Keywords are terms made up of one or more words. They represent how the user identifies her doubts in the search engines, to obtain the answer that she is looking for so much. For this reason, we use them to provide direction when creating our websites and blog posts.
The starting point for any SEO strategy is to identify which keywords you want to fight for.
Even for websites that are older and have already received a lot of links, it is impossible to compete for all the words related to the business organically.
For websites that are starting out, this situation becomes a bit more complicated. Therefore, it is important to choose the search terms with which you want your website to be positioned in the first results of Google and with this, begin to establish strategies to achieve this objective.
The importance of keyword research in Digital Marketing
Nowadays, when you want to know about something or even do something, it is normal that you to go to the largest search engine in the world: Google.
In that rectangular box, you enter some keywords or terms that are quickly searched for and, in less than a second, you have a set of web pages to visit as a result of your search.
The truth is that Google uses these keywords to identify what content on the Internet could best serve the interested party. Therefore, those who have an institutional website, blog, or virtual store need to be very attentive to keyword searches, to generate content that can be found by people searching the internet.
In a more concrete way, you need to identify what are the most common searches that people in your niche perform, so that, starting from this, you can produce content.
The good news is that today we bring you a step by step that you can follow, so that you carry out excellent research on your keywords, which will allow you to produce the best content for your audience and achieve positioning among the first results of Google.
The variables that surround the keywords
There are a variety of ways to conduct keyword research; It can be by carrying out a different process or using different tools.
Depending on the complexity and depth of the research you want to do (such as including more variables and thinking of a different prioritization algorithm) it is important to look for different processes.
Next, we will talk about some variables that we consider relevant for an effective keyword search:
- Volume;
- Difficulty;
- Chance;
- Purchase intent;
- Actual position.
Volume
This is the variable that represents the volume of monthly searches for a given term on Google. This is a very important variable, as it is essential to ensure that there are many people searching for the keywords you want to compete for.
Remember: whenever you use a tool to find the search volume, don't forget to check if the research is being done by filtering only the searches made in your country.
Difficulty
There are words that have already been explored by highly relevant websites and well ranked by Google, as opposed to others that give plenty of opportunities for new websites to appear quickly in the first results.
Because of this, it is very difficult to position your website among the first with some terms and you must take this into account when defining your keywords.
A high difficulty means that the websites that are in the top positions have high authority and this makes ranking more difficult.
An important point here is not to confuse organic difficulty with competition in Google Ads . This type of competition is more related to the fact that many companies are buying a certain word, and not necessarily to the fact that this word is very difficult to address.
Chance
This variable is little used and very relevant when deciding the keyword that you are going to work on.
Have you seen that, when doing a search on Google, other elements appear in addition to organic results, such as searching for videos, images, local businesses, maps, ads, etc?
All these elements cause the click-through rate in the organic results to decrease, as they end up drawing attention to the users for these elements.
Therefore, the more extra elements you have in the result, the lower the chance for a given term.
Purchase intention (funnel stage)
This is a variable that helps you choose a term. For example, a word related to your product or service is considered a word with high purchase intent (such as “financial management software”).
On the other hand, a term in your market that indicates a search for a problem solved by your product can be considered low purchase intent (such as "organize accounts payable").
Actual position
Represents the current position of your business website for a certain word.
Starting from this diagnosis, it is possible to see which pages you can optimize to improve the positioning or for which of them you do not have a page with a good position and you must produce content.
In practice: how to do your keyword research
In this article, we will give you a step by step for a simple and effective keyword search, contemplating the variables that we consider important from the outset.
Find the main business words (head keywords)
The first step is to find the head keywords, which can be considered the words with the highest search volume and which give rise to the long tail terms.
They are usually the first words we search on Google when we are looking for a solution to the problem.
What happens is that, intuitively, we are getting used to thinking about keywords at the end of the sales funnel, that is, something more related to the product sold, and we do not think about the problems that are a few steps behind the purchase process.
Recommended tool:
- Ubersuggest
- SEMRush
It is important that you have some terms related to your business so that you can explore them. But before you start with these terms, pay attention to the next step.
Eliminate terms that are related to your business
By now, you should already have a spreadsheet rich in relevant terms. The thing is, there are probably some words that don't have much to do with your business.
Therefore, in this step we recommend doing a filter to remove duplicate terms and those that have no affinity with your business.
Find long tail words
Once the main terms have been redefined, we will begin to find the long-tail terms, that is, specific words that normally have less search volume and competition.
Recommended tool:
- Keywordtool.io.
To learn more, also read the article How to use long-tail keywords to attract more people to your website.
Discover the search volume of each word
So far, all the work has been to find relevant search terms. Now, the idea is to find
other important data, such as the organic search volume of each term.
Tools you could use:
- RD Station
- SEMRush
- Keyword Planner
Find out if your business website is already positioned on Google
With any of the two mentioned tools, you will be able to see the positioning of your web page for each term.
This will be important to make some decisions later, such as deciding what you will do with each keyword (whether to produce content, optimize an existing page,
do link building , etc.).
Tools you can use:
- RD Station
- SEMRush
Discover the Difficulty, Opportunity and Potential of each term
Now that you've figured out the search volume and current position of your keywords, it's time to find these last three variables.
Tools you can use:
- Moz
The Moz tool has a tool called Keyword Explorer, which displays a report with information for each of the terms entered. You can explore this report to update these variables.
Summing up the process:
- Find the main business terms (head keywords);
- Eliminate terms that are not related to the business;
- Find long tail words;
- Discover the search volume of each word;
- Find out if your business website is already positioned in Google for each word;
- Discover the Difficulty, Opportunity and Potential of each of the terms.
Learn more
Keyword research plays a very important role in your Digital Marketing strategy and is essential for your company's website to generate organic traffic.
If you want to continue improving your SEO strategies, download now the eBook: 28 actionable SEO tips to boost your website in Google . In the material, we talk in more depth about strategies that will help your website to improve the ranking in Google, attracting more visits, Leads and sales for your business.
Good results!
This article was published on October 4, 2018 and updated on October 19, 2021.
