What are Keywords?

Keywords are the words and phrases that identify what people are searching for. They also describe the topics you write about and bridge the gap between your content and your potential audience.

Keyword research is the practice of finding the terms that people enter into search engines so that you can create valuable content around these keywords and rank up to direct more traffic to your website.

Why are they used?

Keyword research is a crucial part of SEO with your keyword being an important SEO ranking factor. Get it right so that Google understands what your content is all about. Knowing your audience is equally important because only when you finally know your target audience, you can optimize your content to deliver the answers they need. Keyword research not only supports SEO but also marketing and promotional activities including PPC advertising and email marketing.

 Keywords Research Guide:

1. Know who your competitors are.
2. Make a list of their URLs.
3. Use AHREFs tool for Keyword research.
4. Copy the URL and paste it in the Site Explorer section.
5. Go to Organic Keywords section.
6. Find the keywords used by your competitors.
7. Factors to consider when choosing the desired Keyword: Keyword Difficulty (KD) and Volume

(Keyword difficulty depends on the number of websites competing to rank higher on that particular keyword. Mainstream and broad keywords have a quite high keyword difficulty. Initially, you can prefer Keywords with KD upto 2)

8. Volume of a keyword is the number of users searching for that keyword per month. You’d definitely want more people searching for the keyword you wrote your content around. You can consider Volume >1000 a decent volume to start with.

(Keyword Difficulty and Volume are the 2 major factors that help you better understand the variety of keywords and come up with the most effective ones. The key point to be noted here is that ranking on the first page for 10 low volume keywords is far better than not ranking on any high volume keyword)

Then what?

Consider these rules and come up with unique keywords. For each keyword, come up with at least 5-10 LSI words. Use these LSI words in your content.

What are LSI words?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI helps search engines provide more relevant results when people search, part of a good keyword research strategy involves finding LSI keywords to use in your content. A good tool for finding LSI keywords is LSIGraph, which gives you a longer list than the eight or so terms Google provides. Use these LSI words in your content to strengthen your SEO game.

How to use Keywords in your website?

For WordPress sites, one can download Yoast SEO plugin which gives you a thorough insight of your on-page SEO. Yoast SEO premium gives you an option to use a multiple number of focus keywords for a single piece of content. Generally, one focus keyword for one page/post would suffice to rank your page high on Google ranking.

There are a number of Google Ranking Factors(more about them later) that need to be taken care of but amongst all, keyword research is the most crucial one. Spend more time on Keyword research, plan your keywords wisely, use them accordingly and things will start falling into place.

Alok Paul

Co-Founder of Prime Seller Hub.