An introduction to keyword research

Keyword research can be a daunting task if you have never done or heard of it before. Fortunately, we have created this blog to help beginners understand what keyword research is and how you can use reliable industry recognised tools to your benefit and get started on your first keyword research venture today. Please note that techniques covered in this article will apply to both SEO and PPC keyword research.  

What is keyword research  

Whenever you search for anything using Google or any other search engine, such as Bing or DuckDuckGo, you must type in a word, phrase, sentence or question into the search bar. These are search queries that will lead you to the page you wish to visit or to obtain the answer to your question as quickly as possible. If your website targets these search queries with its on page content and ranks well within the results then some of that traffic will end up visiting your website. Targeting random search terms can lead to mixed results, this is why a market research strategy called keyword research has been developed. Keyword research will help you better understand your market and how they search online for content, good keyword research will also help you write and optimise your content to better target keywords that will result in more organic traffic to your site. There are a million different ways to conduct keyword research but they all are based on a few fundamental steps: 

1. Figuring out your seed terms 

2. Discovering new terms that are related to your offering 

3. Recording your findings  

4. Picking out focus terms you will target with your content  

How to get started today 

First you will need to start with at least 1-2 seed terms. A seed term is a word or phrase that you start your keyword research with. For example, this can be the name of a product you are selling on your website. If your product was a light bulb your seed term would be ‘light bulb’.  

Once you have at least 1-2 seed terms, you can start to discover more keywords that are similar to your seed term. For this you can use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner. Using the ‘Discover new keywords’ function will allow you to find related terms to your seed terms. This will give you a large list of search terms that also contain volume and competition. These metrics are very important. Volume shows how many searches the query has per month, and competition describes how competitive the search term is for PPC, or in other words how many other businesses are bidding for this keyword. When conducting keyword research for SEO competition it can be used as a keyword difficulty scale instead. Another way to get started with keyword research is to use a tool such as SEMrush and search for an industry competitor to discover terms they are ranking for and which are driving organic traffic to their website.  

As you conduct your research you will start to build up a comprehensive list of terms. Later on you will want to be able to filter and sort these to help you pull out focus terms that you will be using to optimise your website pages for. The best tools to use here are Excel or Google Sheets.  

Finally, you are ready to find your focus terms. Focus terms are keywords that best suit your content offering that will offer the best result. Once you have compiled your list of keywords that are relevant to your seed terms, you will need to shortlist the terms that have good search volume and are low – medium difficulty. It’s also important to filter out terms that do not match your desired search intent. If the search intent is to purchase a product, the customer is more likely to write a specific phrase such as “living room lights”, however, if a customer searches for “How to install living room lights” they are more likely to have already bought living room lights and are looking for a guide on how to install them. Deciding on the intent of the search term and prioritising terms that will more likely to guide your customer to the page they are looking for will further help shortlisting. 

Summary 

You should now have a better understanding of what Keyword research is and how you can start today. To recap, keyword research is used to help with optimising on page content. It also allows us to understand what terms the target market is searching for and what terms competitors are focusing on. First start with a couple seed terms related to your offering and use a tool look like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to find more related terms. Then start building a list on Excel or Google Sheets. Finally, sort and filter your list of keywords and create a list of focus terms. Once you have your focused terms, you can now get started writing your content using the shortlisted terms to ensure your content is optimised for search engines. 

If you are interested in working with Infinity Nation and to discover how we can help you grow your brand, please do get in touch and we would be happy to meet you, alternatively contact us via our contact form.