Keywords Research - The beginner's guide to SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO is the practice of adding your company into the good books of search engines like Google, Bing, etc. It holds so much importance after all Google receives 63,000 searches per second at any given day (source: Internet Live Stats). An important part of this process is keyword research. What are Keywords? They are various phrases or terms which are relevant to your business or brand. The search inputs made contain these words. These words are important because they are the linchpin for search results and the content you are providing that will provide value for that particular result. Your goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs), and the keywords you choose to target (meaning, among other things, the ones you choose to include in your content) will determine what kind of traffic you get.

Using keywords on your page

To begin with, there are certain rules and guidelines when it comes to making use of these terms. Unique but relevant ones should be laced within your content such that it seems normal and is readable for humans and in compliance with the web crawlers too. This includes both the title tag and the body of your content.

You can also look at working your primary keyword into your URL, an H1 tag on the page, the meta description, and alt attributes of images on the page; working on these areas will help search engines identify your page and relate them better with the keywords you intend to target.

Using your keywords in these areas are the most basic criteria. It won’t make you the King Of The Hill overnight, but it is essential SEO; failing to take these basic steps can keep you from achieving a decent rank.

Using keywords to formulate a content strategy

You might choose a certain keyword, keep it in mind and create content that revolves around it, or you already have your content made and you need to figure out how to get it along with keywords. To do this, create what's known as a "content-to-keyword" map. This will help you analyze how strong and impactful your content is, identify the weak links and help you fill the spaces in between.

Keywords define the content on each page of your site. Therefore you can use them to organize your content and develop a strategy accordingly. For this, you can create a spreadsheet (your "content to keyword map") and then identify the primary keyword required for each article on your site. You can then develop your sheet according to your requirements, add keyword search volume, organic traffic, page authority and any other metrics that are important to your business.

Every page on your website must have content made around a specific primary keyword. Your website can fall under a broad industry term and then as you fill in content and get in-depth, you can use various specific keywords related to that industry.

Determining your goal –

One should know their goal. While carrying out the process of SEO research, you will come across a plethora of keywords. You must know which specific words you must zero down on and you will realize that only if you know what your goal is. Every keyword will differ from each other it can be in terms of weight, bid rate, etc.

Finding the best keyword research tools

Make a list of the best websites that offer you tools to carry out research on relevant keywords for your business. Narrow down on 2-3 websites to keep in hand when doing the research. In these websites, you will find tools that will help you with the process such as:

1. Keyword Planner: The Google Keyword Planner is a tool that provides ease while planning your SEO and Ad campaigns. The Keyword Planner helps you find the latest terms that are relevant to your brand and products. It also allows you to have a better idea of how efficient the keywords are by providing an insight into their behavior. Also, your ad budget can be optimized for efficiency with the help of this tool since it provides a bid estimate for each keyword you need. This tool has been a great help for online marketing companies or best SEO agencies when it comes to optimization.
2. LSI tool: LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index. LSI keywords are linked to the main keyword. They could be synonyms or words relevant to the same concept. An example of this could be "Amazon" and "Jeff Bezos". Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon so his name is an LSI keyword for "Amazon". Using tools for good LSI words provide a number of benefits such as better content quality, lower bounce rates, etc.
3. UberSuggest: UberSuggest is a tool that provides quality SEO analytics, the list’s various strategies and helps you to improve them according to the needs of your website so you are a step ahead of your competitors.

Playing with Long-tail keywords –

Long-tail keywords are those that have a length of more than 5-6 words. These words usually have a lower search volume and hence are less competitive. Organizations make lesser use of these because of how they are. This is a good thing, as it gets easier for you to get them ranked and have increased conversions that are specific as well. In fact, SEO experts in India usually make long-tail search inputs when they need something, for example: if you want digital marketing services, you won’t search "digital" or "marketing", instead, you will search "Best Digital Marketing companies in India". Also since the popularity of voice assistants increasing, long-tail keywords are getting frequently used. Also, recent algorithm updates are starting to focus more on them. Long-tail keywords also add more context to your content.

When it comes to your blogs, using long-tail keywords not only increase traffic and visibility but also help to provide value to your readers with good readability. In turn, this helps you to drive your leads to the end of the sales funnel as quickly as possible. This ultimately improves your brand value as well.

Keyword Research is something we at Digitactix intensely focus on when it comes to our SEO practices. Contact Us to fulfill your SEO requirements today!

Parth Shah's knowledge and expertise have proven to be helpful for other Digitactix services too such as Social Media Marketing .