SEO Keyword Research involves researching common terms and phrases related to one’s industry and using them to drive traffic to their website via search engine results such as Google. Businesses wanting a social media presence will need to find out the type of words and phrases that users are using to search for information on Google and other popular search engines.
Understanding the process of keyword research can take months, as a required dedicated effort. The process of keyword research involves:
- Taking time to get to know your target audience
- Knowing the type of questions that they are asking and search phrases they’re likely to be using
- Finding ways to answer their questions
- Using a combination of keywords and phrases to provide them with the answer to their questions
It is possible for you to get a basic understanding of what SEO entails and how to find the keywords and phrases, but when it comes to implementing and monitoring the success of your SEO is where things can get a more time consuming and somewhat a little tricky.
Keyword research requires effort and focus and can take months. If you are learning about SEO, you will find yourself getting stuck and then going back to the books for the solution. This will take time away from your work, which is why you need to hire an SEO Agency.
Since keyword research is a crucial element of your success in the search engines, it is better that you contact an SEO Company to perform an SEO Audit and keyword research. While the SEO specialists work on optimising your website for SEO, you can dedicate your complete attention to running your business.
How Often Should You Perform SEO Keyword Research?
SEO Audits exists for a reason. Even though you may have hired an SEO Melbourne agency to perform keyword research, it does mean you do not need to revisit them again. The SEO specialists you hired optimised your website for SEO, and after a few months, you saw results.
After a year, your website started to decline again in the search results and in the number of visitors coming to your website. This is because keyword trends change due to users using different keywords and phrases to perform research.
For this reason, it is a good idea to hire an SEO agency to perform an SEO Audit to determine what areas of your website need to be worked on and optimised for SEO. If they find your current keywords are not ranking well anymore, they will perform keyword research to help to also discover new keyword opportunities.
How Often Should You Consider an SEO Audit?
You should opt for an audit of your website at least once every year. An audit determines the problematic areas of your website that require improvement as well as any updates your website may require to conform with the latest techniques in the search marketing industry.
Once completed, you will receive several actionable recommendations on how you can improve your website for SEO and whether you need to update your SEO keywords and phrases to rank better on search engines. Apart from engaging the services of an SEO company once every year, you should also consider hiring them for keyword research when you make the following changes to your website:
- You want to create new content for your website
- You want to create and launch a new website
- You want to create a new blog post to publish on your current website
- You want to promote a specific product or service and tailor it to your target audience
You need to regularly search for ways users search for things, so you can identify the most popular and common searchers and how they are searching for the content within your industry on Google. In doing so, it will help you create content that your target audience will enjoy reading and sharing with others. Lastly, you need to perform keyword research if you are launching an SEO campaign.
The Importance of Keyword Research for an effective SEO Campaign
Keyword research needs to be part of the SEO strategy you come up with to ensure you align your offline objectives with your online objectives. The keywords and phrases that are discovered are not the only phrases worth targeting. Keyword research involves a lot of trial and error, which is generally why its recommended to delegate this specialist task to the experts at an SEO Melbourne Agency.
If you decide to do it yourself, you will have to dedicate time and effort towards it, as you have other areas of your business to deal with that can typically take up your time and priority. Generally speaking the DIY approach increases your risk of making a few common mistakes.
Some mistakes that most beginners new to SEO make is performing keyword research only once, not updating and expanding their list of SEO keywords, and targeting mainly popular and highly competitive keywords, which are difficult to rank against competitors.
How SEO Specialists Performs Keyword Research?
To develop an effective SEO Strategy, an SEO Agency will typically follow this process of searching for keywords:
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Identify Seed Keyword Topics
Your SEO specialist may sit together with you or talk to you over the phone to discuss the seed keyword topics that are relevant to your target audience. They will do so by thinking of broad topics that are relevant to your target audience and your industry, coming up with subtopics within those broad topics that relate to your target audience and your industry, and thinking of services and products that you want to use to find keywords and phrases for your offering.
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Establish Objectives
Your agency will talk to you to discover what goals you have in mind that you may want to accomplish. They will then perform keyword research and uncover hundreds of words and phrases that they can bring forward to form part of the SEO strategy.
If you did this on your own, you would become confused due to the sheer volume of keywords that will come up during your search. By having an SEO specialist on board, they will choose relevant keywords from the list, as they will know which words and phrases they can ignore.
Moreover, the type of keywords they choose also depends on your primary objective. Do you want to improve brand awareness? Do you want to drive more organic traffic to your website? Do you want to attract more leads or customers? Do you want to generate more sales and increase revenue?
Each phrase has its own level of competition and search volume but also and most importantly a higher degree of search intent and buyer intent.
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Perform Keyword Analysis
The SEO specialist will perform keyword analysis. A keyword analysis involves:
- Knowing the Different Types of Keywords
They will come up with different types of keywords to help form your SEO strategy by looking at your objectives. For instance, you want to attract more traffic to your website and generate sales. They will come up with buyer keywords.
If the objective is to spread awareness about your blog, they will focus on longer tail keywords. You can integrate the keywords in your content. You can ask them to provide you with SEO Copywriting services as well, so your content gets optimised for SEO.
- Knowing Your Target Audience
You will need to tell the SEO specialist about your target audience. They will help you understand their needs and the common questions and problems they have. This allows them to choose keywords relevant to your target audience.
- Knowing Your Competitive Power
Competitive power refers to keywords that gives you the best chance to rank on the search engines. They have access to keyword tools that they use to find high ranking keywords. You only want to target keywords that you can compete at or with other businesses using the same keywords.
- Knowing the Type of Keywords That You Already Get Traffic and Rank for
Your SEO strategy should not include words and phrases that are working just fine for you. You need to perform research to find out the type of keywords that you are already getting traffic and ranking for. If you use the same keyword to optimise every page of your website, you are committing keyword cannibalisation. In fact, you may already be doing so without knowing, which is why it is so important to hire an SEO Melbourne agency to perform keyword search.
- Knowing the Top Industry Keywords
To know the top industry keywords, you need to know your share of voice. Share of voice is the share of traffic your website receives from a certain keyword. Looking at this can help you determine if you need to improve the performance of the current keywords that you are using.
If it has been a while since you performed SEO keyword research, you need to visit an SEO agency to help you determine keywords and phrases that can help you rank your website.
If keyword research strategy or advice is something that you need assistance with, please contact the team at TopRankings by completing our online forms or calling 1300 881 911.
