When it comes to digital marketing, one of the most important things to get right is SEO. With good SEO, you’ll become more visible to search engines like Google, which will in turn help more customers and clients to find you. With that in mind, then, it should be obvious that optimising your website and your social media communications for SEO is of paramount importance. How can you do that, though?
One of the biggest parts of online SEO is keyword research. This essentially involves looking for keywords associated with your chosen field and trying to incorporate them into your site and your pages. Why is keyword research so important, though? In short, you can’t really build an effective SEO strategy without keyword research, so let’s talk a little bit about why keyword research is so important for SEO success.
It’ll help you compete with other sites
You might have the best service in the world, but it won’t matter if customers aren’t finding you online. Unfortunately, offering a high-quality product or service is only part of the battle; the rest is publicising what you’re offering and making sure that it’s visible. If you don’t do this, then you can be absolutely sure that your competitors will, and that’s partly why keyword research is so important; if you’re not using the right keywords, then people will find websites that are.
It sets you apart in terms of quality
If you do serious, high-quality keyword research, then you’re already putting yourself head and shoulders above a lot of other sites out there. Google has implemented plenty of updates over the last few years in order to target problems like keyword stuffing and black hat SEO, but many website owners don’t know about that, so they continue using unscrupulous techniques to try and artificially draw users to their sites. If you do proper keyword research, you won’t run into this problem.
You can identify potential niches
Within your industry or area, there are bound to be niches that are underserved. If you conduct keyword research, you might be able to identify a few of these niches and try to serve them with your site’s content, perhaps even branching out your business to approach those niches. If you see keywords that are being searched for a lot, for instance, but sites aren’t trying to target those keywords, then you’ve just identified a potential business opportunity for yourself.
You can build a content strategy around keywords
While it’s not always a good idea to build your entire content strategy with keywords in mind, they should at the very least inform what you’re doing when it comes to content. If your site isn’t currently generating content – blog posts, for instance, or social media engagement -then it definitely should be. Using keywords, you can see what people are searching for and construct content they might want to see; for instance, if people want to know how to repair broken parts of a game controller, you could create content based on that, especially if you don’t see any online right now that’s competing with you.
You won’t bring in the wrong people
Some recent Google updates have been targeted at sites that don’t bring in the right audiences. If, for instance, you have a site focused on audio and related equipment, then using keywords for movies or motorsport isn’t going to help you. However, if you can identify areas related to sound and audio in those niches, then you can use the right keywords to build a new content strategy that will attract new audiences without upsetting the search engine algorithms. Keyword research will help you do this more delicately.
You could save money
While saving money through good keyword research isn’t guaranteed, there are potential scenarios where doing keyword research ahead of time could save you from making costly decisions. For example, if you are trying to hit a particular keyword with your content, doing research could show you that others are also trying to hit that keyword and that it wouldn’t be worth your while. You can then move on and focus on a different keyword that’s more suited to your strengths. That way, you haven’t wasted time and money on creating content that wasn’t going to get anywhere.
You can re-promote evergreen content
With good keyword research, content that might have missed its chance the first time around could suddenly become relevant again. If you’ve written a piece of content that was ahead of its time, keyword research could show you that the topic about which you wrote is suddenly gaining traction, and now could be the perfect time to promote that content and repost it on social media. This could lead to you gaining a huge chunk of viewers that you might have missed if you hadn’t done the keyword research.
You can boost your search engine rank
Last but not least, keyword research is important because you could increase your search engine rank significantly. If you do proper keyword research, then Google will rank you more highly when it crawls your website, which hopefully means you’ll get more visitors. High-quality content will then help you to retain those visitors and gain some long-term fans, which means that your future content will have a bigger audience. There really is no downside to doing proper keyword research.
