Having learned how to appear in search results, let’s determine what strategic keywords you should use in your website’s content and how to tailor that content to satisfy both users and search engines.

Keyword research helps you better understand your target market and how they search for your content, services, or products. The objective of this chapter is to teach you how to uncover that information, as well as how to avoid foibles when it comes to keyword research. You will discover a whole new world of strategic SEO once you discover how your target audience searches for your content!

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research is an essential component of any SEO strategy. Without it, you will not be able to build a successful website. And if you want to rank on the first page of Google, you need to be able to identify keywords that people are actually searching for. There are many different ways to go about doing this. Some methods are better than others, and I’m going to share my best strategies with you in this post.

How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy

The following step-by-step process will help you come up with a list of keywords you should target. Therefore, you’ll be able to establish and implement a strong keyword strategy that helps you rank for the search terms you care about.

Make A List of Important, Relevant Topics Related to Your Business.

The first step in this process is to think about the topics you would like to rank for in terms of generic buckets. To help you come up with some specific keywords later in the process, you’ll create about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business.

The following topics are probably the most frequently blogged about by regular bloggers. Maybe they’re the most frequently discussed topics in sales. Consider your buyer personas – what topics would your target audience search for that you’d like your business to be found for?

If you’re a business owner, do you know how many of your potential customers have a particular issue that you could help them with? Are they looking for a product or service you could sell them? It can be really difficult to find out whether someone needs a product or service you offer. It’s also hard to know whether they are the right customer for you. So how do you find out? We’ve all heard the story of the blind men and the elephant.

Fill In Those Topic Buckets with Keywords.

The next step is to identify some keywords that fall into your selected topic buckets. It is important to rank these keyword phrases in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer likely searches for them.

If you are not ranking for the keywords you want to rank for, then you can’t expect to be found by those customers. Once you have a good idea of what keywords to rank for and have identified the topic buckets you want to focus on, it’s time to move on to creating an inbound marketing strategy. What is Inbound Marketing? Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to marketing your business that focuses on attracting customers to your site via content. Inbound means your website attracts people rather than trying to sell them something.

Research Keywords Based On Intent And Analyse Them Accordingly

As I mentioned in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most important factors in determining how well you rank on search engines like Google. Rather than merely carrying the keyword a searcher used, your website should address the problem the searcher intended to solve. What impact does this have on your keyword research?

Sadly, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface, so it’s easy to take them for face value. It would help if you were extra-careful about how you interpret keywords you target since the intent behind a search is so crucial to your ranking potential.