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Last Updated on 3 weeks by Gülenber Han
The question of how to do keyword research is important for SEO. Creating content without keyword analysis will not do your site any good. Your content will not be listed on the search results page as you wish, and your site will have low traffic. Choosing the right keywords will make your site’s ranking on the search results page meaningful. At this stage, you need to know the answer to the question of how to do keyword research for SEO. A keyword analysis is an SEO study that studies popular words and phrases and the way people enter search engines. Researching keywords gives Digital marketers a better understanding of the demand for specific keywords and the requirements and challenges of competing for those terms in organic search results to guide their optimization efforts.

What Is Keyword Research?

 

Focus Keyword

To understand the answer to the question of how to do keyword research, you need to know the answer to the question of what is keyword research. A keyword analysis is about verifying how many times people search for certain keywords, as well as investigating the spelling that people use to research an idea or topic. As a result, analyzing popular keywords is not only a vital aspect of search engine optimization but also of content marketing in general. This research helps us learn more about user needs and stay up to date with the ever-changing spelling of the search environment. By researching the words people write to search engines and creating content with this research, it will provide more accurate traffic to your site. That’s why it’s important that you understand the answer to the question of how to do keyword research for SEO.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Since keyword analysis plays a direct role in the promotion of your site and your brand, in content production, in determining SEO and general marketing strategies and, when necessary, in determining the terms and phrases to be used in the creation of the entire promotion and promotion strategy of the site, SEO and all marketing processes in general are of great importance for their work. Therefore, it is of great importance to know the answer to the question of how to do keyword research.

The focus keywords determined by keyword analysis play a critical role in determining the areas where your site and the content you produce will be found on search engines and in which direction your site will evolve in the internet world. In this respect, keywords that we can call the destination of our site, its route, and keyword analyses are in most cases one of the important actors of our site’s SEO studies.

While correctly performed keyword analyses allow websites to grow rapidly and reach their users in a much more accurate and successful way, the keywords determined by unsuccessful analyses can negatively affect the growth rates of websites and cause the website to lag far behind its competitors in terms of traffic. In addition to the critical role it plays in creating website targeting and strategy, keyword analysis plays a critical role in understanding the search intent of potential users targeted by websites, determining their needs, and determining the behavioral profiles of the audience.

How to do Keyword Research?

 

Now that you know what keyword research is and its importance, you can learn the answer to the question of how to do keyword research for SEO. Keyword research starts with the main keyword or seed keyword that has an idea feature. This word can come from your industry knowledge or the products and services you offer. First, you need to create a keyword list. To diversify this list of keywords, write down terms you’ll discover as you browse websites and social networks. Once you have a Good Enough list, review and note how popular each keyword is and its position on search engine results pages for you and your competitors. Also, you can use tools for this. The Google Ads app is convenient and free for measuring keyword volume and competition values. However, Google Ads Keyword Planner does not show SERP results, that is, positions in search result rankings instantly. You need to use a separate app for SERP results. When you search for your main term in the application, you will get detailed information about the popularity of the word, and its degree of difficulty. This research will also bring new keyword ideas to your mind. However, the most important thing for keyword analysis to be successful is to work with an SEO agency.

Creating Your Seed List

The first step of the question of how to do keyword research for SEO is to create a seed list. A seed list is a collection of keyword suggestions. Make a list of the six keyword groups. Then, concentrating on brand and product terms, add keywords to the list using a combination of brainstorming and inquiry. You want this list to be comprehensive in terms of capturing everything your product does and the issues it answers, but you don’t have to be exhaustive in terms of synonyms or other phrases.

Research Your Audience

In the second step of how to do keyword research, you need to research your audience. In order to complete the keyword analysis process, which is an extremely difficult process, first thoroughly analyze the search purposes of the target audience, which you want to appear on Google and which you want to follow your site in general, the content they need, and the searches they perform. Almost every website has an organizational purpose and the categories and target audiences it plans to appeal to. While this goal or target is to produce policy-oriented news content on your site, as Digitalzade, our site can be SEO and Digital Marketing. In this context, it is important that you analyze the users who are interested in the category or categories that you are considering to start broadcasting life or that you intend to target material acquisitions and the search tendencies of these users.

Find The Search Terms In Use Now

If you’re asking how to do keyword research, you’ll also need to find currently used terms. To find out what search phrases people are using to find you, use your analytics tool, Google Webmaster Tools, and your blogs. Look at the phrases on your internal site search if you have access to it to see what people are looking for.

