How are users making their way to your website? What terms and keywords are they searching for? Do some keywords appear more frequently than others? These questions are central to conducting keyword research. Keyword research is the practice of figuring out what terms users are searching for when they are looking for a particular product or service.
Why Should I Care About Keyword Research?
In order for your website to rank highly on the search engine results page (SERPs), you need to satisfy Google’s algorithm. Though Google’s algorithm changes, there is one connecting thread between the iterations: the importance of keywords. When users search for a particular product or service, like an HVAC company, they may search something like ‘HVAC near me’ or ‘mold removal near me’. If you are an HVAC company, you will want to have these relevant keywords on your website – like in a recent blog post or on a landing page. When the Google algorithm ‘crawls’ through websites and assesses which websites best fit its algorithm, you will have the right keywords on your website, helping your website improve its rank on the SERPs.
In short, you want your audience to be able to find your website easily. By including relevant keywords in your website, you improve your odds of being easily found.
The Benefits of Keyword Research
We mentioned that conducting keyword research will help your website rank higher on the SERPs. This is a significant benefit, but some other benefits may come your way.
Increase Traffic
Effective keyword research and implementation will make your website more relevant to online users. So, you will increase the traffic to your website, improve your website’s authority, and help you better satisfy the Google algorithms.
Improved Market Insight
Every business needs to know what trends its particular market is taking and what needs its target audience is looking for. By conducting keyword research, you can have just that: insight into what your target audience wants. This research will then allow you to craft marketing campaigns and, potentially, products and services that you can be sure that people are looking for.
Keywords and Topics
If you have stayed close to all of the developments in SEO, you may be aware that having the right keywords is not necessarily the end-all-be-all that it once was. To satisfy the algorithm, exact keywords do not need to appear on your website necessarily, but you do need to have relevant topics – and that can only be accomplished through keyword research. As we just saw, keyword research can provide you with invaluable insights into your market, where it may be headed, and what it is interested in. Using this information, you can include relevant topics on your website and help drive traffic to it.
How Do I Conduct Keyword Research?
Keyword research may sound complicated and something you are not comfortable with experimenting with, but if you follow these steps, you will be well on your way to finding those high-leverage keywords and topics.
- Compile a List of Relevant Topics
Before you find any keywords that users are searching for, you need to narrow the search based on your business’s interests, products, and services. Try to come up with 5-10 different topics that are relevant to your business. A great way to figure out which topics are relevant to your business is by looking at your website, seeing what your blogs are about, or if there are any subpages on your website.
- Generate Keywords Based on Topics
Now you have some general topics that you think are relevant to your business. Now, you will start connecting keywords that are specific to a given topic. You do not need to be too creative here. For example, if you are a mold removal and remediation company, your keywords might be ‘mold removal,’ ‘mold remediation,’ ‘best mold removal companies,’ ‘commercial mold removal,’ etc. Importantly, this is not a final step in the keyword generation process; it is just a brainstorming activity to give the project some focus and direction.
If you have Google Analytics – if you do not, you should consider using it – it will provide you with those high-leverage keywords. Google Analytics will give you the keywords users search to find your website.
- Understand Intent in Keyword Research
Though keywords are important, what is even more important is that your website not only satisfies what keywords are searched for but that your website can satisfy the user’s intent. You want to help the user find your website based on the problem they are aiming to solve – which does not necessarily mean that you have the keywords they search for. Sometimes keywords can be open-ended and may lead in a few different directions. For example, if you search ‘mold removal,’ you might not get mold removal companies. Instead, you might get websites that give at-home fixes for mold removal. Before committing to a keyword, you will want to search it on your search engine and see what comes up. If it seems to be an open-ended search and not specific to your intent, you may need to adjust your keyword.
- Research Your Terms
If you have a topic in mind, but struggle to come up with keywords, then try searching for that specific topic. The next step is to scroll down to the bottom of the SERP. At the bottom, you will see Google has suggested search terms to help narrow your search. And there you go, you have some suggested keywords that Google believes will work well for your topic.
- Ella Interactive Can Help
If all of this seems too complicated and far too much work, then consider working with Ella Interactive. With Ella, the software and the experts at Ella can help you with the entire process of keyword research and implementation. Our all-in-one marketing automation tool can provide you with the resources to help you understand your business and the market you operate in.