Are you looking to create strong content that will rank highly on search engines? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll explore the top 6 tips for keyword research in 2022. No matter what service your site provides, SEO should be at the forefront of every marketing strategy.
Often overlooked, SEO is crucial to ensuring that you drive the right kind of traffic in as high of a volume as you can. What good is a product if you can’t reach the audience you’re marketing to? A major aspect of SEO is keyword optimization and research. By targeting the right keywords for your business, you’ll be able to increase traffic and ultimately conversions.
As well as being an important skill for any entrepreneur, it’s also a crucial knowledge point for any budding marketer. After all, 75% of people never scroll past the first page of Google – so you can see how important it is to shoot for rankings on the first page. Throughout this article, we’ll offer 6 keyword research tips for effective SEO.
What is keyword research?
Before we divulge in our selection of top tips, let’s start with a little introduction on keyword research. What exactly is keyword research? To put it simply, keyword research is the process of researching search terms in order to optimise your site and content for higher rankings on search engines results pages.
How to do keyword research for beginners
If you’re completely new to keyword research, you may appreciate a small guide of things you should be considering when carrying out keyword research. Let’s take a look at things to consider:
Search volume
Is there enough search volume to justify including this keyword? Depending on how niche your topic is, you may struggle to find high volume keywords within your topic. However, you should always aim to include keywords with a higher search volume if possible.
Difficulty
How difficult will it be to rank for this keyword? Keyword research tools will often provide you with a number to gauge how difficult the keyword will be to rank for. Depending on how well established your site is, some keywords with higher difficulties may not be attainable. Some sites will have stronger authority and SERP positioning, making it near impossible to rank against them with a smaller less established site. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Why not include a range of long tail and short tail keywords with a variety of volume and difficulty?
Relevance
Are the keywords relevant to your content? There are plenty of keywords with a super high volume and low difficulty, but that doesn’t mean you should target them. You should only focus on keywords if they are relevant to your content. For example, a business themed blog targeting food related keywords simply will not work. After all, Google’s main goal is to provide perfect content for users, and adding irrelevant keywords into your content will only signal to Google that your content is not useful to users.
Current SERP results
What pages are currently ranking for your search term? Before you start creating content based on your keyword list, it’s important to scout out the competition. Who holds the top positions, and can your site realistically compete with the current top ranking content? It’s good to use pages which are currently ranking as a baseline for the quality of content you need to produce. By creating an article stronger and longer than what currently holds position 1 for your term, you may be able to overtake it!
Utilise free tools
Depending on how far into your search marketing journey you are, you may not be ready to invest in keyword research tools. While paid tools are very powerful, they aren’t always necessary for smaller businesses or those looking to get a taste of keyword research. Free tools can offer strong insights into keyword difficulty and volume without charging you a fortune. Some useful free keyword research tools include:
- Answerthepublic
- Wordstream
- Google trends
- Moz keyword explorer
- Semrush
- Ubersuggest
Do some independent searching
While this may seem silly, this is actually a fantastic way to determine what users may be searching for. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and do some Googling. Oftentimes, one search will spark new ideas and branch out to new keyword ideas for you to look into.
While doing your own Googling, another useful thing to take into account is the autocomplete function on Google’s search bar. This will offer you related terms based on what previous users have searched for. These could prove to be useful keywords in themselves, or may also help you think of new ideas to look into.
Consider the intent of your keywords
When you come across a relevant keyword with a high search volume and low difficulty, it can be tempting to immediately incorporate this into your target keyword list. However, you should always think about the intent behind a keyword before you target it.
Ultimately, we need to find traffic that will convert. If users are landing on our page but we aren’t satisfying their search needs, we are leaving these potential customers with a bad experience on our site. Not to mention the bounce rate that will influence our SERP rankings. If you’re going to target a keyword, make sure that the content you’re providing will fulfil the intent behind a user’s search and answer any questions they may have.
Find synonyms and alternative phrasing
Often overlooked, synonyms and alternative phrasing for keywords can be an incredible way to increase traffic to your site. In a world where we search for things as fast as possible, a lot of us search for things in the shortest way we can. Whether that’s a shortened version of what we’re looking for, or a synonym instead of a full term, there’s search volume behind these terms.
You can include these variations in your content to increase visibility alongside using your main target keywords. Oftentimes these variations can offer a lower search difficulty than a more established standard search term.
Analyse competitor content
As well as analysing the current top ranking content on SERPs, you can also find similar content to what you want to produce and check which keywords it’s currently ranking for. This can help you identify keyword gaps within your own content, and also ensures that you aren’t lacking in any areas that your competitors are performing well in. You can use tools such as Ahrefs to analyse each URL and find out which keywords they’re ranking for.
Always check your content
It’s handy to have your list of keywords on hand when writing, but it’s not uncommon to forget to weave a few in. But don’t worry, there’s an easy way to double check that your content is well optimised. SEO content checker tools such as Yoast will allow you to run your content through the tool and tell you which keywords you’re targeting, along with any gaps that you aren’t utilising.
The Semrush content checker is an incredibly powerful tool for this, and analyses a range of different SEO aspects, even offering an overall score to let you know how strong your content is. Checking your content for keywords is essential before pushing your work live, else you may miss out on potential traffic from missing keywords.
Conclusion
It’s clear that keyword research is an incredibly powerful skill to possess in a world dominated by search engines. We hope that this article has offered some useful insight into the topic, and has left you ready to go do some keyword research of your own.
Hungry for more SEO tips and tricks? Check out our recent post on SEO strategies that generate traffic in 2022. Don’t forget to follow us on Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date with the world of apprenticeships.
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