Keyword Research – How to Select Top Keywords for SEO

The Internet is one of the most used tools in our digital world. If your SEO strategy is solid, you can gain visibility quickly and draw organic traffic to your business, helping it rise above the competition. Selecting the right keywords is key to the success of your SEO strategy. They help connect with your target audience. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that for most experts, keywords are the foundation of Search Engine Marketing. People are looking for information, products, and services online every day. Search engines are the first place they choose to find the information they are interested in.

The concept is simple—thanks to keywords, people are able to find the content they are looking for in search engines. Owing to accurate results and, in many situations, relevant results, search engines like Google or Bing are very popular. That’s also why they are commonly used by businesses and marketers all over the world (this also means you).

So, if you want to strengthen your keyword game, here is your complete guide. Read on to understand keyword research, why it is important, tips for selecting the best keywords for SEO, and more insights.

What is Keyword Research?

As the term suggests, you research keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase that people use in the search engine when they are looking for something. It can be information regarding a specific disease, criteria, questions they want answered, etc. The keyword can be a product or service name they want to use. From the right keywords, a business can gain the attention of the right people.

For instance, if someone wants to buy a used sedan, they will search for this keyword and input the exact location. The search engine will show them the top results of dealerships selling used cars in that area. Searchers might even input the price range to narrow the search. If you are a car dealership business and have used the right keywords, including location and price ranges, your results may show on the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Therefore, keyword research is extremely important. The process includes using keyword research tools to find words and phrases with high search volume. Proper research also helps you find keywords with high relevance to your business and low competition. Keep in mind that keyword research is not just about choosing the right words. It is also about understanding search intent, which can be looking for information, purchasing a product or service, or finding a certain website.

Keyword research is the cornerstone of a good SEO strategy. Thus, most reputed SEO agencies do it for you. When you contact them, they understand your business and what it offers. Based on their findings, they create a list of suitable keywords with high search volume for your SEO campaign and embed them into your website. This can mean updating your existing website or creating a new one to increase the likelihood of success. Agencies usually also use the keywords for other digital marketing avenues like social media, email marketing, etc.

Why is Keyword Research Important?

The point of every promotional activity in search engines is to connect searches with your website. Your business’s presence in search engines is bound to the keywords. Knowing which keywords people use to find your product or information about your services gives you a significant advantage – you can make it easier for them to find you.

It is easier to find keywords with high search volume specific to your business, making you more visible in search engines. This translates into achieving higher website positions for keywords, having a larger share in overall clicks from the search engine results page, and bringing in more traffic and users interested in your offer. Hopefully, they will turn into your new satisfied customers. But these are not the only advantages of doing thorough keyword research. You can also reap the following benefits.

• Reaching Relevant Audience: The Internet is a vast space, and what you put there has a global audience. Suppose you feel only 1 or 2 people out of the 10 who viewed your website or content are the ones actually interested in your business offerings. In that case, keyword research can help increase the number of relevant people. You can align your content with user intent and draw quality leads to your web pages.
• Better Engagement: Just because you mean business doesn’t mean it has to be boring. If the content you put out to attract customers is not relevant, they will drift away from your site, regardless of whether the product or service is good. You need to use good keywords, sensibly along with clean and clear content, to ensure your target audience does what you need - be it engage in your content, discover your offerings, sign up for a subscription, or make a purchase.
• Beat Competition: Have you ever wondered how a rival business suddenly starts getting better and more leads? This can be due to their improved keyword research and upgraded SEO strategy with words and phrases with high search volume. Thus, to beat the competition in our digital world, you need to do your homework and find relevant keywords to strengthen your SEO plan.
• Save Your Efforts: What’s the point of wasting money and resources using the wrong keywords? If you want a specific audience to visit your website, you must focus on the right words and phrases. This step helps run targeted ad campaigns and saves you thousands!
• Better Content: When you focus on the right keywords, you also focus on the right content. After keyword research, you can create content that directly addresses the requirements and questions of your audience. Since the entire content becomes relevant, it appears more and more on SERPs.
• Improved User Experience: Everyone knows the feeling when they find what they are looking for on the Internet. During keyword research, your aim should be to improve user experience. By inserting relevant content and keywords, you contribute to enhancing the search experience for your target audience.
• Sustainable Traffic Growth: Using relevant keywords has a prolonged impact on your SEO efforts. It facilitates sustained traffic growth as your website can draw people continuously for years. Therefore, you must focus on finding well-targeted keywords that remain relevant.
• Help You Adapt: Keywords can become redundant or saturated. By conducting regular keyword research and updating your content accordingly, you set the stage for continuous SEO success. You can maintain your visibility by adapting to search behaviors.
• Generate Brand Recognition: When you appear on SERPs regularly using the right keywords, your brand gains recognition. Retention of your company name, products, services, and other information improves significantly, helping you make your business grow and constantly draw organic traffic.
• Brave Algorithm Changes: Change is a constant in the digital world, and search engines keep changing their search algorithms. If you conduct routine keyword research, you can stay ahead of the curve and make improvements whenever necessary to be relevant and keep reaching your target audience.

