Fundamental to search engine optimization is Keyword Research.

Before you can increase your e-commerce website or webpage(s) on the search engine, you must have a good grasp of how to conduct keyword research.

There are both free and paid Keyword research tools available to be adopted in conducting a thorough evaluation of necessary keywords which are often needed in targeting a specific range of internet users and potential leads.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is the statistical evaluation of what I like to call ‘’Marketable Keywords’’ as it relates to the search history of specific Keywords.

If you are a newbie in the digital marketing industry, your ride through the path of online marketing is expected to get you to engage in both qualitative and quantitative analysis of keywords. This helps a great deal in ensuring your web pages gain increasing visibility across the search engines.

The information displayed for various keyword on any preferred keyword analytical tool is often perceived as the statistical review of how each keyword on the search engine has performed over a specified period.

Why is Keyword Research important for SEO?

Carrying out a Keyword Research prior to creating a webpage on your website helps a great deal if you desire to see the page(s) gain more visibility on the web search engines like Google, Bing, or Oath.

Keyword Research helps to provide a proper guide for an SEO expert both for carrying out on-page optimization, copywriting and other White-Hat SEO techniques.

More importantly, the insertion of different keywords on a webpage submitted to the search engine helps the robotic crawlers understand what the page is talking about.

Therefore, if keywords included in the body texts of a webpage are not sufficient, the search engine crawler will not get a comprehensive idea of what your webpage is focusing on and this will make the indexing of a webpage difficult for ranking.

Finally, for the proper optimization of the image texts both for alt and meta tags, Keyword research is vital in surging the analytics of a webpage.

Types of Keywords.

In search engine optimization, there are short-tail and long-tail keywords and they are both crucial in getting a webpage gain an increased visibility on the web search engine.

• Short-Tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords are search phrases with only one word whose length makes them less specific than searches with more words. An example of a short-tail keyword is ‘Shoe’.

• Long-Tail Keywords
In contrast to the short-tail keywords, these set of keywords are search phrases with more than one word or closely related phrases such as; White Snow Ball and Men’s Blue Jacket.

Mind you, the adoption of either keyword has significance in optimizing for the search engine as you will discover shortly.

• Pros and Cons of using a Short-Tail Keyword

The adoption of a short-tail keyword its own advantage as well as disadvantages depending on your SEO strategy.

For example, if a digital marketer or copywriter is interested in driving tons of traffic to a webpage, short tail keywords is the best option.

However, there is quite a big hurdle for newly launched websites whose search activities are just beginning to compete for the already established and aged domains.

The shorter the keyword is, the higher the search volume. Hence, if you could get ranked for a short tail keyword, you’re going to get plenty of organic traffic.

In addition to this fact, the conversion rate of a short-tail keyword is low. This means that because of the competitive nature of short-tail keywords, the level of generating leads through your audience or website visitors is low.

For example, say you have a short-tail keyword performing well in search engine which drives about 100,000+ traffic monthly to your webpage(s), the conversion rate might not be more than 100.

Another disadvantage of short-tail keywords is that they are too specific and less targeted to be mapped out for closely related keywords when an internet user sends a query to the search engine.

• Pros and Cons of using a Long-Tail Keyword

For Long-tail keywords, there is less competition in getting highly ranked for it.
When you choose a long tail keyword, the traffic volume is often low compared to the volume of traffic guaranteed when a short-tail keyword is used.

It is important to note that this low traffic turnover could be a bad thing for some specific niche(s).

However, if you operate an e-commerce website and your marketing strategy is to cater to specific customers, you may consider adopting a long-tail keyword due to its capacity to expand your reach to more targeted potential customers.

Lastly, the most interesting attribute worthy of note about Long-Tail Keywords is the high rate of its conversion.

Even though these conversion rates differ with respect to what it is you’re selling and business location, you will still reap the dividends because website visitors have more probability of converting their visit to leads.

Types of Keyword Research Tools

Many paid and free Keyword research tools often provide detailed statistical analysis of keywords, giving vital information about search volume and forecast.

• Free Keyword Research Tools

The following are free keyword research tools which are equally effective in carrying out a comprehensive Keyword research needed for SEO.

#1 Google AdWords Planner

The tool is primarily designed to help in customizing an SEO Campaign when an online marketer decides to use Search Engine Marketing [SEM] approach in reaching out to its targeted internet users.

Nevertheless, you can use it to research organic keywords by customizing your results for your chosen keywords.

Step-by-step to using Google AdWords Planner for Keyword Research

• Sign-in to Google AdWords using your Gmail account.
• On the interface, search for new keyword and ad group ideas
• Review the search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups
• Get traffic forecasts for a list of keywords
• Multiply keyword lists to get new keyword ideas

To maximize the effectiveness of Google AdWords planner, you should pay attention to keyword ideas and ad group ideas, as both can help with SEO. Ad group ideas contain a set of related keywords that might not show up in general keyword ideas.

Pay attention to the metrics displayed in the statistical table presented featuring the average monthly searches, keyword competition and forecasts.

However, one major flaw of Google AdWords Planner is that it does not give a competitive analysis of specific keywords either on a country or regional basis.

