Hello Chasers,
Google constantly changes its algorithms as more and more updates they keep rolling out and this keeps us on our toes when it comes to maximising our marketing reach. But, one thing has stayed reasonably constant for those looking to optimise their websites for search and that is ‘keyword research’.
When you discover the key to unlocking leads to your business through your marketing campaigns your business will grow quickly!
Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimisation (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy. However, keywords themselves may not be as important to SEO as you may think.
Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics – by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.
By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that the most people in your audience want answers to. And this really is the key to unlocking more leads and business being driven to your door. If you can offer a solution quickly, easily and more efficiently than your competition you will succeed in growing your business.
Here’s how to research keywords for your SEO strategy:
Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
If you’re a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they’re the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas/avatars – what types of topics would your target audience search that you’d want your business to get found for?
Step 2: Fill in those topics with keywords.
These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.
Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyse Accordingly.
Today, it’s more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. So, how does this affect the keyword research you do?
Step 4: Research related search terms.
When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Step 5: Use keyword research tools to your advantage.
This is a bonus step with a couple of FREE tools that can help you easily do this.
- answerthepublic.com
- answersocrates.com
When used in conjunction with SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest these can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.
And of course, don’t forget AI. There are a number or ready made prompts that will allow you to fine tune your research too.
As you can see there is a process to follow if you want to maximise your lead generation and ensure the marketing you spend time and money on generating is producing results.
Are you using this Keyword Research strategy?
Have a great day!
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