Keywords for SEO – Where to Start Your Research?

Build a List of Keywords

Write down keywords and phrases that are suitable to use to promote your website online. Who knows your business better than you? Not exactly. It’s necessary to point out that, at this point, it’s not a good idea to use keywords that you think are best for your business.

It’s not about you. It’s about what keywords are most commonly used by the people who find businesses like yours. Although you shouldn’t use your keywords in the first place, this kind of research could give you an idea of what you should be looking for.

Use Tools from Your PPC Campaigns

Researching keywords is not only important for SEO purposes but is also essential for your paid SEM activities. You can check our article on when to choose PPC and SEO when promoting your business online. If you’re already managing a sponsored links campaign, there are no contraindications to using your best-performing keywords in SEO.

If you’re totally new to these issues, let’s go further with our research.

Google Keyword Research, provided by the AdWords advertising platform, is a good place to start. Of course, there are other keyword research tools on the market, like Bing Ads Intelligence, but let’s stick with Google since it’s the global number one and is quite comprehensive and complementary. You don’t have to pay money or start a campaign immediately to use it. It will provide information about keywords and phrases people use as search queries to find your product. You will also learn which phrases are irrelevant to your offer.

Use Your Own Historical Data

The other tool you could use is, of course, your analytics software. I assume that Google Analytics would be your first choice in that area. You can use it to track many types of traffic from search engines, such as paid, referral, social, and organic. While analyzing your incoming organic traffic, if the amount is quite visible, you can see what keywords visitors have been using to come to your site so far.

Analyze Search Trends

Another variable you should bear in mind is search trends. If the keywords you’ve chosen fit in with local or global search trends (depending on your business), you can get some inspiration from them. If not, it would be a good idea to do additional research and add some new keywords and their variations to your list. Keeping track of search trends is beneficial for the following reasons.

• You can identify seasonal fluctuations.
• Focus on emerging topics related to your business and industry.
• Be alert to keywords with a declining search interest.
• Understand the reasons why some keywords gain popularity while others lose them.
• Keep track of your audience's interests and stay on top during peak times of search.

Analyze Traffic Potential

Who doesn’t want their SEO efforts to pay off? However, you need to analyze the traffic potential to get the payoff you expect. It refers to the number of visitors a keyword brings if you rank well.

You can use tools like the Google Keyword Planner. These tools show the average monthly searches for each keyword. Keywords that rank high also come with more competition, which means you can also use medium-ranking keywords to maintain a balance and keep your visitors coming from all desired directions.

While analyzing traffic potential, you can focus on top-searched keywords as well as achievable and beneficial keywords for your website. The aim is to find keywords that are most relevant to your business and will beat the competition. This means using keywords that other businesses are not focusing on.

Analyze Competition for The Keyword

You can also check how much competition your chosen keywords have. Type some of the keywords of your choice and look at what results will be shown to you. Check if your competitor's offer is available and see if the sponsored links of similar offers will appear. If so, that’s the signal that this is the keyword you want to position your website in search engines. It has a big value, and achieving a better keyword rank could be more difficult than your competitors.

You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush for data on keyword difficulty and competitor analysis. Look at sponsored ads to gauge which keywords are used and which ones your competitors are paying for to get more visibility. Aim to find long-tail keywords or less competitive ones that provide a different or unique path for your SEO strategy and increase your site’s search visibility and traffic.

Choosing the Keywords

Choosing the best keywords is one of the most important steps to strengthen your keyword search game and SEO strategy. But before you start looking, you must gain insights regarding keywords, such as their type, phrases by word number, and more. So, read on.

Types of Keywords

At this point, you’re probably wondering what keywords you should choose. While writing this article, I asked myself a question, “What kind of keywords should I focus on to get the best possible results?”. Doing research showed me that there are many more types of keywords and methodologies used to categorize keywords.

Phrases by Word Number

This is the most common methodology for choosing the right keywords, including the following:

• General keywords: 1-word keywords. Unspecific, general terms people use for search queries. On most occasions, they provide the best amount of traffic but are also highly competitive and not specific enough to connect them with your site.
• More specific keywords: 2-3 word keywords. They provide a good balance between the traffic volume and the relevance of your website. The cost and competition usage for them is moderate.
• Long-tail keywords: 4+ word phrases. Very specific phrases with low competition. The number of long-tail keywords is much bigger than the ones above, but the statistics show that they’re responsible for driving about 70% of overall traffic on the Internet. They will not give you traffic volume, but they are cheap and will provide you with the most engaged users.

