Content Marketing
Keyword research in 2024 is the critical process of identifying and analyzing words and phrases that internet users enter into search engines. As a content writer or marketer, conducting thorough keyword research provides invaluable insights into your audience and their interests. Ultimately, strategic keyword selection enables you to create content that aligns with consumer search queries.
There are several key reasons why keyword research forms the foundation of an impactful SEO and content strategy:
– It reveals your audience’s specific terminology to describe their needs and interests. With this understanding, you can mirror user language patterns in your content for better relevance.
– It uncovers consumer search trends and volumes, allowing you to quantify and track interest in topics over time. For example, leveraging seasonality trends can inform content timing and maximize exposure.
– It highlights gaps in competitor content coverage, presenting opportunities to fill consumer demand with original, high-quality content. Owning unique niche spaces can translate into owned organic traffic.
– It enables content alignment to different stages of the buyer’s journey. Creating resources matched to user intent at each funnel stage attracts visitors closer to conversion.
– It determines the level of difficulty and resources required to compete for rankings on each keyword. These insights allow for setting achievable SEO priorities and goals.
By taking the time to research relevant keyword opportunities thoroughly, you gain an invaluable advantage in creating content that search engines and users naturally gravitate toward. The ROI of these efforts is owned organic traffic, leads, and customer growth over the long term.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of identifying and analyzing words and phrases that people type into search engines to find information online.
How to Do Keyword Research?
Here are the key steps for conducting effective keyword research:
- Brainstorm seed keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. Start by listing products, services, common industry terms, and question formats like “how to X” or “what is X.”
- Expand your keyword list by looking at competitors’ keywords using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. See what terms are driving traffic to their sites.
- Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, UberSuggest, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, etc. to discover more semantic variations and related long-tail keyword ideas.
- Analyze keywords for monthly search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and commercial potential/intent. Filter your list to strategic, achievable keywords.
- Group remaining keywords by topic and parent keywords that encompass related subtopics. This shapes content development.
- Study the existing search results for each keyword to understand current ranking pages and decipher user search intent. What type of content/format are users expecting?
- Define your priorities considering projected traffic potential, your site’s capabilities, resources available for content creation, keyword difficulty, and short vs long-term business goals.
- Create optimized, intent-aligned landing pages for priority keywords and clusters. Ensure each page provides an exceptional user experience.
- Track keyword rankings and traffic over time, refreshing your quarterly research to capture trends and new opportunities.
The key is casting a wide initial net and strategically filtering by metrics, intent, and goals until you have a manageable, high-quality list of keywords to guide your website’s content development and search optimization.
Finding Keyword Ideas
Discovering the optimal keywords to target requires exploring your niche from multiple angles to ensure thorough coverage. Here are four proven tactics to generate an extensive list of potential keyword opportunities:
Brainstorm Seed Keywords
Start by asking yourself – what core terms would my ideal customers likely use to describe our offerings? List out all products, services, common industry terminology, and variations. This creates initial seed keywords to expand upon. Checking website analytics for existing organic traffic keywords provides another launchpad for ideas.
Leverage Competitors’ Keywords
Analyzing your top competitors’ organic rankings is one of the most efficient keyword research tactics. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush reveal which terms drive traffic to their sites. This intelligence highlights widely searched industry phrases potentially missing from your content. Protip: Be sure to filter out branded keyword variations irrelevant to your business.
Explore Keyword Research Tools
Purpose-built keyword tools expand on seed lists by revealing thousands more semantically related terms and questions with search volume data. For example, UberSuggest, Google’s Keyword Planner, and Moz’s Keyword Explorer allow inputting head terms to output full keyword opportunity datasets. Advanced paid tools like Ahrefs quantify ranking difficulty, helping you filter your priorities further.
Study Community Dialogue
Go directly to online spaces where your audience gathers insights on trending industry topics and term usage. Monitoring community forums, social media, review sites, and brand mentions often surfaces fresh keyword ideas you won’t find on competitors’ sites or tools. The added context also helps match keywords to user search intent.
Casting a wide initial keyword research net across these four sources ensures capturing all relevant terminology for further analysis and strategic content planning.
Analyzing Keywords
With an expansive list of keyword opportunities, conducting further analysis helps prioritize and shape your targeting strategy. Focus analysis on these four areas:
Evaluate Search Volume
A key metric to determine if seeding content for a keyword is worthwhile is assessing search volume – how often is this term entered into Google monthly? High numbers indicate higher potential traffic if your content ranks well. Just be aware high volume correlates with more competition. Low-volume keywords can drive targeted visitors, too, when aggregated. Understanding seasonality trends is also key.
Gauge Keyword Difficulty
Keyword difficulty helps estimate the level of effort and backlinks required to rank in the top 10 for a term. Scores range from 0 for easiest to 100 for extremely hard based on the strength of current winners. This metric is critical for defining realistic short and long-term SEO priorities by avoiding overly competitive goals early on or underestimating future growth targets.
