As content creators for the digital world, it is important that your customers can find your content. The ideal way to achieve this discovery is to find that right set of keywords which when typed into search engines will show your webpage in the top results. Due to large number of possible keywords and even larger number of webpages vying for the top spots for the same keywords, keyword research is of paramount importance. The objective of keyword research is the find the right set of keywords that would cost you less and attract more traffic at the same time.
It is important to attract the right kind of traffic to your website to generate leads for your products or services. Keyword research can help you predict the keywords that generate maximum traffic, find the list of webpages that rank high for your selected keywords, and shortlist keywords that generate maximum conversions for your business. However keyword research is not limited to finding a set of keywords, it is more about understanding your webpage's customers and the way they perceive you in the online world.
There are four steps to select the right set of keywords:
The first step is to select keywords that are most relevant to your website's content. You must look at your website from the point of view of your target customers. What are they most likely to search for? How refined are the search terms? Do they know your website already? If the visitors to your website find the content relevant to their search queries, they would engage with the site better. Websites with high relevance to keywords are ranked higher not just in organic search results but also in paid content like advertisements by search engines.
Most search engine users rarely view the search results beyond the first page. Hence it is important to understand the webpages that rank high for the keywords of your interest. Tools like Google AdWords show the competitive bid amounts for keywords. More popular keywords attract more ads on search engines and bid amounts for such keywords are high. You should select keywords that have medium to low bids, thus ensuring lower competition. Another approach is to look at pages that rank higher than your webpage on popular search engines for keyword searches of your interest. Then analysing these pages for their content quality and traffic metrics would give you an idea of your closest competition.
Keyword searches have a long tail, meaning that very few keywords attract large number of searches and large number of keywords attracts few searches per day. Ignoring the keywords that are part of long tail is detrimental to keyword research since these searches when aggregated form a significant portion of online search engine traffic. Webmaster tools allow you to measure traffic to your website. You could create sample search advertisements to determine whether your keywords generate any traffic to your website. Although this approach would provide with detailed metrics, it is expensive to create ads for keywords that have high bid amounts. So this approach is not free.
It is helpful to not focus on a single keyword but build a list of related keywords that attract traffic to your website. Keyword research helps in finding a list of keywords that are related but not obvious to the researcher. Keyword.io provides you with a ready list of keywords that are related to your keyword of interest.