How to do keyword research to improve your SEO strategy

If you are preparing a strong SEO strategy to improve your website and content performance, you need to have an excellent plan and choose the right keywords.

This article will teach you how to ensure that your content is relevant to your audience and has Google search value.

Keyword research is often a very time-consuming and labor-intensive task. You need to analyze data, numbers and compare long lists of keywords.

But, it is extremely important to do this in the right way. Thorough keyword research will be the basis of your SEO strategy and content development.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is defined as analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords to create SEO-optimized content. Keywords, or search terms, often provide a direction to produce your content and marketing strategy.

A keyword can consist of a single word, but often it consists of several words, such as a phrase. For example, "search" is a keyword, as is "best keyword research tool."

Why is keyword research important?

Finding high-volume search terms alone is not enough. You need to ensure that your content's SEO keywords match your brand, product, or service with the keywords that your customer uses. And this is where keyword research takes place.

How to do keyword research?

There are many ways to do this, either manually or using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. But, whichever way you choose, you need to take several important steps to see tangible results. Remember that if it's something too complex for you, you can consider hiring a freelance web designer with SEO knowledge.

Step 1: Study your niche

Before finding out which keywords are best for optimizing your page, it is best to start by studying your segment further. This research alone can give you insights and new angles that you may not have thought of before.

Here are some ideas on how to study your niche:

Talk to your existing customers. Find out the terms they use to describe your brand, company, product, or service.

Try to think from the perspective of your potential customers. If you were to share it with a friend, how would you talk about it?

Get involved in your online communities, such as forums and social networks. Read the discussions, find out the main questions they ask, and think about how you could answer them.

Step 2: Define your goals

A plan must always start by setting the final goal. But before that, you should ask important questions like:

Who are you?

What is your brand?

What is your differential?

How is your website?

What promises do you make on your website?

After answering these questions effectively, you need to specify what your brand's purpose is. Do you want to increase the number of subscribers? Or do you have a specific sales target within a certain timeframe?

Define your goals, draw charts, document everything. They will provide the structure and direction needed to create high-level content.

Step 3: Make a list of relevant topics

Based on your brand's main category and the goals you intend to achieve, break it down into smaller groups of topics. Make a list of all topics related to your brand that you want to rank on Google.

For example, if you are a brand specializing in men's care products, some topics related to your brand could be:

male facial cleansing

antiperspirant deodorant

male pattern baldness

They need to be important topics for your business and related to your personas. Think about what types of topics your audience will search for on Google. These topic groups can be further divided into keywords related to those topics.

Step 4: Create a keyword list

Now that you've divided your main category into different groups of subtopics, you can start creating a list of initial keywords. These keywords need to be related to the various topics we talked about above and, more importantly, related to terms that your target audience searches for on Google.

Focus keywords are important because they will become the basis of your keyword research. They define their niche and identify their competitors.

If you're wondering how to find your brand or product's best keywords, it's a lot easier than you think. All you need to do is describe your offer as simple as possible and think about how others can search for it on Google.

Step 5: Use good keyword research tools

You might think, "Shouldn't keyword research start with the use of a keyword tool?"

There is no right or wrong answer, and this can vary according to each professional. There is not a single rule. Some people prefer to look at paid tools, others in Google tools, or maybe a mix of all of them.

Once you've identified your goals, topics, and a list of starting keywords, it's time to use keyword research tools to refine your search terms further.

Step 6: Study the research intent

Connecting high-volume keywords to increase a page's rankings used to work back in the day. But, it is not so simple nowadays. Today, Google's search algorithms compare search terms with user queries to learn about search intent.

Search intent is defined as the intention or reason why people search for a specific term. There are many determining factors behind people's research habits, such as:

Why are they searching?

Are they researching because they want an answer to a question?

Are they looking for a specific website?

Are they researching because they want to buy something?

Once you have a good idea of ​​the search intent behind readers or potential customers, you can use it to fine-tune your keyword research.

It's great to get a list of high-volume keywords related to your brand or topic. But finding keywords that directly match your target audience's search intent is even better.

Step 7: Find out more about your competitors

Doing keyword searches on Google about your brand alone is not enough. You also need to be aware of what your competitors are doing. The better you understand your industry's content landscape, the better it will be for your SEO strategy.

Understanding the competitiveness of different keywords will also allow you to identify search terms that can be very complicated to rank. But most importantly, you will be able to find keyword opportunity gaps.

These opportunities occur when you find keywords related to your brand or industry with a low to medium competition level.

And now, what are the next steps?

After going through these steps, you should have enough insights to create good content and SEO strategy.

If you're running a content-focused blog, you'll need keyword research to start your content and marketing activities.

Doing keyword research can be a time-consuming task. However, in most cases, it pays off in the long run.