How to do Keyword Research for SEO

Congratulations on your great looking website and being a new online business owner. Regardless of how wonderful your website is or how in demand your product is,  not everybody in the world will be searching for what you do have. To succeed in the competitive online world, you need to narrow your search market to those whose problems you can solve.

Today, effective keyword research is a key to success. Online businesses need to find the most productive keywords to pursue and execute content marketing strategies accordingly. Those who simply guess about keywords can waste marketing dollars but site owners who plan and strategize can get and stay ahead of the always changing SEO curve. The right keyword research helps you discover what topics to write about. Online business owners need to know what their audience is searching for and what they’re interested in. Whether your small business serves pizza or provides accounting services, you need to know which keywords customers are using when looking for your site — and the role these words play in search engine optimization (SEO). The right keywords result in better SEO, which moves you closer to the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

Optimizing Your Website at the Beginning

When you build a website, it’s not just about making it attractive for visitors — you must also make it easy for search engines to provide the most relevant results for a user’s query. To do this, your website needs to be both visually appealing and have relevant keyword-rich content. If you implement this, your small business will be highly visible on the first page instead of getting buried on pages hardly seen. And it’s not just about generating any kind of traffic, it’s about targeted traffic that converts. The right traffic that actually buys your services and products. A strategy is vital. Most business owners overlook the importance of using niche-specific, long-tail keywords and instead, they randomly scatter the most popular search terms (the same ones all the big competitors are using) across  their content.

Strategic Keyword Target List

Creating your strategic keyword target list is both a combination of brainstorming and research investigation. Consider how to outsmart the competition. Think about going beyond your basic lists that your competitors do. This process requires you to have a strategy within your targeted keywords. Find the right keywords that align with your corporate objective, any mission themes etc. Also factor in your budget. Build your strategic keyword target list with group words by topic, match types, advanced filters or demographics of your target audience.

Connect with Your Target Audience

Investigate your audience. What terms does your audience use to describe your products or services? What other relevant terms do they use in their day-to-day lives? Research blog posts, comments, forums, LinkedIn groups etc. Find the popular search terms and delve deeper into the affordable Keyword longtails that you can compete for. Use your analytics tool, Google Webmaster tools, and your weblogs to see what search terms people are using to get to you. If you have access to data on your internal site search, look at those terms to see what people are looking for. Check out the suggestion tools available that allows you to enter a keyword and see what the top autocompletes are for a number of different search engines and other sites.

Assess the Competition

Check out the competition. Find out the ideal customers of your competition. Understand who the successful players are in your niche. Next step is to determine the source of their convertible traffic now and the targeted keywords that they employ. Leverage tools like SpyFu or SEM Rush let you see what competitors are bidding on. As far as overall competition and competitive positioning, for your targeted keywords, with an organic SEO strategy framework, you can come to own this space for your specific keywords. If you position yourself as the valuable content provider for your niche, you will easily outrank the competition. To rank in the top search results for your target keywords, it’s not just about the total number of quality backlinks(links connected to other quality, reputable websites in the search engine website internal ranking algorithms). Start now with an online keyword tracker to plan your SEO strategy.