Check Out The Competition

Another step for the question of how to do keyword research for SEO is to check for competition. Observing the words that your competitors are ranking on Google and driving traffic to their site is an indispensable step of keyword analysis. It is quite natural for you to compete in similar words with the websites you offer content for similar target audiences. In the same way, websites that have started broadcasting much earlier than you or that have provided much more content entry may gain visibility in many more keywords by being one or a few steps ahead of you. At this point, you can use the paid analysis tools mentioned above to see which words your competitors are in, the competitive status of the related word, and how much traffic these words provide. The first thing we need to do in order to perform competitor analysis is to determine the sites that provide regular content entry for the audience we aim to attract to our site on Google. For example, since we are a blog site focused on digital marketing and SEO, our potential competitors will be sites that publish in these areas. In this context, the first thing we need to do is to search for SEO, which is a very generic keyword on Google.

Building Your Keyword List

Building Your Keyword List

One of the most important steps for the question of how to do keyword research is to build a keyword list. To begin, think about the things you wish to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You’ll come up with about 5-10 relevant subject buckets for your business, and you’ll use those topic buckets to help you come up with specific keywords later.

If you’re a frequent blogger, these are probably the themes you write about the most. Perhaps they’re the most often discussed issues in sales meetings. Put yourself in your buyer personas’ shoes: what subjects would your target audience search for that you’d like your company to be discovered for?

Group Words By Topic

If you want to get a successful result for the question of how to do keyword research for SEO, you need to classify words by title. You can insert more than one keyword at a time when you begin typing, but keep them thematically grouped as you go. If you offer both shoes and skirts, for example, you may put “shoes” and “heeled shoes” together, but skirts separately.

Under Match Types, Select Exact

Another answer to how to do keyword research is under match types and select exact. Exact Match returns the number of searches for that term and only that term. This is a more accurate and cautious estimate of the search traffic that a phrase may generate.

Select The Language And Location You’re Interested In

Choosing the language and location you are interested in is important for how to do keyword research. Set the filters to show only English speakers in Germany, for example. Local Monthly Searches will show you the number of people searching for your criteria.

Set Up Your Columns

Setting up your columns is essential to the question of how to do keyword research for SEO. Select the columns Competition and Local Monthly Searches from the drop-down menus. Other columns, such as estimated CPC, are available.

Download/My Keyword Ideas

Your results will be saved in a spreadsheet. As you add more seed phrases, the keyword ideas stay in the left column, so you can merely download them when you’re done. Therefore, download/my keyword ideas is important to the question of how to do keyword research for SEO.

Refining Your Keyword List

Now that you’ve compiled a nice list of keywords, it’s time to whittle it down to the top ones. This is especially crucial if you’re interested in how to do keyword research for SEO and create a keyword list for SEO, as the number of phrases you can realistically optimize for is limited. There are no hard-and-fast rules here; the goal is to delete words that aren’t very fascinating.

Keyword Category

Since you have many different keywords at your disposal and their values, you should choose the best ones. So, you need to know how to do keyword research for SEO. You can easily do this by making your list somehow ready to use. You do not need to create separate pages for these related keywords. You should go the way of targeting them with a single post. You should remember that sometimes even if you don’t mention the keyword in a particular article, you can get it to rank. This will be the first step you need to take when you want to shape the keyword list you have. You should decide contextually and logically which keywords will be included in the main group with which keywords and target them on a single page.

Competition

Competition, which is one of the most critical metrics you should pay attention to when choosing a keyword, is one of the most critical actors of your website’s rise strategy in the long run. The difficulty levels of the keyword are determined by the quality of the websites that are on the first pages of the keyword you choose in the analysis tools. For example, the search volume for the word laptop is 300,000 per month and its difficulty is stated as 91. The main reason why the difficulty level is specified as 91 out of 100 is that the quality of the websites on the first pages of the word (domain authority, page rank values, monthly traffic volumes, general authorities, etc.) is at very serious levels. This means that it is very difficult for newly established sites and medium-sized newly developing sites to rank in this word, especially to get to the first page in the short term.

Search Landscape

Understanding which websites rank for your keyword, as well as how difficult it will be to rank for the given term, gives valuable insight into the competition. Are there paid search ads at the top and right of the organic results? Usually, many search ads mean high-value keywords, and multiple search ads above organic results indicate a very lucrative and direct conversion keyword. See what shows up when you type some of your most critical phrases into Google (or another search engine). If you have a minor term with an uncertain meaning, consider removing it from the list. Also, for any off-topic results you find (keywords you don’t want your advertisements to display), you may start compiling a list of prospective negative keywords.

Semantic Grouping

The final answer to the question of how to do keyword research for SEO is semantic grouping. Create a column to organize your words thematically as you review them. For example, words like ‘what is keyword analysis’, ‘how to do keyword research’, and ‘keyword analysis tools’ can all be brought together under ‘keyword analysis’. These closely related phrases can then be used as PPC ad groups. If you come across a group with a large number of terms, you can choose to exclude some of the ones with fewer searches.

Selen Cetin

Selen Cetin graduated from Dokuz Eylul University, Department of Linguistics. She has been working as an SEO Specialist at Cremicro since 2022.

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