#2 Keyword Tool

The trial version of Keyword Tool offers free Keyword suggestions for the first 750+ keyword. It features search volume, Cost-per-click (CPC), Pay-per-Click (PPC) metrics on each Keyword either short-tail or long-tail and competition.

It also allows you to export your results to Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file or Excel format and equally support Keyword data mining.

The tool works excellently if you are targeting a long-tail keyword or finding suggestions about high converting keywords.

Keyword Tool uses Google Autocomplete data to create its database in providing statistical Keyword result to all users.

• Paid Keyword Research Tool

For paid research tools, a subscriber will be open to having access to its limited features for a 30-days trial version.

There are popular paid keyword research tools which greatly provide data needed for search engine optimization, SEO copywriting, on-page optimization and SEM purposes.

Examples of some popular paid Keyword research tool includes; SEMrush, KwFinder, and SEOmoz.

#1 SEMrush Keyword Research Tool

SEMrush tool has multi-faceted impressive features when combining SEO with content marketing.

This tool offers in-depth Keyword analysis ranging from Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Volume, Keyword trends and Ad copies of listed searches.

Like other top keyword research tool, SEMrush collects keywords that have a search volume of at least ten queries per year on a regional and international basis.

For a search engine optimizer or a copywriter interested in Keywords competitive benchmarking, SEMrush possesses features which evaluate your competitors ranking based on several web performance indicators.

Furthermore, SEMrush also helps you launch into a competitor’s landing pages and workflow-using it as a guide to help you brainstorm your own content optimization.

#2 KwFinder

KWFinder has a long tail keyword research tool features which provide statistical keyword report for trends, search volume, CPC, and Keyword difficulty level in results.

If researcher seeks to evaluate what domains are targeting the same choice keyword you pick, KwFinder offers comprehensive insights into the page’s backlinks, social shares, and traffic of your competitor’s webpage containing your desired keyword.

Another dimension of this Keyword research tool is that it supports content marketing in relation to local SEO specifics of country, town or city.

#3 SEOmoz

This Research tool combines critical features from Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, and Related Searches.

With SEOmoz, an SEO expert or copywriter could attempt to develop lists of keywords and use Moz keyword explorer to get more insights into the performance of these keywords.

Keyword Planner also offers an in-depth analysis of why certain pages rank higher in SERPs based on your respective Keyword competitors.

Keyword Research and Local SEO

The visibility of your webpage(s) on search engine top rankings could be highly demanding. But if you have the right SEO strategy, I believe you should be able to compete with established SEO agencies in your country or location.

To maximize Keyword for Local SEO, the starting point is for you to make a list of keywords which internet users send a query to the web search engine based on your geographical location.

Once you get the less competitive keywords, you need to optimize your landing page features to reflect what your prospective site visitors could be looking for, be it a product or services.

Ensure that you get your website enlisted on Google’s business directory as this helps in mapping out the geographical location of your business including other critical success factors central to increasing your website’s visibility.

Keyword Research and SEO Copywriting

Writing for SEO is critical to ensuring that your site gets more targeted to your prospective clients.

However, SEO Copywriting has evolved over the last couple of years which saw a lot of copywriters engage in Keyword stuffing of the chosen keyword in the title tag of the webpage.

Contemporarily, the starting point of SEO copywriting is Keyword Research.

Depending on your choice focus keyword, Keyword research helps in generating related terms or searches which invariably gives an intensive support to getting your content easily understood and indexed by web crawlers.

Keyword Research and SEO Techniques

Lastly, we take a smooth ride into the significance of Keyword research to different SEO techniques like; White-Hat, Black-Hat and Grey-Hat SEO.

#1 Keyword Research and White-Hat SEO

For long-term and ethical SEO experts, White-Hat SEO seeks to improve the visibility of a webpage using SEO Copywriting, Keyword analysis, link-building and On-Page optimization of their website.

Adopting Keyword Research to promote your White-Hat SEO campaigns, you are targeting some long-term returns and not the quicker benefit which Black-Hat SEO guarantees.

#2 Keyword Research and Black-Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to the use of unethical techniques of getting a webpage(s) ranked for SEO. While paying a special focus on beating the robotic intelligence of the web crawlers.

This approach which does not support approved search engine guidelines often comes through keyword stuffing, insertion of invisible text, the creation of doorway pages and the conjoining of unrelated keywords to a webpage content, otherwise called page swapping- {changing the webpage entirely after it has been ranked by search engines}.

Keyword Research is often overly manipulated while adopting the Black-Hat technique and this result in Keyword stuffing in each of the paragraphs contained on a webpage.

#3 Keyword Research and Grey-Hat SEO

This is the extreme of both White-Hat and Black-Hat SEO techniques. It borders on the hacking activities of hackers into a ranked webpage(s).

Most times, Grey-Hat SEO often land the source of such search engine activity into litigation and the eventual black-listing of such website.

Here, Keyword Research is not needed by the agent of such unethical hacking before a webpage can be infiltrated or ranked in the web search engine.


Source: www.seofingers.com/keyword-research