Keyword Research is vital to your SEO strategy as there is little point in having the most eye-catching website or engaging content if no one sees it.
One of the primary ways to drive traffic to your website is through search engines like Google or Bing. To do this, you must ensure that the content on your web page aligns with search terms people actually use.
We identify these search terms by researching keywords and crafting web pages that answer or provide the solution to whatever term they have queried in a search engine.
There are a number of things you can do to improve your SEO, but keyword research remains one of the most important. If you’re looking for SEO services in the Wirral, or indeed anywhere, we can help you improve your page rankings and take care of basics including SEO keyword research.
What is Keyword Research?
Generally, keywords are words we use to define a particular item or topic of interest. the words and phrases people use when they are looking for something specific or words they use to describe something.
In SEO terms, they are the search queries that people type into the search bar when they want to find something. Ideally, you will want your webpage or wider web presence to contain keywords that are relevant to the content and cover the subject thoroughly.
Keyword research uncovers what these phrases are, what people are searching for in the search engines and the volume of these searches.
Example of Keyword Research
Below is an example of some keyword research taken using a keyword research tool called Semrush. Here we are researching the keyword “Mens T-shirts” and as you can see it has delivered 65’909 different variations of this keyword people use in the search engines, in the UK alone.
From this data, we have an estimation that the term “Men’s T-shirts” is searched for 22’200 times per month in the UK.
The software also gives us the intent behind the terms, whether they are commercial or informational searches.
In addition to this, the software also gives us an estimation of how difficult it is to rank in the top positions for the keyword.
If you have just opened up a new business selling T-shirts out of your garage, attempting to rank top for such a competitive term as “Men’s T-shirts” will be difficult.
So keyword research allows us to identify what keywords we should be targeting to help us achieve our strategic objectives. We might not be able to rank top for this keyword straight away, but we can build towards it with a clear strategy on how to do this.
We could for example start by targeting lower volume keywords or a niche category that has lower competition.
Why is Keyword Research so Important in SEO?
Keyword research is important as it allows us to understand what keywords are being searched for, how they are being searched and crucially, the intent behind them.
Keywords and SEO have pretty much gone together since the very first days of digital marketing. The relationship used to be more straightforward than it is now as search engines have become much better at satisfying search intent.
The algorithms used by Google and other search engines have become increasingly sophisticated at assessing whether your webpage delivers the right content, to satisfy a user search query.
People do not tend to enter text into search engines as they speak. For example, people searching for a new collar for their beloved pet, might simply write ‘new cat collar Birmingham’ and not ‘Where can I find a new collar for my cat?” as they would in general conversation.
But as search algorithms have got more sophisticated, they have brought voice search into the mix, and queries have become more conversational. Through a series of updates including the likes of RankBrain and BERT, Google has become more nuanced and better at inferring the meaning behind the search terms people are actually using on different devices.
This means you can phrase a query any number of ways and your search engine should still return relevant results.
Keyword Competitiveness
Google doesn’t share data on its search volume, but it’s been estimated that it processes 99,000 search queries every second. That’s 8.5 billion searches every day. That’s a lot of searches, but there are also a lot of websites, pages and pieces of content vying for that traffic.
While there are other search engines out there, Google is still by far the most important and dominant search engine worldwide, with a reported market share of 81.95% of all search queries.
If you search for a competitive keyword such as Mens T-Shirts, you are basically in competition with every website that sells men’s t-shirts, and some have been going for a long time and have built up a lot of authority in the search engines.
The more competitive a keyword is, the more difficult it is to rank highly for that particular term. To offset this, people also optimise for other, more specific and less competitive keywords. These can include long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors may be more likely to use when they’re closer to the point of purchase.
Having a range of keywords that are all relevant to your business or area of operation can help to drive quality traffic to your content. Competitor keyword research can also be useful as it always pays to know the keywords your competitors are using and to gauge how successful they are.
Keyword Targeting on Specific Pages
As a rule of thumb, your pages should concentrate on a particular topic or as we call it, a keyword.
One page can rank for many variations of a keyword, but for clarity, it is good to have a focus keyword.
If the content is too diffuse and splits the focus between a number of disparate keywords, it might not rank particularly highly for any of them. If you mix the pages such as T-shirts and Shoes, for example, the page loses focus as it is divided between topics. The content needs to be on-topic and thorough.
Having a clear meta title and page title are old school but highly relevant areas to focus your keyword. These are the biggest indicators to Google what a page is about, from there you need to ensure your content covers the topic.
How Keywords Help Your Strategy
There are many strategies a company may wish to employ when looking to grow in search engines, but keyword research will be a component of any strategy.
The keywords you choose to target will help to indicate to the search engines that you are an authority on this topic. If you have a website talking about your passion, say growing tomatoes, one such strategy would be to cover everything there is to know about tomatoes. You want the search engines to come to an understanding that when a user searches for information on tomatoes, you are the authority on the subject.
This will take time to get there. You will need to cover lots of topics, and provide useful, insightful information. Other people will share your website when talking about tomatoes, people may come to you asking questions about tomatoes off-site, such as newspapers or farmers.
But on the other hand, you could have an e-commerce store that sells tomatoes. From this perspective, you want the search engines to understand that your website is the best go to for a person wishing to buy tomatoes.
This will include creating pages full of commercial information, and lots of different types of tomatoes for sale with lots of content, but of a different kind. Here we would want to know about the nutritional value of tomatoes, how long they take to deliver, the shelf life of the product, recipes they can be used in, and cooking instructions.
The website that focuses on growing tomatoes may even link to the website that sells tomatoes, and this will be a huge indicator to the search engines that your website is the place to go if a person wishes to buy tomatoes.
A Professional Keyword Agency
If you need help with choosing keywords to use on your website, we are here to help you with our SEO services. Our SEO consultants have many years of experience in keyword research and will work with you to choose the right approach to your keyword targeting. Reach out today and speak to one of our SEO consultants on 0151 652 4777.
Posted on Friday, November 12th, 2021 in SEO.