Quantify Business Value
Not all keywords are equally valuable for generating revenue. It is essential to map keywords along your typical customer’s purchase journey to maximize conversion potential. For example, bottom-of-funnel transactional terms indicate readiness to buy, while top-of-funnel informational keywords have a lower but non-zero value for remarketing down the line.
Map Keywords to Buying Stages
As mentioned, categorize keyword opportunities as either top-of-funnel (TOFU), Mid-Funnel (MOFU), or bottom-of-funnel (BOFU). For example, someone searching for an “email marketing overview” is likely just starting their research vs. “best email service provider,” indicating they are nearing vendor selection and purchase. Keywords can then be grouped for content strategy.
Analyzing these parameters provides the proper context on keyword viability and business alignment to inform targeting decisions. It moves you from guessing to an action-oriented strategy.
Targeting Keywords
With your refined, prioritized keyword list in place, the next phase is determining how to best incorporate them into your content planning and development across your website. This requires assessing four components for each term:
Identify Parent Topics
It could be more efficient to create pages targeting every individual keyword variation. Determine if keywords belong to a shared parent topic that can be comprehensively covered on one page. For example, “best stovetop espresso makers” and “stovetop espresso maker reviews” likely belong under a broader “stovetop espresso makers” page. Group similarly related keywords.
Decode Searcher Intent
The intent behind a keyword shapes the content approach and design. Study the existing search engine result pages for clues. Are they mostly product offerings or informational blogs? Optimizing to match user intent improves discoverability and engagement metrics. Missing intent risks bounce rate backlash.
Define Page Type
Every keyword has an ideal format for fulfilling searcher intent. Consider if a blog article, product sheet, comparison guide, or video tutorial best delivers value. Does the term imply visitors want to purchase or research? Match page type to query purpose.
Find Your Angle
Avoid replicating existing pages topping rankings. Analyze competitors’ approaches, then identify an open content gap or a new, unique take on the keyword’s topic that outperforms in quality, fresh data, or media usage. Sometimes, ignoring SEO conventions wins user hearts, links, and better rankings.
Mastering keyword targeting compounds visitors, conversions, and organic growth. Match to intent. Provide unmatched value per query. Reap long-tail rewards.
Prioritizing Keywords
With keyword research complete, you now face the challenge of sequencing targets over months and years, balancing opportunity, resources, and goals. Follow these best practices for an optimized content roadmap:
Estimate Traffic Potential
A common pitfall is evaluating keywords solely on their individual search volume. Instead, examine the total traffic the current top-ranking page receives from all keywords. This gauges the actual value securing the #1 placement commands rather than theoretical volume.
Audit Available Resources
Be realistic regarding your content budget, development, and promotion capacities over both short and long-term periods. Align keyword priorities to current capabilities while still stretching towards aspirational targets as capacities grow over time. Don’t try boiling the ocean early on.
Weigh Business Value
Ideally, keywords will convert visitors into customers. However, also consider secondary company goal values. Does it help acquire backlinks, raise awareness, or provide retargeting audiences? Incorporate these factors along with hard revenue potential when planning priority.
Balance Long & Short Term Goals
It is tempting only to chase quick returns on easier keywords. However, allocating effort toward high-difficulty keywords critical for future growth is essential, even if they take months to crack. Likewise, always pay attention to the fast wins entirely for cash flow’s sake. Find the right cadence between each based on the variables above.
Carefully weighing these convergence points transforms keyword research from a theoretical exercise into an actionable content marketing roadmap custom-tailored to your unique business objectives and constraints.
Key Takeaways
Keyword research is a fundamental pillar of an impactful content strategy and SEO program. By taking the time to research what your audience actively searches for thoroughly, you discover the terminology and topics to weave through all content for alignment with what they want to consume.
Here are the key takeaways for developing an optimized research process:
– Cast a wide initial net capturing all keyword ideas across tools, competitors, community dialogue, and internal analytics.
– Be relentless in focusing on long-tail keyword derivatives around core topics. Variety brings aggregated opportunity, while precision targeting drives conversions.
– Not all keywords and their resulting traffic are created equal. Analyze based on potential value, difficulty levels, and buying cycles.
– Shape website pages around keyword groups that allow comprehensive topical targeting to match diverse searcher intent in one place.
– Set short- and long-term priorities, balancing resource constraints with ambitious growth targets for consistent expansion.
Ongoing keyword research and analysis is mandatory for sustaining relevance as trends change, new competitors emerge, and Google’s algorithms evolve. For maximized organic visibility, it is imperative to continuously expand scope while iterating on what drives performance today.
Own your niche keywords, and then own your niche’s audience. Research then delivered. The traffic and customer growth will follow over time.