Whether you are a content marketer or a conversion optimization expert, keyword research is an important task that you need to perform on a regular basis.
In this article, I'll walk you through the keyword research process, from start to finish, providing tools, templates, and tips on how to discover the best keywords, optimize content and/or pages. your destination and get the most out of organic search visibility:
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of discovering a list of words and phrases your target audience uses when discussing or exploring an idea or a topic that is relevant to your business and/or website. your.
Many marketers think that keyword research is just about Google and understanding what words your prospect or potential customer types into the search box. But keyword research can also be based on social behavior (understanding how people discuss your topic on social media).
For the sake of concentration, This guide is based on search behavior because it provides us with the most structured and easy-to-use data. For more Basic SEO concepts and terms, read here .
Why is Keyword Research Important?
Keyword research is important for several reasons:
- Keyword research provides marketers with useful data on how to build organic search visibility (i.e. increase site rankings) and what topics to build content on.
- Keyword research helps us analyze and understand our competitors (what they are focusing on, what tactics seem to work best for them, and how we can do better)
- Keyword research helps us improve our products (by understanding what our potential customers are struggling with, what they like/dislike, and how to better serve them)
How do I get started with keyword research?
Keyword research always starts with a core term that is the main topic of your business or website. You know that already.
Now, take that word and run through a keyword research tool of your choice. Here are some options.
The best free keyword research tools:
The best paid (freemium) keyword research tools:
- SEMrush ($99/m)
- Serpstat ($19/m)
- Ahrefs ($99/m)
- Spyfu ($39/m)
- Moz PRO ($99/m)
Price note is the lowest-tier product. Each of the above tools offers multiple packages depending on your needs.
Most of the tools above will give you the number of Google searches: The higher it is, the more people search for the word/phrase monthly.
Paid tools also offer some form of organic competitive measurement, i.e. keyword difficulty . Read more about keyword difficulty here .
Your goal is to find keywords with the least search volume (don't use optimization for keywords no one is searching for) and low/moderate competition.
How should I organize my keyword research?
Creating an effective keyword research organizational process is the most important step here: It will define all of your future content marketing and conversion optimization processes.
After running one or more of the above tools, you are likely to end up with hundreds (if not thousands) of keyword suggestions. So, what's next?
The next step is to go and run Serpstat's clustering tool to understand that list. Serpstat uses a unique clustering algorithm that identifies groups of keywords based on relevance.
It uses Google SERPs to determine relevance: the more similar two SERPs are, the more relevant the search queries are. This way, it groups keyword phrases by their close relevance instead of grouping them based on a common word.
Read more about keyword phrase here .
Once you've identified your chosen (i.e., focus) keyword groups (most of which can be included in a piece of content), go ahead and use an Excel or Google Spreadsheet to create a plan. plan content strategy.
There put your focus keywords (and keyword groups) one at a time, and use all sorts of labels to define your future actions:
You can have as many worksheets as you want. I use Cyfe to keep them all together in one dashboard to optimize different parts of my site and track my organic traffic:
How can I use keyword research to drive traffic?
Now that we've completed all the steps, how do we actually use keyword research to optimize content and increase search traffic?
No, it's not about keyword density. Google has removed exact match keywords and so have we. For more information about How SEO has evolved, read here .
To create and optimize your content, use Text Optimizer .
This tool uses semantic analysis to extract related terms from the Google SERPs, as well as break the article you have selected ideas into categories (subtopics).
Just grab the keywords from your spreadsheet and run the tool. The Text Optimizer will analyze the Google SERPs and return:
- Terms you need to include in your future articles – choose around 20 of them to include in your content
- Topic categories (these categories are useful for better understanding and structuring your content and, in most cases, dividing your content into subsections using H2 subheadings. /H3)
- Popular questions (these are great for building content around them). In fact, This entire Keyword Research FAQ is built using “Topic Ideas” / “Editorial Recommendations” from Text Optimizer.
Once your content is created, run the tool again to see how well it is optimized and written.
Text Optimizer drives the entire optimization process of your content, encouraging you to include more conceptually relevant content, including common questions, and breaking your content into meaningful subsections. . The easiest way to use the tool is to use it Google Chrome Plug-in .
When it comes to optimizing for your focus word, you can take care of the basics using plugins like Yoast SEO (or Any alternatives? ). They will prompt you to include your focus keyword in the title, meta description, URL slug, etc.
How Much Does Keyword Research Cost?
For professionals, the minimum keyword research cost is $79 per month ($19/m for Serpstat + $60/m for TextOptimizer)
Those are the two tools a serious content marketer needs (Serpstat is the most affordable of its closest alternatives), at the bare minimum.
With that said, keyword research can be free, but if you're doing monthly content, you need at least those two tools.
On the other hand, and, if SEO is your thing, the more keyword research tools you have, the better, because they will all have slightly different results and will complement each other.
And what is your keyword research process? Please tweet to @seosmarty with your feedback and questions!
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