Whether it comes to SEO and organic traffic, targeting the right and most valuable keywords is essential for your success.
In this guide, you will read about some smart approaches to finding the best keywords to target.
Table of contents:
- What are Keywords
- How to Determine the Most Valuable Keywords to Target
- Understand how Keyword Intent can Attract Customers
- Use Keyword Research Tools
- Conduct a Competitive Keyword Analysis
What are Keywords
Before you delve into any keyword analysis strategy, it is important to understand the concept behind the term.
In short, keywords are words and phrases that people use in search engines such as Google to find relevant information on the Web. Via keywords, users can search for products, services, and everything else.
Keywords establish the connection between the user intent, search engines, and the information on the Web.
To get a deep understanding, have a look at our comprehensive guide, explaining everything about keywords.
How to Determine the Most Valuable Keywords to Target
There are several approaches you can adopt when working on valuable keywords research that would help you target just the right words for optimal results.
Understand your Customers and their Needs
Understanding how your customers think and what they need can be greatly beneficial for your valuable keyword research campaign.
Try to put yourself in their shoes and think of what would make them visit your website, browse your pages and what would eventually prompt them to become clients.
For optimal results, use web analytics tools that help you monitor customer behavior patterns and preferences.
Understanding your customers will grant you an insight into how they think, how they search for products and services such as yours, and most importantly, what queries they use to reach such information.
Use such information to your advantage, and filter out phrases and words that are most likely your site visitors and customers use to find your content. These will become some of the keywords that you will target when working on your website’s content.
Identify Seed Keywords within Your Niche
Seed keywords are the words and phrases you can use as a starting point for researching for more precise relevant keywords.
To identify seed keywords, filter out topics you want to rank in SERPs. To do so, think of several important themes within your business niche and use the names of these topics as seed keywords.
For example, if you are a blogger and focus on marketing topics, here’s an example list of seed keywords you can think of:
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Digital marketing strategy
- Marketing Analytics
- AI for marketing
- Marketing fundamentals
All the topics and seed keywords will become the foundation on which you will come up with ideas for specific keywords.
Identify Specific Keywords
Now that you have a list of seed keywords, it is time to develop specific ideas of keywords that can be directly used on your content or serve for deeper keyword research.
To come up with various specific ideas, take each of your seed keywords and brainstorm subtopics for each of them.
Let’s take the seed keyword “Content Marketing” from the previous section for example. Here are some subtopics related to this particular keyword:
- What is content marketing?
- Content marketing tools.
- Content marketing strategy for experts.
- Content marketing tips for beginners.
- AI tools for content marketing in the retail business.
Keep in mind that these are not necessarily the final variants of your target keywords. Although you can use any of these within your content, you can narrow down the keywords even further.
Identify the Long-Tail Keywords: The Secret Weapon for Success
While seed keywords are relatively short and contain broad information about each term, long-tail keywords are just the opposite: they are long and very specific in their meaning.
In technicality, long-tail keywords are comprised of 3 or more words.
Here are some examples of long-tail keywords:
- Content marketing strategy for selling high-end Japanese pottery
- Content marketing ideas for a beginner digital marketer in the field of IT.
- How to improve your content marketing with AI tools.
Long-tail keywords are very important for any website content and digital marketing strategy. Such keywords are:
- Easier to rank
- They are widely used in search queries. According to CWS, 70% of web searches are conducted via long-tail keywords.
- Long-tail keywords are very specific.
- Long-tail keywords are less competitive and have lower costs.
Furthermore, from an SEO point of view, targeting long-tail keywords can be very beneficial for your website, as such keywords usually have lower difficulty and oftentimes indicate that the user searches for an answer to a specific piece of information – should you provide a specific answer to that specific query, you have the chance to greatly enhance site visits and conversion rates.
Understand how Keyword Intent can Attract Customers
Keyword intent, also known as search intent, is a term describing what searchers want to achieve by using a given keyword when conducting a web search.
