Keyword Research for the Newbs

If you’re looking to optimize a website successfully, you’ll need to do some keyword research. BUT if you’re new to the online world this task may be challenging and confusing, which is why we’re going to go over the basics today.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is a necessary search engine optimization (SEO) task that involves finding popular words and phrases people use in search engines with the intention to use the data for specific optimizations and marketing. Researching keywords gives marketers the ability to uncover top queries and how hard it would be to compete with particular keyword/phrases in organic search results.

Keyword Research 101

Start by making a list of relevant topics based on what you know about your business or product. You’ll want a list of topics to use later on when you begin looking up specific keywords. Here’s an example of possible topics to list if your business was a dog daycare.

“Pet Sitting”

“Dog Daycare”

“Exercise for Dogs”

“Healthy Choices for Dogs”

Well, you get the idea.

Once you’ve established a list of topics, it’s time to fill in those topics with keyword phrases. These keyword phrases should be phrases you believe would rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). An idea of this would be “Where to find a dog daycare?” if we were building off the topic “Dog Daycare.” Another way to do keyword research on phrases is by using Google Analytics on your current website and see which terms your website is already getting noticed for.

When you’re doing your research, you need to focus on user intent phrases. User intent is what the user online intended or wanted to find when they searched something specific into the search engine. Instead of focusing a blog post on a particular keyword because it was rated high in searched words, you’ll want to focus your post on answering the intent of the phrase the user searched. It is essential to be relevant to the keyword phrase rather than just using the keyword because it’s a popular word.

Choosing Keywords

Now that you understand the basics of keyword phrases, it’s time to enhance your current list with your marketing strategy’s right ones. To do this, you need to remember two words: relevance and reliability.

Relevance: Is your content relevant to what is being searched? Google rates content on relevance and if it meets the user’s needs.

Reliability: Is your site offering reliable information? Is it rich with helpful and informative information? Reliable content gives access to higher rankings.

Competitors

Finally, we recommend checking your competitors. Look and see what they’re using in their content. Not all of their keywords will be useful for your website, but it’s a quick way to go over your list and see how relevant and popular your keywords are.