Before you start off with hardcore SEO, you need to do something called keyword research. This will help you understand what your searchers are looking for. Analyzing the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) will help you strategize your SEO in a more effective way. So if you’re new to digital marketing, here are some insights on keyword research and what you can do with it!

1. What Can Keyword Research Do?

Keyword research is fairly simple. It helps you understand the kind of phrases that people type into their search engines. Let’s say you’re trying to optimize keywords for Google or Yahoo, keyword research will help you structure your content for these search engines.

Now, why is this important? Let’s say you optimize for keywords that you think are important (without doing keyword research), you might not really get your content out there because it does  not contain the phrases or keywords your target audience is actually looking for. Your competitor on the other hand does systematic keyword research and optimizes carefully for specific keywords and phrases that the audience is searching for. This will lead to your competitors getting more content to their targeted audience while your content will remain undiscovered.

2. You Must Understand the Search Landscape

In order to properly optimize your keywords, you need to understand the search landscape and create a list of phrases and words that match your business goals. Whether your goal is to build your brand and “create demand” for your product/service or cater to the “existing demand” by selling your product/service,keyword research plays a major role.After you understand the landscape by setting your marketing goals, you need to prioritize your keywords. Those with a high Return-on-Investment (ROI) are of high priority. Basically, choose keywords that will be more successful in getting your content out to the audience rather than spending hours and hours on keywords that would be completely useless (another reason why research is important). Once you find your required keywords, you need to map them on to the content on your website. If you don’t have that content, create it!

Read Also: Step by Step Guide to a good Digital Marketing Strategy

3. The Search and Demand Curve

The search and demand curve is a plot between the total number of searches of a keyword or phrase per week or per month and the number of related keywords for that phrase or keyword. It is very interesting to note that the top 1000 terms account for only about 11% of the total traffic. The majority of the traffic goes to “long tail” keywords. Once you research keywords and focus on long tail keywords, you will be able to attract more traffic in a relatively short span of time.

Keyword research takes time and requires a lot of in depth analysis and is fundamental to any new business that is looking to target a specific audience.

Look out for our post next month on long tail keywords and more on keyword research!

Read our other posts over here and if you’re looking for a company that does all the hard and long keyword research for you, don’t hesitate to contact us! We are always here for you.