What is the Best Way to do Keyword Research?

September 27, 2022

It all comes down to choosing the right word. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. No no not that word, a shorter one, unless you have a tshirt and then please send me the link.

When building a brand, our customers need to be able to find our product. If the types of keywords we use don’t describe our business correctly, they won’t find us. In this case, if you’re selling pizza with a Mary Poppins song, it won’t get you very far. Although, a slice of pepperoni is magical.

But how can we know which keywords for blogs are the right ones? The answer is keyword research.

Keyword research means identifying the keywords that customers associate with your business. But keyword research strategy isn’t just about testing words until we find the right ones. We need to dig a bit deeper.

So grab a shovel, because in this guide, we’re going to give you all the dirt we have on keyword research.

Why Is Keyword Research So Important?

Besides ads and word of mouth, many customers will discover our product via a Google search. Since Google gets millions and millions of searches every day, they use algorithms to filter results. These algorithms determine which content goes to the front page results.

That means we have to become masters of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Queue the Karate Kid music. SEO is the practice of getting our content noticed by search engine algorithms. Successful SEO results in more hits, or kicks, and therefore more business.

For this reason, we can’t just write whatever we want. Everything from page speed to the types of links affects SEO. Keywords are the most important aspect of any SEO campaign.

The results of keyword research don’t just tell us what keywords to use. Keywords and SEO will shape our marketing strategy. That’s why it’s best to do the research before anything else.

Keyword research strategy takes a lot of time and patience. Almost as much as it takes to get your black belt. It requires a deep dive into the data. But those who have the patience often reap the best results. So be willing to read that data and let it tell you a story.

The main benefits of keyword research is boosting awareness of your product. As it garners more interest, you get more hits. More hits always lead to more customer conversion. More customers, more vacations for you! Can you hear the palm trees swaying?

Before we get ourselves hype on those conversion, let us tell you how it all works.

How Does Keyword Research Work?

First, we have to understand what a keyword is. A keyword, counterintuitively, can be a single word or a whole phrase. “Hosting” and “Best local web hosting” are both considered a keyword.

When Google’s web crawlers search our website, they focus on keywords. These allow AI to understand what sort of content we are serving. A keyword is like a shelf marker in a library, designating what sorts of books the readers will find there.

The key to keyword research is to find our target audience. We need to know which sort of people are buying our product. Once we understand them, we can glimpse what keywords they use to arrive at our product.

For example, our business might provide managed hosting services. The question we have to ask ourselves is what customers are going to type into the search bar when looking for our product. Therefore, it pays to think like a consumer.

If someone is looking for managed hosting services, most probably know they need it but don’t know why. If we asked them the difference between self-hosting and managed hosting, they might give us a blank look.

Managed hosting might still get us hits. But if we want to cast the widest net and get the most hits, we need something else. Ranking for “web hosting” or “hosting services” might give us a better result. As the penguins of Madagascar say, don’t give me excuses, give me results.

Keywords that are too specific or esoteric will result in fewer hits. The more specific we get, the less likely someone is to find our product. This is why it’s so important to shape our marketing strategy around keywords.

How to Do Keyword Research

Before we even start searching for keywords, we need to talk to our customers. Engagement is everything! Researching is not just typing in random keywords and hoping for the best. We’ll make better headway if we get a more intimate understanding of what our customers are thinking.

Studying the Customer

We can interact with the customer in a number of ways:

Speak to them directly
Send surveys
Read through forums related to our product
Search for hashtags related to our product on social media
Study competitor websites
Put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and think of our product from their perspective

In the process of this research, we need to pay close attention to the vocabulary. We need to identify the specific terms customers use when referring to all aspects of our product. Good keyword research means writing down all of these nuances for later.

We also use tools like Google Search Console, Google Trends and our personal favorite SEM Rush, to deep dive into the keyword research.

Break the Research Down Into Topics

With the research done, we need to simplify. This means distilling what we learned into more specific categories. “Web hosting with high-security standards” then becomes “secure web hosting,” and so on.

This is crucial because keywords tend to be short, like a teenagers attention span, short. The longer the keyword, the more nuanced results you may end up with. Google breaks all searches down into concise keywords, so we need to identify what those are.

Experiment With Keywords

This is where we put all of our research into practice. Using a keyword research tool, we test out the various keywords we’ve come up with.

This tool tells us lots of important information:

How many hits a certain keyword gets
The frequency of these hits
Which competitors are also getting these hits
Variations of the keyword that get more or fewer hits

All of this is valuable information. With more experimentation, we get closer to the keywords we’ll need for our campaign. Patience is a virtue, since we might stumble upon a keyword that’s better than the ones we’ve assembled.

Why Is Keyword Research Important to Your Small Business?

Picture this: you’re a small business owner trying to attract more customers to your website. You’ve spent countless hours creating great content, but no one seems to be visiting. What gives? Enter keyword research.

By optimizing your website and content around keywords, you can increase your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract more qualified traffic to your website. And what small business doesn’t want to boost visibility?

Small business owners often have more limited resources than big companies. With a small team and a tight budget, it can be challenging to compete with larger brands that have more time and money to invest in their digital marketing efforts. But with keyword research, small business owners can level the playing field by identifying highly searched and highly relevant keywords that your larger competitors may have overlooked. By strategically incorporating these keywords into your website and content, small business owners can improve your visibility in SERPs and attract more targeted traffic to your site.

Go Beyond Keyword Research

Keyword research is the pinnacle of any marketing campaign. It allows us to identify the precise terms that customers use to search for our product. Without it, we lose a massive chunk of business that search engines provide us with.

Remember, it’s not just keywords that affect our SEO. Mobile optimization, a user-friendly experience, and proper security affect our rating.

From keyword research to website management, the WP Guy can help. Schedule an appointment today. With the WP Guy’s help, you can finally get some sleep at night.