Keyword research is essential for business promotion when launching a new site or starting an SEO campaign for an existing site. Google search algorithms take into account over 200 factors.  The algorithms consider the quality of content on pages, website usability, loading speed, and many other factors.  As algorithms evolve, SEO strategies also change, but writing content using relevant SEO keywords will still be the primary step in increasing a website’s SERP visibility, ranking, and traffic.

Creating a strong keyword strategy is the first step in working on an SEO resource. But how should this be done not to affect the promotion and achieve a positive result in website ranking? This article will explain why it is important to use keywords, what they are, and which tools can be used for their research. We will also explain how to create a strong keyword promotion strategy despite constant improvements in search algorithms.

What is keyword research in SEO

Keyword research is the process of researching popular keywords on Google and other search engines to find the ones that are most relevant to your site and have the highest potential for traffic. Such keywords will be used further to optimize existing pages on the site or create new ones. This way, you can beat your competitors in SERPs.

The process of keyword research services should be ongoing. At the very beginning,  brainstorm ideas, select phrases to launch the site, group them, and create pages on that basis.  After that, you can regularly check the effectiveness of the promotion and add pages with other relevant queries. The goal is to make sure that search engines rank your resource higher and that potential customers of your business see your site among the top results in SERP for relevant requests.

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What does “relevant” mean in this case? When researching keywords,  focus on the words and phrases that your target audience would typically use to search for certain services, products, information, etc. These keywords will form the basis of your SEO promotion strategy.

Keywords help to rank at search engines

Relevant keywords help a site increase its position in SERPs. Simply put, the goal is to get your site to the top positions in SERPs for a certain user query. This will help increase traffic and improve sales of services or products, depending on the type of business.

How exactly does this happen? By adding keywords to the site, you inform the search engine what the pages of the resource are about. After that, search crawlers carefully analyze pages and these search queries using special algorithms. In addition to the presence of relevant phrases, search engines take hundreds of other factors into account. As a result, some pages of your resource appear either on the top positions in SERPs or at the very end of the list.

It’s important to understand that developing a promotion strategy is a long and ongoing process. Even with a strong content strategy, modern resource design, useful information, and, of course, relevant keywords, a new site has little chance to appear on the first pages of organic search results immediately. That is why SEO is continuous work that starts from the site’s very foundation and continues throughout its development.

Incidentally, this does not mean that a new business has no chance to be noticed by potential customers in search engines. We mentioned “organic search results” above. Getting to the top positions in SERPs results from proper SEO strategy when the search engine ranks your site higher than competitors’ sites for a particular search query.

Along with “organic results” for queries with words and phrases, Google shows “paid results” — sites that are promoted with the help of Google Ads. Typically, business owners combine SEO with paid advertising to increase the visibility of their sites.

Keyword research tells necessary information for website SEO

A keyword analysis is a basic task that any SEO starts with. Keyword research aims to understand what users are looking for and create content that meets their search intent. Collecting keywords is about finding, organizing, and analyzing user queries. Using the information obtained during the research, you can identify the target and potential keywords worth including in your site and take a higher position in SEPR.

Keyword research can set up an efficient SEO strategy because it is based on the power of data. You can prioritize your SEO efforts by choosing words with high search volume, low competition, or high conversion rates.

Select an automated approach in keyword research so that you don’t miss any optimization opportunity insight. There are many paid and free tools for relevant keyword selection, but you should use those with a large database of keywords for different countries and search engines. For example, with the help of the SE Ranking keyword generator tool, you can do complex keyword research, including finding keywords with the greatest potential, parameters analysis, and checking the competitor’s best ranking keywords.

With this service, you will be able to find out the following information:

• Keyword parameters: difficulty score, search volume, CPC, competition
• Similar, related, and low-volume search ideas
• Top organic and paid search results for a keyword
• SERP features

Google Search Console is another great free keyword research tool that helps businesses optimize their sites for searches, measure traffic, improve website performance in Google search results, and detect issues that need fixing.

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With this resource, you’ll get essential information for SEO:

• What keyword phrases the resource is ranked for
• What positions in the rankings your site takes for these keywords
• How often do users click on links to your pages for certain queries

You can also try other keyword suggestion tools. Everything depends on your preferences, which will arise with time and experience.

Keywords help to outrank your competitors

Now you know that without keyword research, effective search engine promotion is impossible. But why is it so important, what aspects do keywords affect, and why do SEO experts spend so much time researching relevant keywords?

The research of keywords and relevant phrases gives us this necessary SEO information about competitors:

• Positions in the rankings your vs. competitors’ site take for certain keywords
• Phrases to use for easy promotion (mid- and low-frequency phrases)
• The level of keyword competition. Suppose it is high (high-frequency queries), so there is almost no chance to get to the top of search results
• Phrases your direct competitors use for promotion.

While planning an SEO strategy, equal time is spent on researching keywords used by your competitors and researching relevant keywords for your site. These two concepts are closely related because the main goal of promotion is to get ahead of competitors in search results and let the search engine know that you are better in every respect. For this purpose, tracking competitors’ keywords are carried out while planning an SEO campaign and throughout your website’s existence.

