There is little point in having the most eye-catching website or engaging content in the world if no one ever sees it.
One of the primary ways to drive traffic to your website is through search engines like Google or Bing. The techniques you can use to improve your rankings on these search engines – where you appear on the page – form the basis of search engine optimisation or SEO. This can increase the number of visitors you get and ultimately improve sales or engagement.
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 Wirral services, we can help you improve your page rankings and take care of basics including SEO keyword research.
What is Keyword Research?
Put simply, keywords are the words and phrases that define what your content is all about. In pure SEO terms, they are the search queries that people type into the bar of their search engine when they want to find something. Ideally, you will want your website or wider web presence to contain keywords that are relevant to the content.
That way, you have a good chance of appearing high in the results when people search for those terms. Our web design Wirral services can build relevant keywords into your website architecture and content to help drive traffic your way, but you can also do your own keyword research using analytical tools.
Why is Keyword Research so important in SEO?
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, with organic keywords easily accessible through tools such as Google Analytics.
It’s true that the algorithms used by Google and other search engines have become increasingly sophisticated and over the past decade or so Google has quietly removed keyword data from the public domain.
While there are other search engines out there by the way, Google is still by far the most important and dominant search engine worldwide, with a reported market share of 86.64% as of September 2021.1 This also means it is the most important in terms of SEO and, just because it is no longer quite so transparent with keywords, doesn’t mean they any longer matter.
We might not be able to access Google’s keyword algorithms but a SEO Chester agency can still observe the impact of good SEO practices, including using the appropriate keywords. In the early days of SEO and keyword research, it was literally a case of trying to work out the exact search terms people were typing into their search bar.
This did not tend to follow the usual patterns of speaking or writing, so if people were searching for a new collar for their beloved pet, they might simply write ‘new cat collar Birmingham’ and not ‘Where can I find a new collar for my cat in the local area?’.
As search algorithms have got more sophisticated, and as we’ve brought voice search into the mix, 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.
This means you can phrase a query any number of ways and your search engine should still return relevant results. The bottom line though is that if you’re looking for a new cat collar in Birmingham, those specific keywords that sum up the aim of the search still matter.
Keyword Competitiveness
Google doesn’t share data on its search volume, but it’s been estimated that it processes 63,000 search queries every second. That’s 5.6 billion searches every day and around 2 trillion per year.2 That’s a lot of searches but there are also a lot of websites, pages and pieces of content vying for that traffic.
Type in ‘cat collar Birmingham’ and Google reports more than 7 million results. If you want to rank highly for such a competitive keyword there are certain things you can do to improve your overall SEO and our SEO Liverpool services can help with that.
The more competitive it is though, the more difficult it is to rank highly for that particular term. You will also need to 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 a 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 area and your keyword research should focus on linked keywords that are all relevant to that content. 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. It isn’t always apparent how to do keyword research for the best effect but our marketing agency Liverpool and web design Chester can help you get it right.
If you’re looking for expert keyword research or any other aspect of SEO we can design best practices into your website or content from the ground up. This is always the best approach, but SEO can also be improved at any time.
If you want to get a jump on your competitors and work your way up those all-important search rankings, we can help, with services including SEO Chester, web design Liverpool and marketing agency Wirral. Get in touch today to find out how we can help.
Posted on Friday, November 12th, 2021 in SEO.
