search traffic to search engine result pages (SERP). Today, more than ever, keywords have a significant impact on search results. The purpose of keyword research is to find phrases and terms that users (and your potential customers) are searching for like Google, Bing, Safari, and other major search engines. That words and phrases should be connected and related to the services/product/content on your website.
Keyword research helps you to understand the audience, their interests, and questions that they’re asking on search engines so you can implement those researches in your content using keywords so they can easily find your website.
Keywords are the foundation of the website
The first step in keyword research should be performed when you establish your website – it can help you both make a better user experience and reorganize the website. Keywords are helping to separate products, services and to give section or page names. If you’re just reorganizing a website, keyword research will help you to keep in touch with the latest trends, popular terms and to better ranking. If you’re looking to use one of the best website traffic estimators to help you with your marketing strategy, it will probably take keywords into account when deciding the number of organic monthly visitors your page is likely to have. Some of these estimators can even show you what your competitors are up to, perhaps revealing keywords that you’re not currently using that could help you out.
What should the keyword influence? Well – on everything. It should be implemented in your website URL naming, content for each page, website navigation, permalinks, metadata, etc. Be sure all parts of your website are functional and check your hosting package if it can support changes that you want to make. Hostinger has great offers for all kinds of websites with many benefits, and it also works globally, so check it out. Keyword analysis will help you to determine what terms your audience is searching for in relation to your business, so you can implement them.
When you establish basic keywords for each page of your website, you should keep on moving – going to an advanced level with keyword research and implementing it. A successful keyword strategy should not transparently present keywords – it should be created to look more like a conversation so customers can easily go through questions and answers to find what they’re searching for. Basically, the best way is to find a few unique variations for every keyword and smoothly implement them in your content using the specific voice of your brand. Using this method, your content will be closer to the audience, and they’ll be able to find answers to their questions more easily, and your website will rank better on search engine result pages.
How to research keywords
Today you can find plenty of tools that can provide you this data, but one of the best ways is to use Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. It’s free, and as Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world, its researches are marked as safe and proven. You can import all phrases that are related to your content or your website address, and the tool will generate a list of potential keywords. And that’s not all: it will also generate on how many both local and global searches a particular word or phrase appears each month, estimate the probability of its ranking and potential difficulty with it. Unfortunately, you can’t see which word is the most popular, but keep in mind that competitive keywords may require more time to build a high ranking, but they are more likely to make increased traffic to your website.
Local keywords
Local keywords are important because it makes better searchability of your website when you use a closer geographic footprint. In the last few years, Google and other search engines gave more importance to the local businesses placing them higher and encouraging them to grow their online presence. That means you can attract a much more local audience by making local keyword research and optimizing your website according to the results – you can do it at the country, town, or regional level. For example, if you want to succeed in a region that has one language but different phrases for the same thing, you need to implement those phrases specific for locals.
Keyword research will help you in the ranking, but also in further growth
It may sound stupid, but keyword research is sometimes the portal for better knowing your audience. When you look at their questions and researches, you can see what they’re most interested in, and not just implement keywords in searches, but also to improve your business according to their needs. As we said earlier, keyword research is not a temporary job, it requires constant involvement, following trends, customer habits, and changes on the local and global market, but once you discover how it works, it will be easier for future projects.