Keyword Research is an integral part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and has been a part of SEO for many years. Comparable to the “Tall Tales” told by fishermen in the 1800’s, one could say: “back in the olden days of SEO, we could pull keywords out by the hundreds and rank for whatever we wanted”.
While that might sound great to some business owners, it is actually of great benefit to everyone that Google has cleaned up the SEO field. The reason that SEO is a valuable tool to business owners, is that it provides a way for you to reach your target markets through showing up in search engine results. Sites with well planned SEO and excellent content will end up on the first page of the search engine results, resulting in higher traffic, more leads, and, if their User Experience is done well, increased sales.
The reason for the ongoing releases of new search engine algorithms is to ensure that as a provider, Google can continue to serve high quality results to its target market: people who use their service to search for information, products and services.
So, having established the value, let’s talk about Keyword Research and why it is important.
Keyword Research: Fuel for High Quality Content, Created for a Specific Audience
Modern SEO is driven by high quality content: well written articles and pages, all with specific tags so that the search engines know exactly what you are talking about. This allows it to serve your pages to the users that care about what you are offering.
Keyword research is a methodology of determining what people in your specific target markets are searching for when looking for your type of product or service, followed by determining which words you can actually rank for.
Often our clients ask us a great question: “Why can’t we just use the free Google Keyword tool?” The answer is, we do, in fact, often use the same Google tool that you would use for AdWords; however, there are a few key differences in the way that we use it:
- While AdWords shows a “competition rating,” it is based on an automatically calculated algorithm. For every promising Keyword or Keyword phrase we find, we use a complex process to determine the actual competitiveness, rather than relying on the automatically generated ranking.
- Our method to determine Keyword “rank potential” is very effective, and although its slightly more time consuming, it is much more accurate than the automatic method.
- Our deep examination of the competition utilizes a resource not found in any automated tool: Critical Thinking. We are able to save our clients time, money, and effort by whittling down the list of keywords to the ones that have a real chance of ranking.
- Our team is very savvy and creative at trying out multiple similar words & phrases, thus we are able to discover niches that our clients may have missed.
Our Keyword Research campaigns can be tailored to fit your budget and project type, whether the terms will be used in your main content, on social media, or in your blog. We can either do the research and present to you the vetted data, or create your full SEO strategy and write the content for you.
If you’re interested in utilizing Keyword Research as a part of your SEO strategy, contact us today to get started.
