How to Do Keyword Research for Your Website

How to Do Keyword Research for Your Website

You’ve probably heard that you need to do keyword research if you want to optimize your website for search engines. However, you may be wondering how you go about doing this research or what you do once you’ve found some keywords. If you’re new to doing keyword research, this beginner’s guide will help you to get started. Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing the phrases that people search for online. When you know what potential visitors to your website are searching for, you can optimize your content accordingly and get more traffic. For expert assistance, you should turn to a local SEO service in Denver, CO. 

How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy

There are a number of steps involved in SEO keyword research.

Make a List of Relevant Topics Based on Your Knowledge of Your Business and Niche

Think of five to ten generic topic buckets that relate to your business, product or service. What words do you think someone would search for if they wanted to find what you have to offer? These may be the products or services that customers ask about most or recurring themes in your industry.

Fill Those Topic Buckets With Keywords

After coming up with some broad topics, you need to drill down a little further. You now have to identify the keywords that you think you’ll want to rank highly for on search engines. These are specific terms that individuals are searching for. If your site isn’t completely new, you can use Google Analytics to see which search terms are already leading people to your website. Many people stop at this point but this brainstorming activity is just the beginning of doing keyword research.

Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyze Accordingly

It’s important to note that you need to be able to match searchers’ intent as well as the specific words they use. You shouldn’t take keywords at face value. Search engines want to know that your content is actually relevant to what people are looking for. The best way to find out the intent behind a particular keyword is to Google it and see what comes up first in the results.

Take A Look at the Related Search Terms

If you’re finding it hard to find keywords for SEO, enter one of your keywords into Google and scroll down to the bottom of the results. This is where you’ll find a number of related search terms. These can give you some additional ideas to add to your list.

Take Advantage of Keyword Research Tools 

So far, we’ve covered lots of brainstorming. However, there are a number of keyword research tools you can use to assist you including SEMrush and Ahrefs. These can help you to come up with more ideas based on what you’ve come up with so far.

How to Find and Choose Keywords for Your Website

When you are clearer about the keywords you want to rank for, you need to refine your list.

Three Attributes of Good Keywords

You need to choose your keywords based on:

• Relevance - Your content must match searchers’ intent.
• Authority - Your site must be seen as a source of high-quality, informative content relating to the keyword.
• Volume - You’ll want to rank for terms that have a high search volume.

Include Both Head Terms and Long-Tail Keywords in Each Bucket

Head terms are usually one to three words long and they are pretty generic. Long-tail keywords are much more specific and they usually contain three or more words. Your keyword strategy will be more balanced if you include both types of search terms since it is often harder to rank for head terms.

See How Your Competitors Rank for These Keywords

You don’t need to do everything your competitors are doing. Also, if you’re competing against big brands, you may not be able to outrank them no matter how hard you try. Still, you should see which keyword they’ve prioritized since it could give you an idea of whether you’re going in the right direction. If you have certain keywords in common, you should try to rank for those as well. However, you should also be open to using keywords that other websites may not be taking advantage of.

Boost Your Keyword Strategy with Help from the Professionals

SEO keyword analysis is too important to ignore. Choosing the right keywords to rank for will benefit your website and your business in both the long term and the short term. You’ll want to reevaluate how well your chosen keywords are performing every three months or so and make changes where necessary. If you don’t have the time or the skills to perform the steps we’ve outlined, consider hiring a Denver, CO SEO service to help you out.