Keyword research has remained a constant in a rapidly changing search landscape. If you’re an inbound marketer looking to optimize your website, understanding how to do keyword research is a must.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research helps you find your SEO sweet spot — the overlap of keywords that aren’t too hard to rank for and keywords that you can confidently produce excellent content on. It also identifies the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google.

People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online, so if your content successfully gets in front of your audience, you stand to gain more traffic.

Therefore, you should be targeting those searches with content that features those keywords in a meaningful way.

Additionally, inbound methodology focuses less on creating content around what we want to tell people. Instead, we should be creating content around what people want to discover.

In other words, our audience is coming to us for helpful content that provides the answers they’re looking for. And it all begins with keyword research.

Benefits of Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research has many benefits, the most popular being:

Marketing Trend Insight

Conducting effective keyword research can provide insights into current marketing trends and help you center your content on relevant topics and keywords your audience is looking for.

Traffic Growth

When you identify the best-fitting keywords for the content you publish, the higher you’ll rank in search engine results — and the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.

Customer Acquisition

If your content meets the needs of your users, adding a strong call-to-action will lead them into the buyer journey from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.

For instance, the Purranormal Detective Agency would do better to produce excellent content on the broader topic of paranormal investigators, which has a monthly search volume (MSV) of 800.

Keywords vs. Topics

“Search intent” is something I frequently hear about from HubSpot SEOs. That’s because the reason a user types in a particular keyword matters — a lot.

Our content has to solve users’ problems. If you found your way to this article via the search term “SEO keyword strategy,” we have to anticipate your questions on this topic. And then answer them.

SEO is evolving at breakneck speed, but keyword research is still foundational to search intent. It tells you what topics people care about and how popular those topics actually are among your audience.

The operative term here is “topics,” plural. By researching keywords with a high volume of monthly searches, you can identify and sort your content into topics or buckets that you’ll use to create content. For more Queries You can contact us.