Recognize what your target audience is looking for.
Understanding your target market and how they search for your information, services, or products is the power of keyword research.
Keyword research gives particular search data that might assist you in answering queries such as:
- What are they looking for?
- How many individuals are on the lookout for it?
- What format do they require the information in?
You’ll discover a whole new world of strategic SEO after you figure out how your target audience searches for your content.
Before you start looking for keywords, make a list of questions.
Before you can help a company expand through SEO, you must first understand who they are, who their consumers are, and what their objectives are.
This is where many people save costs. Many people skip this critical planning phase because keyword research takes time, and why waste time when you already know what keywords you want to rank for?
The truth is that what you want to rank for and what your audience wants are frequently diametrically opposed. Focusing on your target group and then using keyword data to fine-tune those insights will result in far more successful campaigns than focusing on random keywords.
What are the terms that people are looking for?
You may be able to describe what you do, but how does your target audience find the product, service, or information you offer? The initial stage in the keyword research process is to answer this question.
Identifying keywords
You’ve probably got a list of keywords in mind that you’d like to rank for. These will be things like your products, services, or other topics covered on your website, and they’ll serve as excellent seed keywords for your study, so start there! You can use a keyword research tool to find out the average monthly search volume and similar keywords for those phrases. We’ll go over search volume in more detail in the following section, but it might help you figure out which variations of your keywords are the most popular with searchers during the discovery phase.
Once you’ve entered your seed keywords into a keyword research tool, you’ll start to see more keywords, common inquiries, and content ideas that you might have overlooked otherwise.
When you’re researching keywords for your content, you’ll probably realize that the search volume for such phrases changes a lot. While it’s important to target terms that your audience is searching for, in some circumstances, targeting terms with lower search traffic may be more advantageous because they’re less competitive.
Because both high- and low-competition keywords can benefit your website, learning more about search traffic can help you prioritize keywords and choose the ones that will provide your website with the greatest strategic advantage.
How frequently are those terms looked up?
Getting to the bottom of search volume
The more labor necessary to get higher results for a certain term or keyword phrase, the higher the search traffic. This is sometimes referred to as keyword difficulty and includes SERP features; for example, if a keyword’s result page is clogged with SERP elements such as featured snippets, knowledge graphs, carousels, and so on, the difficulty will rise. Big businesses frequently dominate the top 10 results for high-volume keywords, so if you’re just getting started on the web and targeting the same keywords, ranking can take years.
The stronger the competition and effort required to achieve organic ranking success, the higher the search volume. If you set it too low, though, you risk not attracting any searchers to your site. In many circumstances, targeting highly narrow, low-competition search phrases may be the best option. Long-tail keywords are what we call them in SEO.
Recognizing the long tail
It’s great to work with keywords that get 50,000 or even 5,000 searches per month, but in reality, these popular search terms account for a small percentage of total web searches. Indeed, keywords with large search volumes may imply uncertain purpose, putting you at danger of attracting visitors with goals that aren’t aligned with the content on your website if you target these terms.
Don’t dismiss these less well-known terms. Because searchers are more focused and intentional in their queries, long tail keywords with lower search volume frequently convert better. A user searching for “shoes,” for example, is most likely just browsing.
Using search volume as a strategic tool
You may be even more strategic by looking at your competitors and figuring out how searches fluctuate by season or area now that you’ve uncovered relevant search terms for your site and their accompanying search volumes.
Seasonal keywords
Understanding seasonal trends might help you plan your content strategy. For example, if you know that “bubble tea” popularity in Singapore peaks in October through December, you can plan content months ahead of time and give it a significant push during those months.
Region-specific keywords
You can more strategically target a specific location by using Google Keyword Planner to narrow down your keyword research to specific cities, counties, or states, or evaluating “interest by subregion” in Google Trends. Geographically specific research might assist you in making your content more relevant to your target audience.
Which format is more appropriate for the searcher’s intent?
We studied the features of SERPs. That background will aid us in determining how searchers prefer to consume content for a specific keyword. The format in which Google displays search results is determined by purpose, and each query has its own. According to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, these intentions are either “know” (discover information), “do” (achieve a goal), “website” (find a specific website), or “visit-in-person” (visit a local business).
While there are dozens of different search kinds, let’s look at five of the most common ones:
1.Informational queries: The searcher is looking for specific information, such as the name of a band or the Empire State Building’s height.
2. Navigational queries: The searcher wishes to visit a certain website, such as Facebook.
3. Transactional queries: The searcher wants to do a specific activity, such as purchasing an airline ticket or listening to a song.
4. Commercial investigation: The searcher wants to evaluate products and determine which one is better for their needs.
5. Local queries: The searcher is looking for something in their immediate area, such as a coffee shop, doctor, or music venue.
Surveying the SERP environment for the phrase you want to target in order to obtain a better feel of searcher intent is a crucial stage in the keyword research process. Look at the SERPs if you want to discover what kind of content your target audience wants.
Google has analyzed the behavior of trillions of searches in order to give the best relevant material for each keyword search.
