Uncomplicate- How to do keyword research
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Keyword research is the foundation for great marketing. A lot rides on it. Ask any marketer and they’ll tell you that it is not an easy task.
We had Damon Burton, President, SEO National, break it down for us.
The first step is to know what keywords to monetize for. For you to do that you need to know if people are even searching for that keyword. The keyword needs to have a good search volume. Next is to gauge how hard is it to compete and who you are up against? A website like answerthepublic.com can help you figure that out. The website will tell you what people are searching for.
Imagine that you sell shoes. The website will give the who, what, when, where, and why about shoes. “And so from there, you can go.. okay, I can answer these questions that people are already asking. And so that’s going to help you identify keywords that you can monetize, and that your audience wants to know the answers to. That’ll bring them to your website,” said Damon.
Now, you have a list of keywords that you can target, but you still need to figure out the word that can bring in the most traffic. Your ‘winner’ word in a sense. You can use a Google Keyword Planner for this (Psst..it is free). It’ll give you the search volume of the keywords.
“Now, once you narrow that list down further, then you want to figure out which keywords have the least competition because you are high search volume, low competition,”said Damon.
The smart thing to do is to always keep drilling down. Let’s take the example of shoes again. If you were to google shoes, you’ll get, say, seven billion results. Women’s shoes could bring it down to two billion, women’s hiking shoes could further bring it to, say, 600 million.
“The more specific we get, the lesser is the competition. So, if you get somewhere in the range of one million to 20 million, that’s kind of an average competition. That sounds like a lot, but SEO wise, that’s manageable,” said Damon.
You now have the keywords which have good search volume, and lower competition. All you need to do now is to frame your content accordingly.
What’s more?
TFIDF. What’s that?
It stands for Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency. Search for TFIDF software and choose the one you are comfortable with (Damon uses WebSite Auditor). Once you type in your keyword, it will find which websites rank on page one for that keyword and give the list of the top 10. It will analyze the site’s structure and content.
“It will say that the word shoes is in their title tag and meta description…. and they have an average of an H1 tag and H2 tag and it shows up this many times. They have an average of 1000 words per page, and within those 1000 words, it says shoes seven times. So, this is an exact science,” said Damon.
This exercise will give you a direction and help you understand what it takes to rank on top for that keyword.
But all said and done, keyword research can only get better with practice. Have any other suggestions, leave them in the comments below.
