Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they're the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called "search queries."
As a website owner and content creator, you want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding your content among the results.
Why are keywords important?
Keywords are important because they are the linchpin between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. Your goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs), and the keywords you choose to target the ones you choose to include in your content) will determine what kind of traffic you get.
If you own a women’s apparel shop, for example, you might want to rank for "new collection" — but if you're not careful, you might end up attracting traffic that's interested in finding a new collection of men’s apparel.
To create content that ranks well organically and drives visitors to your site, you need to understand the needs of those visitors — the language they use and the type of content they seek.
You can do this by talking to your customers, frequenting forums and community groups, and doing your own keyword research with a tool like Keyword Explorer.
Keyword optimization (also known as keyword research) is the act of researching, analyzing, and selecting the best keywords to target to drive qualified traffic from search engines to your website.
Keyword search optimization is a critical step in the initial stages of search engine marketing, for both paid and organic search. If you do a bad job at selecting your target keywords, all your subsequent efforts will be in vain. So it’s vital to get keyword optimization right.
keyword optimization isn't a set it and forget it process. By continuously performing keyword analysis and expanding your database of keywords, your site traffic, leads and sales will continue to grow.
Benefits of Keyword Optimization
In a recent survey, participants listed keyword optimization as one of the hardest tasks in search engine marketing. Because of its difficult nature, most site owners, marketers, and bloggers don't spend enough time optimizing keywords. This is ironic since optimizing keywords is the most important aspect of SEO and PPC. If you don't choose and use keywords your customers are searching for, you won't get found. That means no traffic, no sales, no money.
So to look at the big picture, you must practice search engine keyword optimization.
Search Volume & Ranking Difficulty
Average Monthly Search volume is among the most frequently used metrics for keyword research. Keyword Planner from Google AdWords shows the average monthly searches for any given keyword.
Using an exact match for a keyword gives you a precise representation of the actual volume of searches. To arrive at a more accurate 12-month search volume, it is recommended to segment monthly search volumes and manually average them.
Keyword planner doesn’t include search volume for keyword phrases that are auto-corrected. Alternately you can also use tools like Solvid, SemRush, Mangools, and Moz to arrive at the monthly search volume.
Keywords with higher search volume will attract more traffic but are likely to be more competitive. If you are a brand-new website, then you should target keywords with low search volume to establish domain authority.
Domain authority is a concept termed by Moz. Domain authority evaluates the strength of the website on a logarithmic scale of 0-100. Moz uses over 40 to determine domain authority including site link profile.
Your site link profile accounts for both inbound and outbound links. High-quality links are required to develop a strong link profile.
To use search volume efficiently follow the best practices:
- Choose the exact match keyword.
If you are skeptical about which exact match keywords to choose from you can conduct a small paid AdWords campaign using keywords set to broad match type to arrive at exact match keywords that could convert for your business.
- choose the appropriate region If your business is only targeting specific geographies.
- Manually average the 12-month search volume.
Group all related keywords that answer the same question together.
KOB Analysis
KOB Analysis refers to Keyword Objection to Benefit Analysis. KOB analysis helps you to discover the best opportunities for conducting an SEO campaign which allows you to allocate resources efficiently.
Relevance
Beyond search volume and KOB analysis, it is essential to check whether your content is relevant to your audience. High organic relevance results in higher CTR and traffic.
To identify relevance, you can use the below tools:
- Google Trends
Google Trends provides trends, data, and visualization for any keyword. Google Trends uses time and region to separate the search terms. It also allows you to identify related keywords and queries.
- Google Ngram
Google Ngram, unlike Google trends, searches google books database to find keywords and phrases in a corpus of books. For instance, if you were to decide between writing an article on either machine learning or artificial intelligence. A search for the terms in Ngram would have shown a huge spike in interest between 1960 to 2015 for artificial intelligence.
- Answer The Public
Use Answer The Public to find all the questions that the users are asking for any given keyword or phrase. If you are into creating helpful content, you can use the tool to identify new opportunities for content creation.
Uber Suggests helps you to find new keywords and phrases. You can filter the keywords and also check the relevance using google trends data on the tool.
Conclusion
Easy Wins, Long-Term Wins. A good keyword strategy needs to have a healthy mix of head terms and long-tail keywords. Head terms include generic keywords or phrases that are shorter in length. Head terms are more frequently searched which also makes them more competitive. Long terms keywords tend to be more specific and comprise of phrases that include 3 or more words.
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