Keyword research defines a buyer persona

Another reason why keywords are so important is that they define a “buyer persona.” This is a collective image of your target audience that will help research relevant keywords and develop advertising campaigns to promote your business.

A buyer persona usually includes the following characteristics:

• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Average income

The customer’s “pains” (problems). Your product or service should address these problems.

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A buyer persona is not just one image. You can create several such images, depending on your area of expertise. Once you’ve created a buyer persona, keyword research will be much easier because you’ll be able to look at your business through the eyes of potential customers.

When you’ve researched keywords for each buyer persona and covered all the possible interests of your potential customers, these keywords can potentially bring targeted traffic to your site. This means that your site will attract those visitors who are mostly interested in your services.

Keywords drive traffic to the website

And so, you understand the importance of keywords for promotion. But how to add them harmoniously to the site to guarantee a steady traffic flow? Once you decide to attract traffic using keywords, be sure to cover the following areas of keyword SEO:

• Text content. Ideally, keywords should be used in all texts on the site, including informational articles, descriptions of individual categories, texts for products and services, meta tags, page headings.
• Internal anchors. These links in the text lead to other pages on your site if they match by topics. For example, you write about the drama genre on a page and mention the detective genre or an individual author. In these cases, you post links to pages with a detective novel and that author.
• External Anchors. Links that lead from other sites to yours. They are usually used to increase the relevance of your site to a group of queries.
• New pages. New pages should be initially planned for specific keyword groups.

Final Word

Search engines regularly update the algorithms by which they rank sites. This is done to improve the quality of content. Therefore, work in the field of SEO is becoming more challenging yet exciting. Because of the  constant changes, many people ask the relevant question: “are keywords still important for SEO, or can we do without them?” The answer is a definite yes — keywords were, are, and will remain an integral part of SEO promotion. And when you learn how to research and use such words and phrases properly, 80% of success is yours.

There’s a lot of misinformation or outdated information about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) these days. Search engines are constantly evolving to produce a better experience for the end-user and this can cause confusion. We hear a lot of myths about SEO but because we’re working in the industry on a daily basis, and have done so for many years, we know what works right now.

Never trust the advice of a novice when considering SEO. We’ve even heard it said that “keywords are dead”. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Using keywords is far more sophisticated than it once was, however, it’s still an essential foundation for all your SEO efforts.

When you consider your keywords based on user-intent, you’ll be able to structure your website in a way that serves your prospective customers better and search engines love that. You may also identify keyword and content opportunities to expand your reach.

Your website visitors are not going to always land on your home page first. In fact, research conducted by HigherVisibility indicates many top performing websites don’t rank a site’s homepage at the top for a number of hotly contested keywords. This means every page within your website has the potential to pull in traffic. An effective keyword mapping strategy will help you do just that.

If you’re new to keywords, this article will help guide you through the steps to identify great keywords for your website. These keywords will be useful in brainstorming content ideas and from this content, we’ll explore ways to set up a powerful keyword mapping strategy.

Keyword Mapping Basics

Keyword mapping is simply taking the selected keywords you want to rank for, and setting up a site structure to house all the relevant content to target those keywords. To structure your website and its content in a logical way, your visitors will appreciate it, and so will the search engines.

Keyword mapping is the foundation to on-page SEO strategy since it’s focussed on content. Great quality content that is ultra-specific is what the search engines are looking for and keyword mapping gives you a strategy to build it out. You don’t need to create all the pages all at once either, you may start with some core pages and a plan to expand your content over time.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we need to remain flexible so we adapt to changes that present themselves in business and be more efficient. When working on your keyword mapping, keep this in mind so you can maintain a structure that can expand or adjust if you need to in the future.

Does size matter?

You may already have a range of content you feel is ready to publish within your website. The keyword mapping process will help identify gaps in your content and what pages should be built out to attract more traffic. For websites that are highly niched, or local businesses with little competition, a one-page website may be all you need however it will be difficult to rank for a broad range of keywords which is why single page websites often end up adding a blog. A blog is a simple way of building out more content so you can rank for more keywords.

Step 1: Create a broad range of keywords

Start with a few phrases you intuitively know might be good keywords to target and then conduct further research to find deeper opportunities. It’s usually worthwhile working with keywords you already rank for but don’t limit yourself to just these phrases. Think broadly and creatively about your target market and what they might be searching for.

Using keyword suggestion tools, you should create a long list of potential phrases. From this list you’ll probably find some keywords are a great match for your website and others that are not suitable. Audit your list to ensure they are all a great fit for your website.

Step 2: Categorize your keywords

Grouping your keywords into similar topics and you’ll begin to formulate ideas for a suitable website structure. If keywords are addressing the same topic, those keywords should be grouped together.

If you are planning a large, content rich website you may choose to have a structure that includes sub-categories. How many categories you choose to work with is completely up to you. Consider what would make best practical sense given your niche.

You’ll probably find some keywords may be suitable for a couple of different categories, so work through a logical process of making an assessment of where a keyword may best fit. Using the data you might identify some categories you’d like to target but have very few keywords so you may choose to revisit step one and build out a broader range of keywords to expand that category.

