SEO (search engine optimisation) is the method used to place your website / content at a higher ranking on google, attracting more organic web traffic to your website from the right people.
One of the pivotal elements of SEO is keyword research.
What are keywords?
Keywords or phrases are what google uses to work out what your website or content is about. It then uses these phrases to show your content to people using Google to search for those particular phrases/keywords.
The ideal situation is that when someone uses Google to search for your keywords, your website appears on that first google page.
I’m sure you know yourself, when you search something, it’s rare you click on any page but the first or second to choose a link. You’ll most likely choose from the first page, and second at a push if you’re looking for something a little more specific.
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the before work that you put in, if you know what you want to rank for. And it’s fine if you haven’t worked that out yet. But, for those with more niche content / websites, you’ll already have an idea of what you want people to search so that you show in their Google results.
You can get really useful information from keyword research.
- Where you rank for keywords currently.
- What your competitors keywords are.
- What keywords are easy to rank for.
- What people are actually searching for rather than what you think they might be searching for.
The last one, what people are actually searching for, is very important. Let’s say, you sell diamond chandeliers, you’ll want to show up if someone is searching for exactly that. But you’ll probably find, there aren’t lots of searches for diamond chandeliers, so then you may want to think about trying to rank for just chandeliers to try and get more traffic to your website. It may be that you do only want that niche group and you’re not looking to gain a huge amount of traffic (I’d imagine you have to be of a certain category to be buying a diamond chandelier, but you get the concept.)
You need to find a balance of terms that users are searching for when looking for information, products or services, and those that are relevant to you.
Once you’ve researched the keywords and phrases you want to rank for, you then need to tailor your content to make sure those words are within the text throughout your website, so that Google can pick up that’s what the content is about.
It’s not as easy as putting your keywords in white text on a white background in all the white spaces of a page. Google knows that trick, you won’t get away with it. It needs to be organic. You need to mention those terms throughout the text on your website, blog post, article, or whatever it might be to start ranking.
Why is keyword research important?
Having your customers search for the right terms can help you gain more web traffic, from the right people. Which will also help with your conversion rate (if you’re selling products or services that is).
It means the people who are coming to your website are there for the right reasons, so you’ll automatically have an engaged user or customer.
You’ll be able to see what your competitors are searching for, which means you can look to rank for the same keywords to try and get above them and gain those customers.
How do I learn more about keyword research?
There are also lots of SEO courses out there, if you like the educational route.
And there are also thousands and thousands of articles out there all going into in depth detail about keyword research and its importance.
And you can get in touch with us here at Marcadet. We offer tailored SEO training. So, if you want to focus specifically on keyword research, we can do that. And if you want to know more about SEO as a whole, we can do that too. It doesn’t matter how little or how much you know, we’ve got training for you.
