Keyword research is the most important activity in Search marketing field. If you have to spend lots of time on keyword research than also don’t worry as this time is not wasted and gives you a high return value.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing the terms that people use to search for your products or services or content. It is about finding the high traffic search terms that will bring visitors to your site.
You can follow the steps to search for keyword for your site.
1. Brainstorming
- List most important words and phrases currently on your site if you already have site otherwise list words or phrases which best describe your business also called Root Keyword Phrases.
- It's important to note that this step is just about creating a list of targeted keyword phrases. Don't worry about how competitive these keywords are or any other external factors.
- Put yourself in the mindset of your customers and find answer to the question “What do you think people will search for when they are looking for your product or service?” Find out multiple phrases, re-phrase them and write all of them.
2. Investigate Competitor’s Keyword
- Record important/valuable words and phrases on your competitor’s website.
- Check what your competitors are optimizing for: check site keywords used in title and meta tags, headings, alternative and anchor text, and overall content.
- Check which anchor text people are using to link to your competitors.
- Learn what your competitor ranks for:
3. Grab a Thesaurus
Find out the synonyms of some of the theme defining terms you have come up with. There are number of phrases related to your term. Write down those phrases which will help you to expand your keyword list.
If you already have a website find out the keyword phrases already delivering traffic to your website using Google Analytics
4. Use Keyword Research Tools to get ideas.
Every search phrase that's typed into an engine is recorded in one way or another, and keyword research tools allow us to retrieve this information. However, those tools cannot show us (directly) how valuable or important it might be to rank for and receive traffic from those searches. Some of these free keyword research tools are:
- Google’s Keyword Tool
- Google Insights for search compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
- Google Trends to compare multiple search terms.
Keyword research tools are essential for seeing what users truly search for. These tools generally house data on search engine queries that have been conducted over at least the past month, more often over the past year.
They enable you to get an idea of which specific terms are searched for, and how often. They allow you to enter one term and get back other related terms, including synonyms, variations, plurals, and misspellings.
Determine Which Keyword Phrases are the Highest Quality
Go through this list of keyword phrases one-by-one and lookup/record the competition and search volume using keyword research tools. Keyword phrases with the lowest competition and highest search volume are the terms you should be optimizing for.
Search Volume (SV) is how many queries are made for a keyword per month.
You should also optimize for more competitive keyword phrases but keep in mind that the more competitive the term, the longer and more difficult your SEO process will be.
The best keywords have the following qualities:
- Strong relevance to your site: terms for which you have content to support
- Relatively high search volume: terms people are actually look for
- Relatively low competition: terms with a small number of search results
Without the above criteria, you'll typically land in one of two scenarios:
You choose highly popular — and competitive — keywords. You end up with terms so broad that about a billion other sites are competing for them. You don't stand a chance of getting a top ranking.
You choose very narrowly targeted or niche keywords. You end up with terms that are so specific that no one actually searches for them. A top ranking is wasted because no one's there to see it.
When you select keywords that meet the three key criteria, you exponentially increase your chances of ranking high in SERPs.