What are keywords?

Keywords are the literal key to get your website noticed. The lower the difficulty of the words that are used, the more noticeable your business is online! The more popular that your business is, the more success you will have! That’s the aim afterall.

But wait, what is a keyword? Why do I need them How will they help me?

Well, buckle up! I’m here to tell you how they benefit you and your business.              

So what is a keyword?

A keyword is a word or a phrase that people type into search engines in order to find certain information online, it is the gateway to guide people to find certain information online.

Long tail keywords are longer specific phrases or keywords to find what people are searching for, these are normally three or more words. The significance of how low difficulty, high relevance and the conversion is what matters!

You wanna be at the top of the page right? Of course you do! But first, you have to understand how to use keywords.

It is so important to find the right keywords in the good old Search Engine Optimization.

This helps finding those key phrases that people use in search engines such as Google to find certain little pieces of information that they need, which in turn the more they use those keywords, that particular website gets more traction, which in turn works up to the top of the first page!

The biggest advantage of using long tail keywords is that the competition for these terms are far lower than general terms! Let’s say for example a  customer typed: “Milk chocolate cookie dough recipe” into Google, this is so much lower than just “cookie dough” but so is the difficulty of finding that particular piece of information.

Well written articles and websites on certain topics can rank more with long tail keywords, although the search volume is low for each word separately, the number may be interesting if you sum it all up.

These particular keywords are what people usually use to search for things on the internet. There is so much more traffic from long tail than general since more and more people use long tail keywords!

There are much better conversion rates using long tail keywords than the general terms, because they are more specific for that customer which implies that this customer is further along the customer journey.

BUT WAIT, THERE IS MORE.

How are you going to get those sweet, sweet keywords? What kind of keywords do you need to use? What gets the best revenue? What do you do?!

The answer? KEYWORD RESEARCH

So, Keyword Research is the process of finding and analysing the best keywords that should be used for optimising your website. This is soooo important!

This is finding what language people use when looking for information on the web and optimising your website for those keywords. So in those early stages of the Search Engine Optimisation, keyword research could often be reduced to visiting Google, selecting the keywords with the highest search volume and the frequency in the text of the website.

With the evolution and development of SEO over the years, keyword research has evolved too! The Hummingbird Algorithm was introduced as the new era of Google was produced, and this algorithm looks into what lies behind the search queries people make!

The Hummingbird Algorithm solely focuses on synonyms and themed related topics along with context to deliver search results which are closer to the users intent, not only the exact phrase.

This encourages the authors to use natural language instead of keyword focused content to make a name for themselves, as Google wants to be more “human”, it wants to understand the context of the search query and give responses in the most natural way.                        

When do I use keyword research?

It is a continual process, this isn’t a one-type thing and everything is done and that’s it you’re sorted, no no.

There are three processes to this research:

• Looking for a new niche
• Looking for new topics
• Optimising existing pages.
  
  

Looking for that new niche

This research is absolutely necessary when looking for a new niche for your website or blog. You have to evaluate the popularity of that niche, revealing all possible topics that can be covered and of course, what the competition for that niche may be.

A crucial step within this is deciding whether to invest time and money into a certain project. The mere thought of the research for the first time, the higher the chance that unpleasant surprises will be eliminated down the road.

Looking for those new topics

On a smaller scale, it happens all the time, you look for a new article idea with a certain niche, not only you do research with every new topic, you also cover a website.

Once you understand a niche you can see the way people look for information. Finding new topics you wouldn’t have thought of the first time will be highlighted in a keyword search.

Optimising those existing pages

It is a great idea to go back to existing content and analyse missed opportunities – a “reversed” search really. The main idea is to use the focus words from old pieces of content and grab those missed opportunities. Often there are sub topics that are closely related to the original topic but are not covered nearly enough in that original content.

How do I find  ideal keywords?

Brainstorm, write down all possible topics, spy on your competitors or use a keyword tool (like Mangools) that offer suggestions with other useful pieces of information.

It should have the right balance between popularity, difficulty and relevance!

Popularity

The obvious factors is the search volume.

The more searches of a certain keyword,  the more organic traffic you will get!

Look at monthly search volume and look at the internet over time, especially when doing keyword research that goes into creating and publishing a blog or website.

Difficulty of the keyword

Popularity is an important factor but you won’t be able to rank for a keyword with a high research volume! This is pretty useless.

Always consider the competition of keywords and access the difficulty within that keyword.

Relevance of the keyword

Once you check the search volume and the difficulty of the keyword and find the ideal balance of the two which is the high volume of the searches to the low difficulty finding them.

You should be looking for Search Engine Results Pages for detailed analysis of those websites that rank for those specific keywords.

Each search has a search intent behind it and there are different types of content for different types of intent, SERP analysis will help choose the right type of content for those pages.

Mangools is a really good resource, check it out!

Thank you for reading!