Understanding keyword intent can greatly help you achieve more with your website content.
This is why, delving deeper into the meaning of a given keyword and the intent it is being used by visitors is important.
Here’s an example:
When someone searches for “web hosting plans”, most probably this user is looking for a web hosting plan that they want to subscribe to. Or, in short, this user has a purchase intent.
On the other hand, if someone searches for “different types of web hosting”, they are probably searching for resources that explain the characteristics of various hosting services and what sets them apart from each other. This means that their search intent is most likely informational rather than purchase-focused.
Understanding the intent behind each of your focus keywords can help you tailor your website content in such a way that it fits the user intent and therefore becomes useful to them. What’s more, when using focus keywords with the right intent, search engines such as Google can rank your website even higher in search results.
To read more about search and keyword intent, read our comprehensive guide on the topic of keywords.
Use Keyword Research Tools
Numerous different keyword research tools help you make deep keyword analysis. By using such tools, you can:
- Come up with more keyword and topic ideas for your website.
- See the keyword intent behind each suggestion.
- See how many times a given keyword has been used in search queries for some time.
- How hard it can be to use a given keyword to boost your search rankings.
Some keyword research tools are:
Conduct a Competitive Keyword Analysis
A competitive keyword analysis, or simply a keyword gap analysis, is the process of discovering the keywords your competitors use and rank for in search results.
Competitive keyword analysis can help you come up with ideas for new and relevant website content, optimize your existing content, and enhance your digital marketing strategies for better results.
To conduct a keyword gap analysis, follow these steps:
Identify Your Top Competitors
To begin your keyword gap analysis, identify your top 5 competitors. To find them, consider websites and organizations as top competitors that:
- Operate in the same field
- Offer similar to your products and services
- Publish similar content to yours
- Their websites appear high in search results for specific keywords
Research Competitors’ Valuable Keywords
Now that you have filtered your top competitors, it is time to find out the keywords they are using and ranking for.
There are two main methods for conducting such research:
Manually. To do so, browse their websites and search for terms and words that are prominent and commonly used. If these words and phrases oftentimes appear in headings and on other key website positions, then they are most likely keywords.
Use Keyword research tools. A simpler and more effective method is to use a keyword research tool such as Semrush (or any other similar) that can grant you ample useful information about your competitors’ website content.
Such tools provide you with information about keywords used all across a given website – browse the suggestions and see how different topics and web pages adopt different keywords.
Filter the relevant keywords that are suitable for your website from all websites – you will use these once the keyword gap research is finished.
Organize the Newly Comprised List of Valuable Keywords
Once you find the relevant keywords from the top 5 competitive websites, it is time to organize the keywords you collected in different groups:
Remove the irrelevant keywords. Check your list for words and terms that are completely irrelevant to your business, website topic, and niche. Such words won’t help you rank higher or attract more paying customers, so it is best to filter these out.
Find relevant keywords that can help you create new types of content. Check for relevant keywords that you can use and see how competitors are using these for more ideas. Then, think of similar or better types of content you can publish on your website using these keywords.
Improve already published content with relevant keywords. Check your list of collected keywords and determine whether you can add any to your already existing content, to enhance its ranking capability. Also, if you are using a keyword research tool, you can compare the keywords you are using to those of your competitors and decide which ones are better to use in terms of SEO, volume, and difficulty.
As a rule of thumb, remember that the most effective keywords are the long-tail ones with high search volume and low difficulty.
How to Determine the Most Valuable Keywords to Target – Conclusion
There are various ways to determine the most valuable keywords you can use for your website.
In short, you can collect relevant keywords by:
- Understand your Customers and their Needs
- Identify Seed Keywords within Your Niche
- Identify Specific Keywords
- Identify the Long-Tail Keywords: The Secret Weapon for Success
- Understand how Keyword Intent can Attract Customers
- Use Keyword Research Tools
