Keyword Research – How It Provides the Right Direction to SEO Campaigns

A sound strategy of search engine optimization together with structured content is essential to launch any SEO campaign. But it is important to know the touch points of optimization on which to build the strategy and structure your content by ascertaining the needs of searchers, the search demand pattern in the SERP landscape and the kind of competition that awaits you.  In simple words, you must first do some proper keyword research that provides direction about the way to plan your campaign. It requires a good understanding of the keyword research process by starting with understanding the goals and how to create your own keyword inventory.

First, you must understand why you need keyword research and how it relates to the search engine optimization strategies that you want to formulate.  Unless you have proper content, it is impossible to drive the campaign ahead for which you must know how to structure your content. And to understand how to structure your content, you must know which kinds of words people are using during searches. Since it is not possible to read the minds of searchers to understand what they expect from your content, you must analyze the pattern of searches with a focus on the keywords that are relevant for your business. The research will reveal the words, phrases, and terms that searchers are actually looking for so that you can build your strategies for optimizing around those keywords.

The goals of keyword research

• Understand the search demand that helps to develop more effective search engine optimization strategies.
• Generate a list of search terms and phrases that align with your marketing goals.
• Identify the keywords with high ROI prospects and work on it first.
• Find the gaps on pages by matching with keywords

The search demand landscape

Understanding the kind of demand for different types of keywords like branded keywords and broad keyword phrases helps to channelize your optimization efforts in the right direction. It helps to avoid pursuing keywords that no one is looking for. It is not right to think that branded keywords perform better than generic keywords because it all depends on the nature of the business. Some businesses are so much brand driven that consumers equate the quality of the products with brand names and narrow down their choices by using branded keywords.  On the other hand, there are many other businesses and products which are not at all brand driven as when people search for soccer jerseys seldom would they mention brands in the search query. Therefore, the kind of optimization for these two types of keywords will be entirely different.

Keyword list that matches with your marketing goals

The knowledge about the search demand landscape should help you to create a list of keyword terms and phrases that closely relate to your marketing goals and help to achieve rankings. The keywords that you aim to work with for achieving high ranks must have actual demand so that your efforts do not go waste. You must also identify the keywords which despite matching with your marketing goals are very difficult to rank for. Some keywords do not at all have any impact on the organic results and are not worth considering. In such cases, you might think about some other types of searches like paid searches or those based on videos, images, and maps.

Prioritize keyword investments

It is pointless to spend money on keywords randomly because it can lead to a frustrating experience if you focus on low ROI keywords first. Instead, you must stagger your investments on keyword and start spending by focusing on keywords that have the highest ROI.  Efficiency in using keywords matters most, and you must devote your time and effort after the chosen keywords that payback well for the hard work.  Your target must be to achieve the most in the shortest time by prioritizing the keywords and putting your money in the right places. Once you see the results, it not only provides encouragement but also justifies the investment and gives a lot of satisfaction.

Do gap analysis

Now that you know the types of keywords to focus upon and the way to utilize your money for the best returns, you must turn to the aspect of creating structured content.  The returns from keywords depend a lot on the worth of the content developed around the chosen keywords. Check each page of the website for matching the keywords with the content, and you might find some pages that do not have any content based on the keyword for which you must create appropriate content. Again, if the content matches with keywords but does not answer searcher’s queries to the fullest, it needs improvement. Lastly, if you have not optimized keywords of some pages, you must do that too.

Doing a solid keyword search would ensure that you make optimal use of your optimization efforts that provide the right returns.