How to Make the Perfect Keywords Research
Did you know Google’s algorithm uses more than 200 variables in order to rank websites? This is just one of the reasons why you should be focusing on doing a keywords research which the search engine par excellence so that your website remains on the top of the results. This is part of what we know as SEO, Search Engine Optimization, which is crucial if we want our site to have a strong presence online and receive the traffic we are targeting.
In this article, we’ll be exploring what’s the keywords research process and how you can make the most out of it so that it’s efficient and will help you get the audience your site deserves. Nevertheless, we should start with questioning ourselves what keywords are and why are they so important, don’t you think?
Keywords in A Nutshell
In order to make a good keywords research, you need to know what they are and what use we should make of them. Keywords are words or sentences we use to establish and develop content online while, for the clients, are the words they put in the search bar so that they can find what they’re looking for among the results.
As the individual who’s trying to sell something (a product, information or whatever the purpose of your site is), keywords must be placed carefully all along your content as they’re going to tell the search engines what’s on your website and what can users find there. Moreover, in terms of SEO, keywords are essential for your content to be successful, accessible and reachable for everyone.
Step by Step in Terms of Keywords Research
The first concept you should be learning about when it comes to keywords is the “search volume”, which is one of the hardest parts of this research. If you find yourself with a keyword that has a high search volume, for example, it doesn’t mean you can earn a lot of traffic from it. Most of the people who look for information aren’t willing to buy (in case you’re trying to sell anything) or they get the answer before they even click on your site. To sum up, you shouldn’t be looking for keywords only with a big search volume on most of the cases. We’ll also be speaking of intent, difficulty and other terminology you need to get familiar with, so… let the show begin!
Find Keyword Ideas
Once you’ve determined the intent you’re looking for when thinking of your keywords, it’s time to get down to work! Finding ideas for your keywords is rather easy, specially when we think of the tools you can make use of nowadays and we’ll be recommending in case you don’t know them.
One of them is Ahrefs, which has really interesting features and is one of the most used tools for keywords research in 2024. There you can check your competitors by including them on a keyword tool and take a look at what their keywords are — Ahrefs has this tool called Content Gap Analysis that will help you do that. You’ll plug the site in question, choose the “content gap” tool on the left list and then check your competitors who are on the first positions of search engine’s results for the keywords you also want to use. And that’s a wrap! Next step is saving those keywords you want to use and go into step 2: checking the difficulty and search volume.
Check Difficulty and Search Volume
Now we have a list of keywords we want to use, but are they worth pursuing? It’s time to check their difficulty and search volume, which you can do by using sites such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, which will give you the metrics you need. These are the search volume (average monthly searches) and their difficulty (how hard it is to rank for those keywords), so you’ll be looking for a balance that makes it possible for your website to be ranked higher on search engine’s results.
How do you know you’re doing things right? Let us set an example so that you can get in the blink of an eye. Imagine you want to rank for “best tennis racket”, but its difficulty is really high (many websites are ranking for it), so you need to find a long-tail keyword like “best tennis racket for beginners” which, despite having a lower search volume (5,000 monthly searches), has less difficulty and a more specific search intent. Speaking of intent, we’re about to enter the last phase of keywords research!
Evaluate the Intent
The final thing you should be thinking about when doing a keywords research is: what is my target audience looking for? There are, in summary, three different intents which users or future clients can have, which we’re about to explain so that you can identify them and take advantage of them.
The first one would be what’s known as “High Buying Intent”, which basically consists of those people who are likely to buy and, for that reason, they do searches such as “pizza restaurant toronto”. This keyword or long-tail keyword tells us the clear intention of the user of eating pizza that day or very soon, so Google (or any search engine they use) will show them ads about pizza restaurants or even the map showing their location.
Secondly, we’d have the “Research Intent”, where keywords usually include words such as “best”, “opinion” or “review”. If you’ve been following until now, probably you can already figure out what these people are looking for when going online: they’re doing research on solutions or products they’re interested in. Top-articles are normally really popular when it comes to this intent.
Finally, let’s introduce you to the “Informational Intent”, one in which keywords are thought for people who seek information and nothing else. They could be checking some random piece of news they’ve heard about or learning something new without needing to purchase anything.
Conclusions
To sum up all that we’ve been exploring in this article, making the perfect keywords research is not always going to be an easy task and it’s one that needs practice and dedication. Nevertheless, there are plenty of tools and guides all over the internet which can help you understand what you need for your specific case; for example, you can also take a look at this article from HubSpot where they offer another guide for beginners when it comes to keywords research.