Editorial Staff
When increasing the organic traffic on your website, choosing the right keyword is the key.
Before you start creating content, you should first find out what are the search term that your audience uses.
Their search terms are then becoming your keywords.
In this module, you’ll learn about:
- What is Keyword Research
- Why Keyword Research is Important
- How to Do Keyword Research
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an essential part of SEO activity, when someone conduct a research of keywords analysis and decide which keywords to use to rank better in SERP.
To obtain the data, the webmaster need to dig into their potential customer’s point of view.
They should analyze which terms are being used the most by their audience and then create a content around it.
A competition level analysis also required in the keyword research as we’re trying to get the lowest competition as possible to rank easier in SERP.
In SEO practice, keyword research should be the first list to do prior to creating any content in your website.
Why Keyword Research is Important for SEO?
One of the common mistake done by webmaster is: they blindly determine the keyword based on their own assumption on what terms that the audiences will use as the search query.
Here is the example:
Let’s say you’re planning to create a content about list of foods that dog aren’t allowed to eat.
You might assume that the term “forbidden foods for dogs” will be your target keyword, without doing any analysis.
Within the same topic, is that the search term that most of the audience are actually searching for?
Now, let’s check out what the data says:
As you can see from the data, the search term “forbidden foods for dogs has the average monthly searches volume of 100 to 1,000 with the medium level of competition.
However, there is actually other alternative of the search term that offers higher volume and lower competition: “what dog cannot eat”.
The data shown that more people are actually searching for “what dog cannot eat” instead of “forbidden foods for dogs”, although both search term have the same meaning.
Furthermore, it turns out that the term “what dog cannot eat” also has lower competition in the SERP as compared to the term “forbidden foods for dogs”.
Get the idea?
This is why keyword research is important in SEO!
Now, let’s take a look on how to do a proper keyword research like the table above.
How to Do Keyword Research?
We have divided the keyword research into 4 step-by-step plan that practical for you to understand and apply it:
1. Think About Your Mission
Before starting anything, think about what is your mission about.
- What will your content about?
- Who exactly are you going to reach?
- What makes your content special?
Once you’re able to answer these questions, you can start to think what content you will be producing.
Illustration: John has a dog food niche website, and he is going to target all the dog owners audience. Then, he plan to create a content related about dog foods.
2. List Down Keyword Ideas of What You Think People Might Search For
The second step is creating a list of keyword ideas, preferably in excel sheet.
Think of all the possible keywords that your potential audience might use it for a search term.
Illustration: The first content that John want to write is the list of foods that dog aren’t allowed to eat. His intention is make this content delivered to all the dog owners and put a recommended foods for dogs that his website is selling. Now, he list down all the possible terms that the dog owners will use on the search engine:
Tip: John can actually get the list of the ideas from the search engine. Simply by typing the seed keywords on the search engine, and he will see bunch of terms recommended:
Tip 2: Another way to find the keyword ideas from search engines is by looking from the related search inside the SERP. Usually, it is placed on the bottom of the SERP page.
Tip 3: John also can find the keyword ideas from “People also ask” SERP feature. However, this SERP feature is only triggered if John is searching for a question term.
3. Check Who are Your Competitors for Those Keywords
After listing down the keyword ideas, now let’s check out who will be your competitors if you’re targeting those keywords.
Are you competing against Forbes, Wikipedia, or the other giant authority sites?
This is something that you should consider since competing against these sites is just going to give you a hard time to reach position 1 on that keyword.
If you like to challenge yourself, you can go ahead with that keyword. Other options, you can forget about this keyword, and move on to the other keyword – which will be much easier to do.
Illustration: When checking who are the competitor for one of the keyword “foods that are fatal for dogs”, John found out that the SERP ranking is dominated by giant authority sites such as Healthline and Medicalnewstoday.
John then choose to not target this keyword since he can choose easier path by choosing alternative keywords that are not dominated by these giant authority sites.
He then marked those keywords as indication that he will exclude this from keyword selection:
4. Analyze for The Search Volume & Competition Level
The next step is analyzing the search volume and competition level of the selected keywords using keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner.
From here, you should choose the highest average monthly searches and in the same time has the lowest competition.
Note: The competition here is different from the competitor checking that you’ve done in the step 3. The competition level in Keyword Planner stated how much websites are actually aiming for that keywords, while the step number 3 is more to check who is dominating the top positions in SERP. A low competition level in Keyword Planner does not mean that there is no high authority sites presence. Vice versa, if the SERP is dominated by high authority sites, it does not mean that there are a lot of websites are aiming for this keyword (high competition).
Illustration: By using Keyword Planner, John can see what is the actual average monthly searches and competition level for each keywords.
After done checking, John decided that the term “what dog cannot eat” has the best performance to the other keyword, seeing from the highest search volume and the lowest competition level.
A Beginning of Optimization
You have learnt about keyword research and how to do it properly.
Once you decided which keyword you’re going to use, then you can start write the content about it.
Determining a keyword is just a start of the on-page SEO that you’re going to learn on the next module.
