Keyword research is the process of picking high-volume queries that people actively look for in search engines. The goal is to understand what people are searching for and accordingly tweak the site’s content to give them exactly that.
If done correctly – keyword selection can drive measurable success towards your site. That’s why keyword research and analysis happens to be the cornerstone of SEO.
Here’s how you can do keyword research in 2021.
How To Do Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis For SEO in 2021
First, Prepare a List of Seed Keywords
Think of seed keywords as the broad terms that define your business. These broad keywords give your campaign a kickstart. Once you get to know these search terms, you can further find more keywords and ideas around them.
The best way to figure out your business’s seed keywords is to write down a couple of keywords and phrases that best explain your services. Come up with general keywords, and pick a few valuable ones for every topic.
Get All the Right SEO Tools
You’ll see that the market is loaded with a ton of useful tools for keyword research and analysis.
Some of them are basic while others are more advanced. Some are free while others are paid. Some are simple and others are more sophisticated.
Here are a few of the most highly recommended tools:
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- Ahrefs
- Google Keyword Planner
- SEMRush
- Google Search Console
Next, Generate Your Keyword List
After you have created a list of seed keywords, you can go more in-depth by using research methods. Here are a few methods you may employ.
Competitor Research
You can use the method of ‘keyword gap’ to check for which areas your competitors are beating you, from an SEO standpoint. Here’s a simple 3-step approach to follow:
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- Make a list of competitor domains.
- Pick whatever parameter you wish to check against.
- Make the comparison.
You will also find out which keywords are performing better for your competitors. In the case of a fairly new website, you can always use the ‘Competitor Research’ module wherein you can look for myriad keywords and topics based on the domain.
Draw a comparison between your own keywords and your competitors to find the overlapping ones. From there you can pick and integrate the most promising ones.
Query Autosuggestions
You can try the autocomplete option that comes from search predictions from search engines like Google, YouTube, and Amazon. Use the seed keywords you identified earlier to create more suggestions to get a better idea of how people are formulating their queries.
Combining this with the ‘Related Search’ method will get you a better understanding of how other people are thinking.
Related Questions
This particular method uses the option of voice search to pull in the search phrases for related questions. Remember, that keywords thus collected happen to be long-tail keywords and also carry a conversational style.
Most of these questions are excellent for creating guides and Q&A pages. They are also useful when it comes to optimizing voice search pages.
Word Combinations
Word Combinations is an excellent feature in that it uses a keyword randomizer. Most keyword research tools have that option. Simply throw in a bunch of keywords, and you will get a list of all the possible combinations until you have exhausted every one of them.
The goal is to come up with ideas and suggestions that don’t always seem apparent. By discovering new combinations, you can secure better rankings.
Third, Filter Your Data
To cherry-pick the highest-yielding keywords, you will have to narrow the size of your list down to a manageable size. There are many ways to go about this. Here are a few areas to review.
Keyword Length
Broad-term keywords tend to bring in more traffic. However, the conversions happen to be fewer. In the same way, if you pick long-tail keywords, there is a good chance that they will convert better.
According to a study, almost 80% of all queries tend to contain around 1-4 words. A good SEO strategy is supposed to contain at least 3 keywords. After that, it’s good to go well into a structured website aiming for both long and short-tail keywords.
Search Volume
Search volume tells you the kind of demand there is for each keyword. Keywords that carry low search volume don’t bring in any significant amount of traffic. Such keywords can easily be removed from your research.
On the other hand, keywords that carry high volume bring in way more traffic. However, the competition is also quite intense for such queries.
Keyword Difficulty
This particular metric will tell you how strong the highest-ranking pages are for any given keyword. You will also know how difficult it’s going to be for you to beat them. A bigger value indicates more difficulty. Therefore, you will have to put more effort into making them rank for that particular keyword.
Irrelevant Words
Most keywords will come with the filter option that will weed-out irrelevant keywords. Here, you can remove all the keywords that include irrelevant brand names, irrelevant locations, and other words that it considers to be low-quality.
Bottom Line
This an abbreviated blueprint to show how you can do keyword research and analysis in 2021. Hopefully, this post simplified things for you.
Ciao,
Miss Kemya
This is a guest post from Mike Khorev, an SEO expert and digital marketing consultant who helps small and mid-size businesses generate more leads, sales and grow revenue online. He offers expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO digital marketing, web design, social media, search engine marketing and many other online practices. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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