Keywords and phrases are fundamental drivers for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). These are the words and phrases that users key into their search engine. With sufficient keyword research, you can find out which keywords and phrases you need in your content to bring traffic to your website. This is for each of your web pages, not the website as a whole, so you can use targeted keywords and phrases for each page.
Why do keyword research?
Keyword research will tell you what your ideal customers are searching for, the volume of people using these search terms each month, and how competitive it is to rank for these keywords. This will help you to decide which keywords and phrases you need to include in your content. It provides you with crucial information that guides your content strategy. Insights from keyword research will influence every new page on your website.
Keyword research helps you to:
- Understand search intent
- Focus on certain topics in your website copy
- Understand which elements of product and service development you should concentrate on
- Decide on content design and formatting
- Make SEO decisions
- Build links through off-the-page optimisation
- Identify competitors and conduct competitor analysis
- Create new pages and update existing pages.
Keyword analysis
Keyword analysis is based on these factors: keyword type, the intent of the searcher, the number of searches, keyword difficulty and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) features.
All of these factors influence the search opportunity of a keyword.
Keyword type
There are three types of keywords:
- Head keywords – a single word
- Body keywords – 2 – 3 words
- Longtail keywords – 4 or more words
Search intent
This is the reason why the searcher is using the keyword or phrase. It might be for answers to a specific question (informational), it could be to find out about particular brands (navigational), the searcher might want to compare products, services or companies (commercial), or it could be directly associated with a purchase (transactional).
Understanding searcher intent will give clarity on the types of traffic you could potentially attract if you ranked well for those keywords or phrases.
Number of searches
This is the number of times a keyword or phrase is used in searches which indicates the potential volume of traffic you could receive.
Keyword difficulty
This measures competition levels, which will tell you how much investment will be needed to rank against your competitors for the keyword or phrase.
SERP features
SERP features influence the structure, formatting and design of your web pages. SERP features include maps, reviews, images, videos, news, advertisements and in-depth articles. You would need to include the same features on your own pages to rank highly for the same keyword or phrase.
Getting started with keyword research
To begin your keyword research you need to create a seed list of keywords and phrases. There are different ways to do this:
- Think about all the terms associated with your product or service
- Test your product or service-related key terms on Google
- Explore user intent
- Conduct an analysis of competitor keywords
- Look into niche topics related to your business
Once you have a list of keywords, categorise them into their levels of opportunity. For example, high opportunity keywords will have low to medium competition while low opportunity keywords will have high competition. You can also categorise them based on their informational, commercial or transactional intent (see above). We always tell our customers to try and rank for keywords and phrases that are more profitable for their company. Time, money and energy put into growing your online presence needs to be valuable and profitable for your business too. For smaller businesses, choose keywords that are more niche to your ideal customers. Often, these keywords will be long-tail keywords with less competition on the search engines.
This process will help you to understand the best opportunities for driving traffic to your website and the investment required to make use of those opportunities.
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Code Galaxy is a website and software development agency. Contact us to find out how we can identify keywords and phrases for your products and services that will drive organic traffic to your website.
View more of our insights, and read our latest article about keyword cannibalisation and how it damages your search engine ranking.
