More than half of online activity begins with a search queries.
Knowing that the majority of online activity is search queies is reason enough to master keyword research. But what is keyword research?
In a nutshell, keyword research is to find out what your target audience is searching for online. Without knowing the top words it’ll be too difficult to optimize a website, content, and link building. Keyword research refers to locating the most popular terms your target audience will be entering into search engines to find websites and/or businesses they’re looking for.
In this article we will discuss what techniques will help you choose the best keywords to target.
Methods for Keyword Research
- Basic spreadsheet- you’ll want a spreadsheet to place the keywords or phrases you believe audiences will be searching to find answers regarding certain topics. This can sometimes be challenging as some of the phrases you choose may be too difficult and obscure while others may be too broad to find you. For example: best pizza ( too broad). A better example would be, best deep crust pizza in New York city.
- Brainstorm- two brains is better than one. Sometimes what we may think is obvious, may not be obvious to another person. Ping pong ideas off a fellow coworker or friend.
- There are websites that will help you come up with discovery terms. You can look up free keyword tools- Yahoo and dogpile offer them.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner- get it. Enough said.
- Keyword Analysis- once you have your words and phrases its time to analyze your competition. Moz is a good tool to use as it will show you the difficulty for each keyword and how hard it will be to rank it. It will also show you the top 10 sites ranked with the word or phrase.
- Once you’ve chosen your words based off your data and research its time to test them out. We ALWAYS recommend A/B testing. You’ll want to test out multiple keywords and keyword phrases.
Finding the right keyword or phrase doesn’t have to be hard, but it can be time consuming compiling all the data. We understand that which is why we’re always here to help or even brainstorm ideas with you.
