Among the 3 most influential ranking factors like keywords relevancy, Backlinks and core web vitals, SEO keyword research is the most important factor google looks at before ranking any site on google. So, it’s undeniable to have an effective SEO keyword research strategy for any brand to get more organic leads and sales. It’s almost impossible to rank a website even with thousands of backlinks if keywords used in a website are not relevant to the user’s search query.
Did you know? 60% of online marketers state that from SEO and blog content, they got quality leads, says Hubspot. And Ahrefs founds that, 92.42% of keywords get only less than 10 searches in a month. So, an effective SEO keyword research strategy is high in need to tap into the remaining 7.58% of keywords that has more volume.
What’s a Keyword? And what are the types of Keywords?
Keywords are set of words or phrases, which describe the whole context of a particular page or content, usually whatever users search in the google search, can be a potential keyword. Marketers and advertisers segmented keywords into many categories like long tail keywords, short tail keywords according to the length, highly competitive and low competitive keywords according to the competition, organic keywords and paid keywords based on the marketing strategies and so on.
Along with the website SEO, Keywords also play vital roles in almost all the marketing strategies like paid campaigns on google, Social Media hashtags, YouTube SEO, image optimization and so on. Wherever one uses the content, keywords can help to rank those content. So naturally, content and keywords are tied up together.
In this article, we’ll be focusing only on how to make effective keyword research only for SEO strategies.
Why is SEO keyword research essential?
Though google has more than 200 Ranking Factors to rank any website on google search results, of which Keyword relevancy is the foremost factor Google considers. For example, if one search for the best digital marketing agency in Sharjah, google will list all the digital marketing agency website and a local pack of digital marketing agency profiles in Sharjah in the SERP (Search engine results page), not any auditing agency from Dubai or any other part of the country, even if these websites has thousands and thousands of Backlinks.
Moreover, with the high competition prevailing in the modern business world, it’s almost impossible to rank for certain big keywords. For example, any real estate agency which has started recently, can’t immediately rank for the keyword “Real Estate”. Because this keyword is very competitive. This new agency has to focus on some other keywords that are less competitive and yet have more Search volume. With low competitive keywords, they may get a decent amount of traffic, and start converting them into clients, instead of going beyond the high competitive keywords and wasting all the Budget.
Effective SEO keyword research involves analysing what keywords competitors are using and what keywords the potential customers are searching for, identification of keyword gaps in your niche, and filtering the low-competitive and high-volume keywords for your brand. With the help of effective SEO keyword research, one can find a way to penetrate in his niche and then, sooner he can dominate his niche industry from there.
Step to conduct an effective SEO keyword research
There are multiple strategies and methods available online to conduct effective SEO keyword research. I am going to share our exclusive keywords strategy.
Step 1: Collect many relevant terms as possible
First, you should collect as many relevant keywords as possible for your brand. There are multiple sources of keywords available for free. You can use any free keyword tools or paid keyword tools, you can find keywords from google auto suggest, google related keywords in the search engine results page, the “people may ask” section of google, from the titles and descriptions of search results, and as many ways as possible. Fill all those keywords in the google sheets. Make sure, you have enough keywords in questions format like Wh question, because according to Moz, “Around 8% of search queries are phrased as questions”
Step 2: Use the keywords tool to note the metrics
Once you have a set of keywords. Now we have to upload those keywords on any tools. There are multiple keyword tools available in the market like google keywords planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz etc. And there are many free tools also available in the market. I suggest you use any paid tools, like Ahrefs or Semrush. Because with paid tools like Ahrefs, we can see various kinds of metrics all in one place, it would be easy to organise and manage all the keywords in one place.
Or else, you might have to use many free tools for different metrics, which might eat up most of your time and effort. Make sure the tool you use, should display all the metrics like Search volume and competition, and filtering options. And upload all the keywords on the tool.
Step 3: Filter the keywords
Once you have uploaded your keywords, now the next step in effective SEO keyword research is to filter those keywords based on certain metrics like search volume, keywords difficulty, number of keywords and more.
First, sort them from high search volume to low search volume. Then sort them using low competitive keywords from the high competitive keywords. Now you might have got a good sum of Keywords on the top with high search volume and low competition. Then filter those keywords with a word count of 4 or more. According to Ahrefs, around 69.7% of search terms on search engines contain four or more words in them.
Most of the keywords with 4 or more keywords might be long tail Keywords, and not all the keywords with more than 4 words are not long tail Keywords.
Now you have the set of high volume and less competitive long-tail keyword lists. Now, the next step in effective SEO Keywords research would be Using the “all in title” method.
Step 4: Check it with the “all in title” method
This is one of the most underrated methods, which only a few experienced and great SEO experts practise in the industry. Here you have to copy one keyword and paste it into the google search and add “allintitle:” before the keyword for example if you have a keyword for a media company in Dubai, then you have to type “allintitle: talk series on technology“. It will show only a few results only. It will show search results which have all these words in the keyword you searched, in the titles. Once you do this, you have to check two things here.
First, You have to check how many results appear for each keyword and note it down. Less the number of results more the opportunity to rank high on google. Second, You have to note what kind of content is ranking like any social media page like Linkedin pulse or Quora posts ranking or any forum ranking on the first page of the SERP. If so, it’s easy for you to outrank those results (social media and forum content results) with your future blog Posts.
And that’s it, now you have a set of less competitive, high volume, long tail keywords which have high potential to rank high on the Search engine and can get your decent traffic from google. It doesn’t stop here, you have to write content in such a way it outranks your competition.
Step 5: Schedule and write content from SEO keyword research
The last step is to create a plan to write content. You might have a reasonable sum of effective keywords, write content for those keywords and schedule them on the calendar. And create content, blog posts and videos, and edit the existing content according to those keywords. While creating the content, make sure your content has to revolve around the selected keyword only and shouldn’t get diverted, and insert your keyword naturally into the content wherever possible, but don’t stuff the keyword too much. Check your website after 3-4 months, I guarantee, you can witness enormous changes in your website traffic, Ranking and performance.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we have discussed what’s a keyword and its type, why it’s essential to conduct SEO keyword research and how to conduct effective SEO keyword research in a few steps.
When you do those steps correctly, you will have a lot of good quality keywords that are very easy to rank only when other aspects of SEO like Backlinks and core web vitals are strong and act as the pillar. If you have any doubts about SEO keyword research or link building or technical SEO part, do ping us at info@thecreatives360.com, we are offering free consultations, especially for SMEs and startups on SEO.
We have handled various SEO projects across different industries, and we are currently helping startups and SMEs to rank high on the search engine and get high-quality traffic and leads. Comment below or contact us to get a free SEO audit on your website.
Cheers,
Sasi
