Needless to say, ranking higher in the SERPs can drive more targeted traffic to your website. Which is why finding keywords people search for is step 1 of any SEO campaign. But when you have a list of the right keywords, you can start working on important SEO tasks like:. But even if you do everything right, it can take years.
Which is why I recommend focusing on long tail keywords. Fortunately, finding long tail terms is a breeze thanks to Google Suggest also known as Google Autocomplete.
Both tools bubble up question keywords. The first tool is called AnswerThePublic. But it tends to bring up its own unique set of questions. The great thing about these tools is that the question keywords you get are long tail keywords.
The 1 issue with any keyword research tool is that they usually spit out words and phrases that are super related to the seed keyword you typed into it. This tool lets you ask customers, colleagues or clients how THEY would search for something in Google.
The one big difference is that, with ecommerce SEO , you need to find keywords for product and category pages… and lots of them. Fortunately, you can find lots of excellent product keywords using Amazon Suggest. This works the exact same way as Google Suggest. In fact, I find myself using traditional keyword tools less and less.
Instead, I just look at the keywords that my competitors already rank for. We're committed to your privacy. HubSpot uses the information you provide to us to contact you about our relevant content, products, and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.
For more information, check out our privacy policy. Written by Rachel Leist rachelleist. While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin' out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research. Well, the need to do keyword research has stayed the same. How you actually do it hasn't. Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization SEO or general marketing.
Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more. Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy. However, keywords themselves may not be as important to SEO as you may think.
More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years, and how unimportant keywords themselves have become to our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.
And to some extent, this is true; using keywords that exactly match a person's search is no longer the most important ranking factor in the eyes of an SEO professional. Rather, it's the intent behind that keyword, and whether or not a piece of content solves for that intent we'll talk more about intent in just a minute.
Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool , how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics -- by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target. For an inside look into how Ahrefs can aid you in your SEO keyword research, check out our case study and exclusive interview here.
By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that the most people in your audience want answers to.
I'm going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting. That way, you'll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about. To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You'll come up with about topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you'll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.
If you're a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they're the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas -- what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? If you were a company like HubSpot, for example -- selling marketing software which happens to have some awesome SEO tools See those numbers in parentheses to the right of each keyword?
That's their monthly search volume. This data allows you to gauge how important these topics are to your audience, and how many different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful with that keyword. To learn more about these sub-topics, we move onto step Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it's time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets.
These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs search engine results pages because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms. For instance, if I took that last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company -- "marketing automation" -- I'd brainstorm some keyword phrases that I think people would type in related to that topic. Those might include:.
And so on and so on. The point of this step isn't to come up with your final list of keyword phrases. You just want to end up with a brain dump of phrases you think potential customers might use to search for content related to that particular topic bucket. We'll narrow the lists down later in the process so you don't have something too unwieldy. Although more and more keywords are getting encrypted by Google every day, another smart way to come up with keyword ideas is to figure out which keywords your website is already getting found for.
To do this, you'll need website analytics software like Google Analytics or HubSpot's Sources report, available in the Traffic Analytics tool. Drill down into your website's traffic sources, and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site.
Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have. And remember, if you're having trouble coming up with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues -- those who are in Sales or Service -- and ask them what types of terms their prospects and customers use, or common questions they have.
Those are often great starting points for keyword research. Download the Template. This template is designed to help you do the same and bucket your keywords into topic clusters, analyze MSV, and inform your editorial calendar and strategy. Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it's more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used.
So, how does this affect the keyword research you do? A website that is well optimized for search engines "speaks the same language" as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site. Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO. In other words, you need to know how people are looking for the products, services or information that you offer, in order to make it easy for them to find you—otherwise, they'll land on one of the many other pages in the Google results.
Implementing keyword SEO will help your site rank above your competitors. This is why developing a list of keywords is one of the first and most important steps in any search engine optimization initiative. Keywords and SEO are directly connected when it comes to running a winning search marketing campaign.
Because keywords are foundational for all your other SEO efforts, it's well worth the time and investment to ensure your SEO keywords are highly relevant to your audience and effectively organized for action. Settling on the right SEO keywords is a delicate process involving both trial and error, but the basics are easy to understand.
Basically, SEO keyword research should be an ongoing and ever-evolving part of your job as a marketer. Not only should you try new keyword search tools and keep track of the results, but you should feel free to experiment based on your own research — who else uses your keywords?
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