Effective SEO begins with keyword selection. How do you find and choose the best keywords? With keyword research.
Why is it important? One word: ROI.
ROI in SEO is only possible when you show up for the keyword phrases your customers use to find your products and services.
If you don’t choose your keywords wisely, you will waste time and money creating content and pages that build no value in your business.
Before we move on, the alternative is to trust your keyword research and SEO campaign to Beanie Media. So many clients, cannot be wrong
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of identifying the most lucrative keywords you should target based on competition and budget.
The process involves writing down your business’s goals for SEO, identifying the keywords that will achieve those goals, and researching the competition.
The aim is to select keywords that have the highest relevancy to your business, that receive a reasonably high number of monthly search queries and are beatable.
Where most businesses falter is being able to sift through the hundreds of keywords that look good on paper to find those that offer significant value.
Keyword research and SEO strategy
SEO is a strategic marketing activity. It is driven by data and research, not assumptions, conjecture and loose pictures of a business model.
It doesn’t make any sense to optimise for keywords your customers don’t use, so it makes sense to invest time into keyword research.
Keyword research will define three areas of your SEO strategy:
- Budget allocation
- Keyword targeting
- Website navigation and structure
Keyword research is critical to SEO because when you optimise a page for a specific keyword, people need to not only be searching for that keyword to generate traffic, but the competition for that keyword has to be beatable.
Avoid this common businessowner mistake
The biggest mistake businessowners make with SEO is assuming they are an SEO expert because they know their business and market, leading to wasted investment in keywords that will never deliver a return on investment.
For example, businessowners are suckers for targeting impossibly high-volume keywords and broad keywords dominated by the likes of Wikipedia.
Unsurprisingly, this is a common reason for investment in paid search (pay-per-click) in an attempt to dominate and recoup costs, a dangerous game that promises to sink even more money through a lack of experience and understanding.
Tools are a starting point, but only do half a job
Keyword research tools like Mangools KWFinder and Ahrefs are used by professionals to automate the process of keyword discovery.
These tools are a starting point for keyword research, giving you a list to work from with search volume data. Another way to do keyword research is in Google Search Console – this tracks your search engine performance.
However, don’t be fooled by keyword research and SEO tools that claim to make keyword research as easy as registering a domain name.
Yes, a tool will give you keyword ideas with search volume data, but it won’t tell you what you should target based on your goals and budget.
This is where an SEO professional comes in, to interpret the data the tool provides and build a winning SEO strategy that will achieve your business goals.