Keyword research - what is it?
Keyword research is all about finding the keywords your audience uses when they’re looking for a product or service you offer and using this information to guide your keyword strategy. Without keyword research, your text will be ineffective: you will miss out on popular keywords that your target audience are already searching for. Or you could end up competing with bigger businesses for an audience, a battle you may only have a small chance of winning, even with a great strategy.
There are a variety of factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy. In this blog post we’ll discuss your mission, your audience, and your competition.
Focus keywords
Before you do anything, and this is key, you need to know what makes your company unique. Take a step back and look at your business as a whole. You need to have a clear concept of the mission of your company. You need to determine exactly what you have to offer because that’s what’s going to make you rank. This is how you will identify your Focus keywords.
SEO is just like regular business. If you do everything in the same way or less well than your competition, you’re not going to stand out. If you’re not the best result option, why should people want to find you? Why should Google rank you? It’s a simple rule, but this factor is often forgotten.
What makes your company unique?
If you’re struggling to find the right keywords, try asking yourself the following questions:
What do you have to offer?
What is your mission?
What are your core values and strengths?
What makes you stand out from the crowd? Think about the key aspects of your business which you excel in.
You don’t have to be better than your competition at absolutely everything, so long as you identify enough points to build a keyword strategy around. For smaller companies, this means that you probably have to be better at the things the bigger ones haven’t thought of or aren’t actively looking to do.
What role does your audience have in your keyword research
Once you’ve established what you have to offer, it’s time to consider your audience. How does your proposal connect with the needs and goals of real people? In the end, SEO is all about making sure your users can find what they’re looking for. This means much more than just choosing the right keywords. Understanding your audience’s needs is essential for making great user-centric content, which is an important part of good SEO too. The first thing you must do is find out which words your potential audience uses to find the information they’re looking for.
Let’s look at an example. At Ideas Are Human we offer training courses on SEO as part of our Ideas Learning Services. So, at first glance, it might seem logical for us to optimize for the keyword SEO Learning. However, when we analyze traffic data, it turns out that our audience searches for [SEO training] or [SEO courses] far more often. So, it makes much more sense to optimize for that term instead.
Every company has its internal vocabulary, which often doesn’t reflect the vocabulary of its audience. Therefore, you should aim to remain objective and always select your keywords from your audience’s perspective. By using the features of tools like SEMrush and AHrefs we can help you to find keyword data and suggestions with just a few clicks.
What are your competitors doing?
Lastly, you can’t devise a proper keyword research strategy without considering your competition. All too often, websites optimize for terms they have absolutely no chance of ranking highly for. For instance, keywords with a high search volume can help a website connect with much bigger audiences, but you’ll only see positive results if you can rank well. The search terms that deliver the largest amount of traffic are highly competitive, so you need to research the competition and assess the situation well.
There is no need to go overboard and make a thorough analysis of all the competitors in your field. It’s more important to stick to the basics for now. It’s quite easy to get a general idea of your SEO competition. Just Google some search terms you would like to rank for and see which companies show up and compare them with where your site ranks. How big are the companies you are competing with for those top three rankings? Would your company fit within these results? This is all quite easy to determine using only Google search results.
Beware! You can’t just blindly trust the search results. Google tailors them to the specific search history of a user, which means your site will come up higher for you than for others doing the same search. You can get around this by searching in incognito mode, although that still has a local search component. You can use a VPN to conceal your location to be absolutely sure that you are getting objective search results.
2nd November 2023