Step 3: Create your sitemap

If you’ve done a great job of step two, your sitemap may feel as though it almost falls into place. For large, content rich websites it may be more complex. It’s important to consider the hierarchy of your content and where it all best fits into you keyword map.

Planning out your sitemap is simply working out what pages your website will need based on the categories you have and along with any other pages you may need (home, contact, privacy etc).

This process can be done on a spreadsheet however you may find it easier on scraps of paper that you can shuffle around. Write down the page name on a separate piece of paper and define how they should all fit into a website menu structure. This process works great on sticky notes you can place on a wall and step back to review and then rework.

A common mistake is getting too attached to your old website structure. For this process you should ignore what you previously had including any content you might already have. If the old content you had doesn’t serve the new strategy you’ve developed it should be reworked or rewritten.

The journey from here

Once your keyword mapping is complete, it’s time to prepare the content and build it out using best practice SEO strategies. You’ll work out URL names as a starting point, ideally using URLs from the old website or creating redirects from the old URLs to the new in the most appropriate manner. You might also need a fresh new website design or may be able to rework what you already have if it’s well built and suitable for optimization.

Here at Brandignity we love all things digital marketing including SEO, website design and development. We also provide internet marketing consultations for those who just need a little online guidance and support. Book a chat so we can discuss your goals and options.

The term SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s a technique used by marketers and business owners to help their overall website and individual webpages rank high in the search engines. The higher these things rank in popular search engines like Google, the more people who will likely find their company. Obviously, this increases the total number of leads, which in turn increases the total number of sales.

The most common thing people think about when it comes to SEO is keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that are inserted into the written content to help pages rank on appropriate searches. If, for example, you have written a page with the keyword “digital marketing agency,” and a person types this phrase into the search bar at the top of Google, you will rank somewhere in the search results.

It is a common misconception that this is the only thing important in SEO, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, there are a lot of things which go into getting a webpage to rank high in the search engines. Many marketers have found that, while still relevant, keywords are no longer even the most important thing in SEO.

User Experience is More Important

In the dark ages of the internet, keywords really were one of the only things attributed to search results. Over time, however, Google’s algorithm shifted to one that values user experience over words on a page. That doesn’t mean those words don’t contribute to user experience, but we aren’t talking about keywords here.

Nobody knows the exact algorithm used by Google. It’s a giant mystery that SEO specialists are constantly trying to solve. Google feeds marketers small bits of information on what is relevant, and we have a pretty solid idea of the most important aspects of how a webpage gets ranked – but nobody (not even Google, actually) knows everything.

What we do know is that Google ranks a lot of page aspects that can only be described as user experience, commonly referred to as U/X. This includes important items like page bounce rate, page loading speed, layout, ease of page navigation, and mobile optimization.

Content is Still King

The most important thing to take away from this information is that content is still king. You still need high-quality content to rank high, and (of course) to keep customers on your website long enough to think about purchasing from you.

Content does not only revolve around blogs, articles, and on-page copy that is crammed with a certain percentage of keywords, however. It means you want to create high-quality written materials that are easy to skim through, interesting, and relevant. Easy to skim through means using H2 headers, short paragraphs, bullets, and numbered lists.

Content also refers to other format types. Video is more in-demand than ever, and it can really keep people on your webpage. High-quality images are equally vital. Not only will they draw in people’s attention, but they can make written content both more readable and add significant value to blog posts or articles if used properly.

Is there such thing as to much SEO? Yes. From time to time I bump into a website or a blog where the owner has simply read too much information and their mind is racing around the world of search engine optimization. 35 hyper linked keywords in the text, way too many keywords in the text and a meta title tag that doesn’t seem to quit. There is a thin line between too much SEO and not enough and it is important to distinguish between the two.

Meta Title Tag

There is no reason why you need to shove 16 keywords into the title tag on any page of your website. Your title tags should be under 60 characters and written tastefully utilizing some keywords. Forcing a whole handful of them into your title tag is not going to do anything for your website in the long run. It also hurts your user experience from the sense that when someone does see that page in the search results they might not even click on it if it wasn’t constructed to the nature of the content on that specific page.

Interlinking

There is such a thing as way too much interlinking. Your text shouldn’t have more hyperlinks than actual text. That might get someone sick and not to mention the user experience to have some read that is awful, no one should ever have to go through that. Interlink a few key phrases to either outside sources or important pages of your website and you will see much more of an impact.

Too Many Keywords

Remember that at the end of the day it is a human that will purchase from your business or have to call you so you have to write your website copy for humans first and foremost. Keywords and good copy is very important but your keyword density could be a problem if you over stuff the text with words. You want to approach everything you do online with taste.

Whenever you do anything online to your website ask yourself if it looks natural. If it looks out of place and just doesn’t feel natural there is a good possibility it just might be over optimized. Take your time and do it right and don’t just hire someone to do it for you because they charge $49.95. Research the company and person doing to see if they are capable of achieving the task at hand the right way.