keyword research for seo

A Useful Guide on Keyword Research with Essential Tips

Shruti

Keywords play a vital role when it comes to performing on-page SEO. It is essential to optimize the keywords in meta tags, URLs, content, image, and headings. Learn everything about how to search keywords with this useful guide and essential tips.

Step-by-Step Process Keyword Research for SEO

Keyword Research is a vital part of on-page SEO and can make or break the entire marketing efforts. There should be the right target keywords to improve the visibility of the site on search engines to entice clicks and visits to the site.  

Step 1 – Choosing the right set of Keywords for SEO

Determining the right set of keywords is crucial when performing Keyword research for SEO and here are the essential keyword research tips.

Essential Keyword Research Tips

  1. Ask the below-mentioned questions

Is there a Keyword relevancy?

Are the Keywords answering the queries of searchers?

Are they aligning with marketing goals?

2. Perform a search for the Keywords in Google if they are having advertisements for the same. This shows how much popular a keyword is on the search engines if there are many advertisements in search results for the target key terms.

3. You can also explore the Google search console for the queries searched by the visitors and landing on your different web pages

4. Using proper long tail keywords in the title, headings and content can help rank higher in search engines.

5. Use Google trends and the people also ask section to get a better understanding of keywords.




6. Competition is the key when considering the keywords as highly competitive will not rank as they are targeted by high domain authority websites.

7. You can also check keyword difficulty and choose 0-35 for the new site and more based on the current domain authority.

8. Understand the audience and opportunities based on the search intent. The best way to choose the keywords is to consider the synonyms searchers may type for your product which is also called Semantic search. You can also consider the auto-suggest and related keywords.

9. Intents are basically of 3 types – informational, navigational, and transactional.

Ex of informational – how to rent an apartment?

Ex of Navigational – Looking for brands such as MagicBricks, NoBroker

Ex of Transactional – Apartment for sale in Bellandur

10. There is a need to think from the user’s perspective

  1. What are the challenges they are facing?
  2. What information is valuable to them?
  3. What type of demographic and location they are having?
  4. What kind of interest do visitors are having?
  5. What type of queries they are typing?
  6. The best way to explore what people are looking for is checking Yahoo Answers and Quora.

Step 2 – Build a Topic-Based List

Make a proper topic list based on the above keyword research tips. Break topics into informational, navigational, and transactional, related keywords and auto-suggested keywords. You can use tools like wordstream, ubersuggest, google keyword planner, keyword surfer, keywords everywhere.

Step 3 – Check Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty

You can check the search volume and keyword difficulty in the tool such as SEMrush ahref and MOZ. Try to select those keywords having high search volumes and medium to low competition and keyword difficulty of below 35 for a new site. Make sure that you select the keywords based on relevancy.

Step 4 – Check Relevancy and Authority

If you want to know the relevancy then type in Google the keyword and check the results. Explore the landing pages and extract keywords from them for low to medium domain authority and page authority pages because they are quick to rank.

Step 5 – Finalize the Keywords

Add all the details in excel and monitor the rankings for them daily to know the position changes. Implement the on-page optimization and improvements wherever required. 

Best Keyword Research Tools

  • Google Adword keyword Planner tool.
  • Keyword.io
  • Keyword Finder
  • Keyword Explorer from Moz.
  • Google trends
  • SEMrush
  • Webconfs.com
  • Ubersuggest for generating list
  • Easyseotools for generating list
  • Buzzsumo for checking social shares.
  • Quora for checking queries
  • Yahoo answers for checking queries

Essential Tips for Keyword Optimization

  1. Perform proper keyword usage in the content to improve the visibility on the search engines and make it noticeable for crawling and indexing.
  2. There should be proper relevance for a particular keyword mapped with the content.
  3. Avoid keyword stuffing by making proper usage of keywords as Google will penalize the site if the keyword density is more than 2 or 3.
  4. Add focus keyword once in the title, near the top of the page, 1-2 % in body content, image, URL, and meta description.
  5. Properly map the keywords and do not target the main keyword to other pages and anchor text to avoid cannibalization issues.
  6. If the keyword is targeted to multiple pages, then either use 301 redirection or canonical tag to the most important page or preferred version.

Final Thoughts

Keyword Research is the backbone of every digital marketing activity. So, follow the above steps and optimization tips for Keyword research and improve their visibility on search engines.