Keywords are the building blocks of SEO content – without the right keywords, your page will crumble and disappear into the oblivion of Google page 10, which no one ever visits.
To choose the right keywords, you’ll need to do keyword research. Skipping keyword research will cause you to choose all the wrong keywords and miss out on a lot of opportunities to optimize your content. In this article, you’ll learn:
- What is keyword research
- Why is keyword research important for SEO
- How to do keyword research in just 3 steps
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of discovering and analyzing popular words people type into search engines to look for information, products, or services. This process is meant to help improve Search Engine Optimization and marketing strategies, so that your content can rank higher and garner more traffic.
Why is keyword research important for SEO?
You might be wondering why keyword research is so important and whether it’s worth it to go through all the hassle. What happens if you skip this step and just write whatever you want?
You can certainly choose not to do keyword research and just throw in content that you think is good enough.
However, if you’re writing content that no one is searching for on search engines, no traffic will ever come to your page.
If there’s no demand, then there’s no traffic.
Keyword research helps you achieve two things:
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Discover words people type into search engines
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Target the best words to include in your content
By discovering what people are searching for, you can create content that surrounds these keywords, and use those keywords in your content.
With the help of metrics like keyword popularity and ranking difficulty, you can then decide on the best keywords to target that will give you the highest return, which is traffic.
So if you’re looking to create SEO content that ranks high and brings traffic, keyword research should be your first step.
How to do keyword research in just 3 steps
Now that we know what keyword research is, and why it’s so important, we can finally move on to how to do keyword research – in just 3 easy steps.
1. Discover related keywords
Every keyword research journey begins with the first element: the seed keyword.
So first, you need to determine what your seed keyword is. A seed keyword is basically the main topic of your content, consists of one or two words, and doesn’t have modifiers.
For example, if your business is selling coffee online, the seed keyword would be “coffee”.
Once you’ve determined your seed keyword, you need to come up with a list of keywords that are related to your seed keyword. Coming back to our seed keyword, coffee, some related words would be: espresso, coffee beans, iced coffee, cappuccino, brewed coffee, and instant coffee.
And honestly, the list is endless. There are probably thousands of words related to coffee.
So although it is possible to manually come up with related keywords on your own, it is very time-consuming.
The faster and recommended way would be to use a
Let’s plug in the seed keyword “coffee” into LSIGraph and see what it comes up with.
From the seed keyword “coffee”, LSIGraph generated a total of 507 related keywords in less than 10 seconds. If you were to come up with the same amount of keywords, it would probably take hours!
2. Select the most valuable keywords
Now that you have a list of related keywords, you need to select the most profitable keywords – keywords that have the highest chance for you to rank for.
So how do you sift through the list of endless keywords and choose the best ones? How do you figure out which ones gives you the best shot at ranking?
To put it simply, you want to target keywords that have:
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Increasing search trend
Keywords with an increasing search trend show that it has the potential for increased traffic to your website
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Moderate to high search volume
Intuitively, you would think that keywords with the highest search volume would be the best, as it demonstrates a high demand from search engine users. Although this is true to some extent, high search volumes prove too challenging to rank, which we’ll touch on shortly. Therefore, you want to target keywords with moderate to high search volumes. Too low, and no one will ever discover your page, but too high, and it’ll be nearly impossible to rank.
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Less competitive keywords
You want to select keywords with the least competition to rank. If a certain keyword has too much competition, it might be close to impossible for you to beat them. In other words, the lower the competition, the easier it is to rank.
The key to targeting the most profitable keywords here is finding the sweet spot that balances all these factors. This is a bit tricky since these metrics affect each other ie. high search volume means high competition, and high difficulty.
The fastest and easiest way to find this “sweet spot” would be to use a
Not a lot of keyword research tools have this, but LSIGraph’s tool does provide what they call the “Opportunity Score”. This tells you which keywords gives you the most ROI (Return On Investment) with the least effort.
Basically, it does the thinking for you so you don’t have to.
Additionally, it also saves you a lot of time and effort in terms of analysis as it readily provides metrics like monthly search trend, monthly search volume, keyword difficulty and more in just seconds. If you were to do this manually for multiple keywords, it might take hours.
3. Conduct competitor keyword analysis
The last step to performing your keyword research is to conduct competitor keyword analysis, or also known as keyword gap analysis.
Keyword gaps are keywords that your competitors are capitalizing on, but you aren’t. These are keywords that are bringing traffic to their websites, so you’d want to incorporate these keywords so that your page will also show when search users enter those keywords into search engines.
Therefore, the reason behind the need for competitor keyword analysis is to ultimately close the gap between your content and your competitors’, so that you can outrank them. One way to close this gap is by analyzing their content and identify their winning keywords. This helps you uncover what works for your competitors, so that you can emulate them and implement them for your own.
So how do you do competitor analysis? Of course, you can go ahead and visit high ranking pages one by one, compare them with your own, and come up with a way to outperform them.
However, this process takes up a lot of time, especially if you’re looking at multiple competitors.
The way to streamline this process is by using a
RankingGap is an SEO tool specifically made for you to perform keyword gap analysis. It helps you achieve the 3 steps below to complete your keyword research journey:
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Find common keywords both you and your competitors are ranking for
With these common keywords, if you’re ranking higher than your competitors, awesome! You just need to monitor those rankings and make sure they don’t overtake you.
However, for those keywords where your competitors are outranking you, you wanna come up with strategies to overtake them. One way you can do this is by comparing the content surrounding their keyword with yours, and implement what they’re doing to your own.
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Look for keywords your competitors rank for, but you aren’t
If your competitors are ranking for keywords you’re not, your goal would be to steal their spot and climb higher. To do this, you need to identify the gaps between you and your competitors, and brainstorm ways to overcome that gap
You can start by comparing your content, and look at what they’re doing that’s different to yours. It also helps to reoptimize your older content by revamping it and updating new information. Another way is also by producing fresh content. It’s easier to come up with new ideas by looking at topic areas covered by your competitor that are lacking in yours.
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Identify keywords you rank for, but your competitors aren’t
By recognizing where your strength lies, you’ll be able to focus on keeping your spot and maintaining this advantage over your competitors. You’d want to always keep an eye out on these keywords so that if it ever dips, you’ll be ready to optimize your content so that it climbs back up.
Summary
Now that you’ve learned why keyword research is important and how to do it, you’re ready to strategically select the best keywords that will boost your SEO content’s rank and traffic.
Although conducting keyword research manually is possible, it is highly impractical due to the amount of time and effort you’d need to put in.
For faster and better results, it is highly recommended that you use an