3 Steps to Mastering Keyword Research

Posted by LauraDerb on February 12th, 2021

Keyword research is an activity search engine optimization experts use to identify and investigate various search terms that users enter into the search engines while searching for goods, services or even general information. It is also the first step towards getting your website listed in Google and other major search directories. In simple terms, it is the process of discovering what keywords potential customers will enter into the search engines and finding out how often these terms appear on Google search results pages. Keyword research can be performed using many different methods, depending on your knowledge and experience as a search marketer, but in general the main techniques are as follows. Some of them may seem obvious, but others may be very surprising at first glance.

The first technique of keyword research involves analysing what people are actually searching for. This is a very obvious, almost primitive way of hunting down keywords that will boost your ranking in the search engines. The reason why you need to target specific keywords is because the search engines place restrictions on the best and most searched keywords based on their own criteria, including how much competition there is. The more search results to your website appears for a particular keyword, then the more likely it is that someone is going to click on your listing.

One of the things you need to do before you start keyword research is to see how many times your selected keywords appear in Google searches over a five-day period. You can see this information in Google's free tool. To do this, search for your chosen keywords using Google's keyword research advertising management platform. You'll get a list of all the searches done over a given period, including exact matches, average searches and total searches per month. Once you've looked at this data, you can decide if you want to launch a keyword research campaign.

The next technique of keyword research relies on knowing what the searcher wants to do with the information that they receive from you. If you're selling information products such as eBooks or courses about dog training, you want to know how the words you select are related to what the searcher wants. What does the searcher want to accomplish? Does the searcher want a product to help them solve a problem, find a solution to a problem, improve their lifestyle, etc.? If so, then your website needs to have those words in it, along with the proper number of them. If not, then you just have to deal with people not getting your site's information and leaving because they didn't get what they were looking for.

Keyword research tools are great for helping you figure out what the searcher is looking for, but that's only part of the equation. You also have to know what people are searching for and how many people search for those terms are looking for what you offer. For example, many people searching for a local restaurant will be looking for the menu. They may also want to know if the restaurant has a kid's menu or even a takeout menu. Knowing these two things will give you the ability to target your keyword research to the right audience for your site.

The second step of keyword research involves selecting the best keywords for your site based on both of these factors. It would be a good idea to use as many of the top-ranking keywords as you can to increase your chances of getting traffic for your site. But remember, this traffic won't necessarily convert into paying customers, unless you do a good job of explaining your products and service. In other words, if you're not targeting the correct keywords, then you aren't going to get very many sales.

A third step is to locate these keywords on other websites and see how popular they are. There's a huge chance that other people are searching for them. By looking at popular searches, you'll also get an idea of how many people are searching for those keywords and how they rank in search engine results. If a keyword rank high in search engine results but no one is searching for it, that means there isn't much competition for it. In other words, the competition for that keyword is pretty stiff.

The final step in keyword research would be to determine what these keywords mean and how you can optimize your site to make them rank highly. One of my favorite tools is called the google keyword planner. This tool can generate a list of all of the major search terms in use and how they're ranking within Google. I recommend using the free version as opposed to the one that comes with the pro version.