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There are many factors and steps that go into search engine optimization, but one of the most important ones is keyword research.
Learning how to conduct keyword research is a must when creating an SEO campaign.
Unfortunately, it’s not a 5-minute process. It requires time and thorough analysis.
Using the right keywords in SEO will drive your target audience to your website. You need to discover what terms your audience uses to find products and services similar to yours.
Our digital marketing agency has outlined a guide outlining questions you may have about conducting keyword research for an SEO campaign.
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What is SEO?
SEO, a.k.a search engine optimization, is when a company makes conscious efforts to optimize their website for organic traffic— in other words, trying to get the right audience to visit your website without the help of paid platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook ads.
Google’s algorithm continuously crawls and ranks websites to determine which ones are more relevant for each type of search result. By optimizing your website with relevant and useful content, it’s more likely that Google will return your website to a user.
Google ranks your website based on three main factors:
- Relevance: how relevant is the content on your website to a user’s search quiery?
- Authority: how accurate and trustworthy is your website?
- Usefulness: how organized is the content on your website? Can anyone reading it understand it?
And what drives the right audience to your website is ensuring you’re using keywords that users are searching for. To find which keywords to use, you will need to conduct keyword research.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is finding keywords that your target audience may be searching for.
Keyword research is the ‘compass’ of your SEO campaign. It’ll give you a better understanding of your audience and their online behaviours.
The first step toward keyword research is determining seed keywords.
What are Seed Keywords?
Seed keywords are terms that you can use to unlock new keyword ideas. They are usually the first words that come into your mind when determining which terms to use in your website content. Because of that, they usually have high search volume and high competition.
However, if you’re building a website from scratch or your website has a low domain authority, using high search volume keywords may not help you rank higher on Google. The reason for that is that there’ll be thousands of other websites that will be using the same keywords that may already be ranking high on Google
Thus, a great place to start is to find a group of 5-15 seed keywords. You can find seed keywords by:
- Brainstorming
- Finding related searches on Google to that keyword
- Our marketing agency in Vancouver uses SEMRush for its versatility and ability to track improvements.
After you’ve found a group of seed keywords, use them to generate keyword ideas.
Why Should You Generate Keyword Ideas?
Using high competition keywords may cause little to no impact on your SEO efforts. When you use seed keywords to generate keyword ideas to use in your website content, you’ll most likely find low-competition keywords that will start to bring high-intent traffic to your website. Once Google recognizes that people are going there and consuming your content, it’ll start ranking it higher and showing your page to more people.
How To Get Keyword Ideas?
You can generate keyword ideas by repeating the same techniques we outlined for getting seed keywords. The key is to get terms related to your original keywords (that are still relevant to your brand and content). Another way to find keyword ideas is using Google’s related terms at the end of the Search page. It’ll give you other terms that users may be searching for that are similar to what you input in the search bar.
Once you’ve found 5-10 keywords, you’re ready to use them throughout your website content – through blog posts or your website copy. By focusing on a group of keywords, you can keep track of your SEO efforts.
Still Got Questions?
Do you still have questions about keyword research in SEO? Reach out to our marketing agency in Vancouver, and we will be happy to chat with you about it! Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn – we would love to hear from you.
Thank you for reading, and keep it cool!