It all begins with words typed into a search box.
Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market’s keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.
It’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking.
Basic process for assessing a keyword’s value
1) Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content? Will searchers find what they have come on your site to look for using the chosen keywords?
2) Understanding which websites already rank for your keyword gives you valuable insight into the competition, and also how hard it will be to rank for the given term. Are there search advertisements running along the top and right-hand side of organic results? Typically, many search ads means a high-value keyword.
3) If your website doesn’t rank for the keyword, you can buy test traffic to see how well it convert/ In Google Adwords, choose “exam match” and point the traffic to the relevant page on your website. Track impressions and conversion rate over the course f at least 200-300 clicks.
Understanding the long tail of keyword demand
It’s wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these popular search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s called the “long tail” of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, comprise the majority of the world’s search volume.
Another lesson search marketers have learned is that long tail keywords often convert better, because they catch people later in the buying/conversion cycle. A person searching for “website designers” is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other hand, someone searching for “responsive website design” practically has their wallet out!
Keyword Research
Where do we get all of this knowledge about keyword demand and keyword referrals? From research sources like:
- Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool
- Linkdex
- Semrush
At Give The Dog A Bone, we use each of these platforms to keep us informed on monthly search volume data, and idea of how difficult to will be to rank for your chosen keywords, estimated click-through rate, and where you currently rank among the keywords.
Keyword Difficulty
When will I reach success?
In order to know which keywords to target, it’s essential to not only understand the demand for a given term or phrase, but also the work required to achieve high rankings. If big brands take the top 10 results and you’re just starting out on the web, the uphill battle for rankings can take years of effort. This is why it’s essential to understand keyword difficulty.