As mentioned in the previous section, this is a very obvious one. Google and other search engines want to ensure that the content they present to their users is the best.

Therefore, in order to rank on the first page and lure organic traffic, your content needs to be relevant to the user’s needs. Furthermore, it also needs to be aligned with the product and services that your website offers in order to reach your target audience. 

On the other hand, if your keyword research is irrelevant, you won’t be able to rank on search engines regardless of the quality and relevance of your content.

Hence, relevant keyword research that is strategically used in an informative piece of content has a higher chance of ranking on search engines.

Another key concept that you need to consider while conducting your research is the competition. If you are a relatively new brand and wish to compete with the tycoons of your industry, your chances of appearing at the top are pretty slim.

Search engines frequently allot domain authorities to websites based on their content, reach, relevance, backlinks, age and so on. The higher a website’s authority, the higher its chances of ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages.

Therefore, while conducting your keyword research, you need to target keywords that are relevant and have lower competition. At least in the beginning. Later on, once your domain authority increases, you can certainly try beating your competition. 

Once you have taken care of the relevance and the competition, it’s time you concentrate on the search volume. 

This is highly essential as it determines the number of people visiting your website. Search volumes refer to the number of people searching a particular keyword. 

For example, if ten thousand people are searching for the keyword ”SEO Northampton”, then the search volume for the keyword would be ten thousand.

This means that you need to look for keywords with greater search volumes to ensure that more and more people arrive at your website. 

This is essential because though there might be keywords out there that you rank for, if no one is searching for them, the rank is absolutely pointless.

Thus, based on the three concepts above, ideal keyword research shall result in keywords that are relevant to the website, have low competition and have a high search volume.

The process of keyword research begins with a quest for relevant topics that are closely related to your website’s original motive. 

Whether you are marketing a service, a product or simply some informative content, the topics need to be aligned to a particular category or genre.

Thus, it all begins with creating a list of topic baskets that you wish to cover. Let’s explore this with an example: 

We are an SEO company that offers various services such as 360° SEO, link building services, white label SEO, content optimisation and so much more.

Now when we conduct our keyword research, we will first create topic buckets like SEO, Link Building, SEO Content Writing, Digital Marketing, et cetera. You get the gist.

Once we’ve created this list, we are going to move on to creating content that falls into the above-mentioned categories. However, not just yet, we still need to search for keywords. We’ll show you how to do that in the next step.

Now that your categories are ready to go, it’s time to search for keywords that fit in the topic brackets. 

However, how do you find these keywords? They’re not readily available and even if they are, you still need to analyse them before adding them to your list of keywords.

That’s where the keyword research tools come in. Created research tools are created by various organisations in order to provide a platform for businesses and SEO companies to conduct their research. 

These tools include everything you need for your business including competitor SEO analysis, keyword ideas, search volumes, related terms and so on.

While there are a number of keyword research tools available on the market, we will tell you about the best ones in the next section of this blog.

Now we have the list of categories for our keyword research and the perfect tools for its execution. 

The next step is to create a list of keywords that are relevant to our topics and help us provide our customers with insights and information regarding our website. 

The list of keywords you choose is going to be different for every category. Let’s say we’re talking about SEO. The keywords that shall fall into this category can be: SEO, SEO ranking, What is SEO, SEO agency, SEO services, et cetera.

Similarly, the keywords for the category link building will be different to a great extent. Thus, in this step, our goal is to source as many relevant keywords as possible for our website. 

Here you fill your list with every possible search term, phrase and keyword that a user might use while looking for the topics that you have selected. Continue this practice until you have a sufficient list of keywords for all your categories.

Once we’re done with this, we will slowly sort them out based on various SEO factors in the following steps.

While we might have a huge list of the best keywords on our hands, we can’t use a lot of them due to various reasons. Some are grammatically wrong, some ambiguous and some have the wrong spellings. 

Even if these are the best keywords out there, you can’t really ruin the quality of your content for them. In fact, one of the key takeaways of this article is that SEO is highly dependent on quality rather than quantity.

Therefore, the next step would be to sort out the keywords that can be used organically in your content without ruining its quality.

However, don’t worry about the keywords that you couldn’t use in your website content. You can always use them where the grammar doesn’t matter. For example the alt tags and the image file names.

Related search terms and LSI keywords are one of the best ways to optimise your content while also avoiding keyword stuffing.

These keywords are closely related to the keyword that you are targeting and greatly optimise your content for a wide range of content consumers.

You can easily find these terms at the end of the SERPs every time you type a particular keyword into the search bar.

Moreover, you can also use several keyword research tools that can provide you with very good related search terms and LSI keywords.

Using these terms helps search engine bots identify the intent of your content and makes it easier for Google to present your content to your target audience.

When we say aim lower, we are talking about aiming to rank for longtail keywords first. This can help you increase your domain rating and then allow you to stand a chance with bigger brands.

Don’t know what longtail keywords are? That’s cool, we’ll tell you. Longtail keywords are usually very specific and target a smaller audience. As the name suggests they are longer than most commonly used keywords and thus aren’t frequently used by content creators.

Using these keywords can help you rank on the SERPs because they have very less competition. This can eventually help increase your domain authority and help you climb up the ladder of SEO.

While you avoid the competition at first, you also need to analyse the competitors in order to understand how they are using their keywords.

Of course, you don’t need to replicate their strategy but competitor analysis can certainly provide you with a deeper insight into your own research. 

You can analyse where they are lacking, find out the keywords that they are trying to rank for and also reverse engineer their keyword research.

Analysing the competition can also help you avoid certain keywords that have high competition. These keywords are where websites with very high domain authority compete.

While we don’t mean to discourage you, it is better to start with longtail keywords with low competition and then move on to more generic keywords.

Additionally, certain keyword research tools also help you with an analysis of a competitor’s webpage. You can use such tools to learn more about the organic keywords that they rank for, their link building strategy and so much more.

Now that you have the most relevant keywords that have low competition and are perfectly suitable for your website, it’s time to analyse their search volumes. 

The search volume of a keyword refers to the average number of people searching it over a particular period of time. However, search volumes are usually calculated on a monthly basis.

Thus the search volume helps you determine how many people you may possibly attract if you use a particular keyword. 

While we spoke about targeting longtail keywords in the previous point, the problem is that most longtail keywords have lower search volumes. 

Therefore, while we advise you to target longtail keywords majorly, one shouldn’t exclusively stick to them. You need to create a wide range of content that includes keywords with different search volumes. 

Efficient keyword research leads you to keywords that are relevant, have low competition and have high search volumes. Such keywords are probably the dream of every SEO company, however, this happens rarely. 

Therefore, it is essential to spread your research and target keywords from various arenas. 

This ends the process of keyword research. Now the next step would be to strategically create quality content using the keywords obtained from the research. 

An essential aspect of creating search engine optimised content is keyword placement. This doesn’t have much to do with keyword research and falls under the concept of SEO content writing. Hence, we will be covering this in one of our upcoming blogs about content writing and SEO.