Process for Keyword Research

Proper keyword identification and classification are the foundation of any successful SEO effort. The following method for conducting keyword research will give you a decent framework and firm foundation for locating, categorising, and ranking the keywords in your universe.

How many keywords should clients strive to rank for is a common question? There is no one “correct” response to this query. The equation is influenced by the markets, products, and budgets of the various companies.

Here is a fundamental method for conducting keyword research.

1. Determine the World of Your Keywords
Make a thorough list of all the words that apply to your company and that suggest the searcher could be interested in your material. To create your initial “seed word” list, combine your intuition with PPC data, competitive intelligence, analytics, internal search data, Google suggest data, and any prior client or company data.

2. Increasing the List
To increase the seed word list and determine the relative search volumes of all your keywords, use the Google Keyword Tool (along with other programs like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, if you have access to them).

Remember that Google’s anticipated search volumes are frequently inaccurate and serve mainly to contrast the relative popularity of different words. In other words, you can presume that keyword B is more popular if keyword A has a monthly search volume of 5,000 and keyword B has a monthly search volume of 10,000. However, you shouldn’t expect that obtaining a top ranking for keyword B would result in 10,000 monthly users. It might, but it won’t most likely.

Note: If you can afford to undertake the testing, using paid search to evaluate keyword popularity and conversion rates is a great tool for figuring out which keyword phrases are most crucial to target with organic search.

3. Sort Your List by Priority
Your “keyword universe” consists of your newly expanded list. Following that, it is appropriate to prioritize your keywords and select the most crucial ones for your campaign.

As a general indicator of health, you should monitor rankings for these keywords. Additionally, when you start link-building activities later on in your campaign, these keywords will be your top priority.

Depending on who you ask, you could wind up with 25 important keywords or hundreds (large enterprise companies with multiple products and sub-brands). Your top keywords should be those that have the greatest potential to generate income.

Having said that, it’s critical to remember that the terms you choose will somewhat depend on how competitive your sector is.
It makes perfect sense for a business like Petco to target a term like “dog food.” But as its online presence expands, a small pet shop in Pacific Beach might want to begin by focusing on more specialized keyword phrases like “dog food in Pacific Beach” before moving up to more competitive ones. In this case, even though “dog food” didn’t top the priority list, it would still be included in the little pet store’s keyword universe.

4. Sort Your Important Keywords
After you’ve created a list of your campaign’s top keywords, classify them according to your company’s objectives. This enables more detailed reporting and performance understanding.

All keywords should at the very least be divided into the brand and non-brand categories. Product type, subbrands, business groups, keyword-based categories (such as all variations of the keyword phrase “dog food”), and keywords that correspond to a particular business objective or client segment are examples of additional categories.

People on your team will find it simpler to comprehend the influence that SEO is having on a more meaningful level when data is categorized.

5. Determine Your Favorite Landing Pages
Once your keywords have been created in this way, you can start assigning the priority keywords to the particular sites where they are most pertinent. Your main focus for your optimization efforts for your priority keywords will be these pages.

As you start working on your preferred landing pages’ on-page optimization (page titles, meta descriptions, H tags, and content), you might discover that a given page is only pertinent to one or two priority keywords. Here, you can improve your optimization efforts and focus on a larger variety of long tail permutations by using the extra keywords from the keyword universe that were not chosen as priority words.

Dog food in Pacific Beach, for instance, might have been the priority keyword selected by the fictitious Pacific Beach Pet Store. However, it’s possible that the priority list’s only keyword phrase that applies to its dog food page is that one.

To find more keyword phrases like “dog food online,” “dog food for sale,” and “buy dog food,” they will look back at the keyword universe when they attempt to improve the on-page components of its dog food page. Due to how competitive they are, these weren’t put to the priority list, but they still want to include them in their on-page optimization efforts. The title of the generated page could be:

The main keyword phrase as well as other keyword phrases from the keyword universe are included in this page title example. Keep in mind that words in a page title don’t have to be in order to be relevant. The phrase “dog food in pacific beach,” “dog food for sale,” “dog food online,” “buy dog food,” “purchase dog food in pacific beach,” and many other relevant keyword variations are all applicable to this page title. This enables the page title to target a variety of pertinent long-tail search phrases.

For executives who don’t want to try to grasp performance against hundreds of keywords, having a priority list of keywords makes it simpler to decide where to spend resources, which keywords to check ranks for, which keywords to prioritize for link text, and which keywords to report on.

It is used to decide which keywords to emphasize in the optimization when a page is appropriate for numerous keywords across the keyword universe.

6. Continually improve your keyword list
It’s crucial to pay attention to your analytics and PPC data to find new search phrases that could present fresh business prospects. This is particularly valid for newly launched brands, subbrands, and keywords that are influenced by seasonal behavior.

Reviewing these data sets on a monthly basis is a good idea to spot any fresh prospects that can be incorporated into your SEO plan.

Hopefully, this keyword research procedure will give your personal SEO campaign a nice framework and strong basis. Good fortune!

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