Phrases by Type of Searched Information

Keywords are also based on the information people search for. They can be based on the following criteria.

• Information keywords: These are used when people are looking for particular information or products.
• Navigation keywords: These are used when people are looking for a specific brand or company.
• Purchase keywords: Used when users are determined to buy a specific product or service.

Phrases by Organic Traffic Type

For successful marketing efforts, businesses often focus on keywords that bring organic traffic to their websites. They can be:

• Branded keywords: Keywords that are connected to your unique brand.
• Non-branded keywords: The phrases that do not reference your brand.

Other Types of Keyword Variations

Besides the keyword methodologies mentioned above, you can also focus on the types of keyword variations below.

• Geographical keywords: Local or global keyword variations.
• Misspelled keywords: These occur when problems with misspellings appear.
• Seasonal keywords: Used on specific occasions.

What Keywords Should You Choose

Since keyword research is an integral part of your SEO strategy, you must know how to find the right ones. The keywords you should choose should be:

Relevant to Your Business

You don’t want to be everywhere, especially on the search engine results page, which is irrelevant to your niche, so you should be consistent with your topic. Relevant keywords are necessary to draw the right kind of attention from the people who are actually interested in the information on your website and the products or services you are offering.

Contain More Than One Word

Focus mostly on 2-3 word phrases; they combine even metrics in every aspect. The aim is to use keywords that make sense and prevent ambiguity. The more specific and clear the keyword, the better it is. What’s more, you won’t have issues incorporating it into your content.

Provide Traffic Volume

These should be keywords that provide you with enough traffic to scale your business and increase your sales. The long-tail keywords shouldn’t be underestimated, though, because they provide lower traffic but are more targeted to your users.

Be Targeted

The advantage of 2-3 phrases is that they are oriented towards the topic, more specific than very broad 1-word keywords, and bring you targeted traffic in an acceptable amount of volume.

Have Low Competition

These keywords, like any business, should have a niche. Trying to get traffic from very competitive keywords could be costly and doesn’t translate into conversions. Try to find a niche that won’t strain your budget.

Provide Good Conversion Rates

Keywords should deliver as large a number of users as possible who will convert to using your product. Stick with the terms that are mostly used as search queries by users and be with your offer where they are looking.

Provide Good Engagement

Conversions don’t always mean sales, especially when users are just starting to do research and are at the top of the buying funnel. Creating engagement with your website is important, too. Low bounce rates, time spent on a page, and the number of pages visited could be indicators of your traffic quality.

How to Use Your Keywords

Once your list is complete, it’s time to give it a spin and try it out. Just having the right keywords in your kitty is not enough. You need to use them correctly and consistently to get the desired results. Here are tips from industry experts to help you get the hang of things and use the keywords to their best potential.

Optimize Your Website

Optimize your website and landing pages to be more related to your most converting keywords. If you don't know how to do that, check out our 10 simple tips to start your SEO.

Optimize Your Content

You can use your keywords to optimize your content to be more visible and accessible to search engines. Don’t stop improving! Try to find new keywords that will be similar to your topic. Use your keywords list to build up highly specific search queries that people type in search engines to find your website.

Track and Optimize The Results

If everything is ready, you can track, analyze, and improve your overall efforts and strategy to achieve the best results. Take a look at our post about how to do that. Remember to analyze your SEO efforts with a holistic approach. The 80/20 rule could be some guidance. If 80% of your traffic is generated by only 20% of your keywords, try to focus on them in the first place. General and more specific keywords will deliver you the most traffic. Your brand and long-tail keywords will give you less traffic but will bring you more targeted users, which will generate higher conversion rates. Try to mix your activities to find out what keyword strategy will give you the best performance.

Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, and keeping up with it takes time and effort. If you truly want your SEO efforts to pay off, it is best to seek the assistance of professionals. Reputed and experienced SEO agencies have the human resources, digital tools, and expertise to keep up the work. They can do keyword research on your behalf and ensure your website is regularly optimized. Their aim is to maintain your rankings on SERPs and ensure the right people get to know about your business.

Their efforts and regular updates help you remain visible and maintain a strong online presence. SEO professionals can contribute greatly to your business’s success and ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Conclusion

Choosing the right keyword for sustainable SEO for your business can be challenging, especially when you are new to the process. While enlisting the assistance of professional SEO agencies is a crucial step, learning about keywords and how to choose the right ones is equally important.

Therefore, through the insights shared in this blog, you can understand what keyword research is, its advantages, and how to start your search for the best words and phrases to increase your SEO rankings. You can also learn how to use these keywords correctly. So, what are you waiting for? Tap into the potential of SEO keywords and boost your business’s online presence.