How to Choose the Right Keywords for Your SEO Campaign?
Why is Keyword Research Important?
Keyword research is crucial as it helps to identify the best terms to target and provides valuable insights into the Google searches made by your target audience. By understanding how to choose the right keywords for your SEO campaigns, you can shape your marketing and content strategies accordingly.
When people conduct online research, they use keywords to find answers. Thus, if your content effectively appears in front of your audience during their searches, you can attract more traffic. Therefore, it’s essential to focus on these queries.
Moreover, as per the inbound methodology, we should create content around what people want to learn, rather than what we want to tell them. In other words, our audience comes to us.
Benefits of Conducting Keyword Research
Keyword research offers several benefits, including:
1. Market Research Trends
Effective keyword research provides insights into current marketing trends and helps you focus your content on relevant subjects and search terms used by your target audience.
2. Increased Traffic
Choosing relevant keywords for your content can improve your search engine ranking and attract more visitors to your website.
3. Acquiring New Clients
If your company provides the information that other business professionals need, you can fulfill their requirements and direct them to a call-to-action that takes them through the buyer’s journey from awareness to purchase.
To address your audience’s queries, research keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent.
Elements of Keyword Research
Consider these three factors when conducting keyword research:
1. Relevance
Relevance affects how Google ranks your content. The search intent plays a crucial role here. If your content satisfies the searchers’ needs, it will rank for that keyword. Additionally, your content should be the best resource for the query. Google won’t give your content a better ranking if it offers less value than other online content.
2. Credibility
Google considers authoritative sources more reliable. Therefore, you must establish yourself as an authoritative source by enhancing your website with educational, useful content and promoting it to gain social signals and backlinks. Unless your content is exceptional, you have a reduced chance of ranking if you’re not recognized as an authority in the field or if the SERPs for a keyword are dominated by authoritative sources you can’t compete with.
3. Quantity
Even if a specific keyword leads to the first page of search results, it won’t drive traffic to your site if no one searches for it. MSV (Monthly Search Volume) is used to measure the volume, which is the total monthly searches for the keyword across all audiences.
How to Find and Choose the Right Keywords for Your Website SEO Campaigns
Once you have a general idea of the terms you want to rank for, it’s time to refine your list of potential keywords based on those that will work best for your plan. Here’s how:
Step 1: Use Google Keyword Planner to narrow down your keyword selection.
Google’s Keyword Planner can help you predict the search volume and traffic for keywords you’re considering. Then, use Google Trends to fill in some gaps based on the knowledge you gained from Keyword Planner.
Use the Keyword Planner to highlight any terms on your list that have abnormally low (or excessively high) search traffic and don’t support maintaining the balanced mix we discussed above. Check their trend history and forecasts in Google Trends before deleting anything, though. For example, you can determine whether some low-volume terms might be something you should engage in now and profit from later.
Or perhaps you’re simply faced with a collection of terms that is excessively long and needs to be condensed. You can use Google Trends to identify the terms that are trending up and merit your attention the most.
Step 2: Prioritize low-hanging fruit.
Prioritizing low-hanging fruit means giving top priority to keywords for which you have a possibility of ranking based on the authority of your website.
Large businesses frequently target keywords with high search traffic, and since their brands are already well-known, Google frequently rewards them with authority across a wide range of subjects.
You might also think about using less competitive terms. If no one else is vying for the top spot for a keyword, it can be yours by default if there aren’t already numerous articles competing for it.
Step 3: Check the monthly search volume (MSV) for the keywords you’ve selected.
Checking MSV can help you create content that is focused on what readers want to learn. The number of times a search term or keyword is entered into search engines each month is known as the monthly search volume. You can discover the most popular keywords among similar keyword clusters for free using tools like Google Trends.
Step 4: Factor in SERP features when choosing keywords
Google emphasizes a number of SERP feature snippets if used properly. Search for your chosen keywords and see what the top result looks like to learn more about them. In this article, we’ll briefly describe the different types of SERP features.
Picture Packs
Image packs are search results that appear naturally and are presented as a horizontal row of photos. If there is an image pack, create a picture-heavy post to be included in it.
Paragraph Snippets
Short passages of text called featured snippets or paragraph snippets are displayed at the top of Google search results to provide quick answers to popular search inquiries. Comprehending the searcher’s intention and offering clear responses can help you gain this placement.
List Excerpts
List snippets, also known as listicles, are excerpts created for articles that outline the steps to complete a task from beginning to end, frequently for “How To” searches. Writing posts with straightforward formatting and directions can help you succeed in this placement.
Video Snippets
Short videos called video snippets are displayed by Google at the top of search results pages in lieu of text-based featured snippets. Uploading a video to both YouTube and your website and tagging it with relevant keywords may help you achieve this placement.
Step 5: Look for a combination of head phrases and long-tail keywords in each bucket
Head terms are usually one to three words long and are shorter and more generic than other keyword phrases. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that typically contain three or more syllables.
Make sure your keyword strategy is well-balanced with both long-term objectives and immediate successes by including a blend of head terms and long-tail terms. Head keywords are frequently more competitive and challenging to rank for, but because they are searched for more often than long-tail terms, they are still important.
Step 6: Check the ranking keywords of your competitors
You don’t necessarily have to do something just because your rival is. Likewise with terms. To help you reevaluate your list of keywords, it’s a good idea to know which keywords your rivals are attempting to rank for.
If your rival is already ranking for certain keywords on your list, it makes sense to work on raising your ranking for those as well. Don’t disregard the ones your rivals don’t appear to be concerned about, though. You might have a great chance to gain market share on significant conditions as well.
Maintain a similar balance to what the combination of long-tail and head terms enables by understanding the ratio of terms that might be a little trickier due to competition to those that might be a little more realistic. Remember, the objective is to come up with a list of keywords that not only helps you move towards more ambitious, long-term SEO goals but also offers some quick wins.
You now have a list of keywords that will direct your attention to appropriate business-related subjects and help you achieve both short- and long-term success. Review these keywords every few months and add more as you acquire more authority in the SERPs.
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