Keywords, key phrases, focus keywords, whatever the semantic are uber important in SEO.
If you want to rank high in SERPs, it’s compulsory to know what keywords to target in your content.
This article, part of our SEO series, will help with that.
What is a keyword?
A keyword is a word or set of words or a phrase that users query search engines.
Someone thinking of baby clothes may search for “cute baby clothes.”
Cute baby clothes – in this case, is a keyword.
As a content creator, we can also flip the definition of a keyword to mean the key phrases that your content revolves around.
Why are keywords important for SEO?
If you remember the earlier section on how search engines work, we showed how search engines use the words in your content to match user search queries.
You could write the best prose worthy of a Pulitzer prize but still fail to get to Google’s first page if it (Google) has no clue about your content.
Or you could unintentionally do so well in SERPs for a totally wrong keyword or key phrases that don’t convert.
If your content does not intentionally capture the desired focus keyword, search engines are left to guess the subject of your content.
That’s because search engines attach the same value to each word in the content until there is a clear pattern of words that appear more than others.
If you write about baby clothes and don’t mention baby clothes in your article, how would Google guess your content is about baby clothes?
How to do Keyword Research For SEO
Now we’ll look at how to find the best keywords to target in your content.
The first task in keyword research is to build a stash of candidate words and phrases.
You start with your seed keyword – let’s say you want to rank high for baby clothes; your seed keyword is the main word or phrase you are targeting.
We’ll now plug it into a couple of SEO tools – paid and free – that we leverage for keyword research.
Answer the public
Answer the public pulls data from Google autocomplete and visualizes it.
In there is a mine of keyword and content ideas to pursue.
Enter your seed keyword and then click search
Download the results
QuestionDB
Another great tool that will serve you hot keywords, if you can part with $10 a month for the pro plan.
The free plan is limited to 10 results per query.
Plugin your head term, then click generate. On the next page, download the results.
Google Keyword Planner
Log in to the Google Keyword planner, then go to Discover new keywords
Enter your keyword(s), then hit the Get results button
Now sort through the keywords and select those that intrigue you.
The other way around the Google keyword planner is by letting Google make suggestions of keywords off a website. It can be your website or a competitor.
Search Google for your head term. Grab the top sites and then plug them into Google keyword planner.
Select the option of START WITH A WEBSITE, enter the website, select the option of using the entire site or only the page, then click GET RESULTS.
The top page for our baby clothes head term ranks for 701 keywords, sort the keywords, then click DOWNLOAD KEYWORD IDEAS.
Q&A sites – Quora, Reddit
Question and answer websites are another great source of keyword and content ideas.
A trip to places your audience spends time will unearth your quality keywords to target in your content.
Take the case of Quora
And Reddit
Question and answer communities help you know what conversations are happening around the content ideas.
Get keyword ideas from trend monitoring sites
Another source of great keyword ideas is trend monitoring platforms.
Examples are Google trends, Exploding topics, Google Insights For Search, Twitter Trending Topics, NowRelevant.
Not only are these keywords hot, but they are also often less competitive and easy to rank.
If you catch the beginning of a trend, you will ride it for a long time before the space gets crowded with latecomers.
You have thousands of keywords by now, so we move onto the second keyword research task – to pick high-quality keywords.
For this step, fire up any SEO tool like MOZ, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, and upload our keywords.
For SEMrush, go to Overview under Keyword Analytics, then select the Bulk Analysis.
Select the target country of your audience – if you are doing SEO for a South African company, select South Africa.
Paste your keywords in the box (up to 100).
Click the Analyze button.
Look at the search volume, keyword difficulty, and the Cost Per Click (CPC)
How to choose a good keyword.
Keyword difficulty
Keyword difficulty shows you how hard it is for a new website to rank on Google’s first page.
1% being easy to rank and 100% very hard to rank for.
For a new site, target keywords with difficulty under 50%
Cost per click (CPC)
The CPC is the average cost advertisers on Google Ads pay per click when the keyword triggers an ad.
CPC data is vital to weed out keywords with low commercial value. Advertises will only bid high for keywords that make money
You should also target only keywords that buying traffic. The higher the CPC, the better the keyword.
Search volume
A keyword’s search volume shows the average number of monthly searches in the last 12 months.
Pick keywords with a sizeable search volume.
Now that you know how to find good keywords for your content I’ll show you how to write SEO friendly content.
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