Knowing your target market enables you to understand and deliver products and services that satisfy peoples` needs.
And if you meet your audience`s needs, it`s easy to convince them to be customers.
Keywords are the tools to help you know what your audience needs. They are the words people use when searching for products or services online.
Search engines align readers` searches with your content based on your keywords' relevance to the search queries.
Learning how to do keyword research helps produce content that aligns with your audience's intent and makes it easy to convert.
Here is how you can do it:
Brainstorm Keyword Ideas Related to Your Business
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| Image by Andrea Piacquadio: Pexels |
Solving problems is what triggers people to search online. As a marketer, those challenges should be the basis of your keyword research.
To better understand readers` pain points, you must put yourself in your audience`s position. Then think of the words they would use when searching for services or products related to your niche.
As you brainstorm, consider your content purpose and ensure to make it relevant to the customer's intent.
Ask yourself if you want to create content based on informational, transactional, or commercial intent.
Here is how you can properly utilize these intent types to create better keywords:
Informational Intent
This is when you want to teach people about something.
In that case, your keywords involve words like
- How
- What
- When
- Why
However, sometimes these question words might not be used, but they still should be implied.
An example is the keyword make money online. This keyword`s intent aim is to teach people ways to generate income online.
It answers questions such as
- How to make money online
- What jobs to do to make money online
- Why you should consider learning to make money online
Commercial Intent
This is when a person has the intent of buying a product or service in the future.
Such people already know the products they need and are looking for reviews, comparisons, discounts, etc.
For this intent, people use keywords like
- Affordable
- Product A vs. Product B
- Products reviews
- Cheapest
- Best
If you are selling cars, for example, you can target this intent using keywords like
- Affordable Subaru
- Range Rover vs. Land Rover Price Ranges
- Cheapest Canters
- Best Luxurious Cars
Transactional Intent
People use transactional keywords when they have decided to buy and are looking for where to purchase.
Such people already know the type of product or service they want.
If your website sells what they want and it surfaces in the search results, you have a great chance to make sales.
To appear in these searches, you should target keywords like
- For sale
- Buy
- Discount
- Price
- Purchase
If you sell laptops, for instance, you can use keywords like
- HP laptops for sale
- Buy HP laptops
- Samsung laptop discounts
- Lenovo laptop prices
- Purchase Laptops
Use Search Engines to Find More Keyword Suggestions
After brainstorming your keywords, you`ll have to confirm if they are what people search for.
To do that, paste the keywords in the search engines and search.
Below the search results page, you`ll see an additional search section. You will find recently used keywords relevant to yours.
Here is what it looks like:
.png "Search engine keywords")
That will give you insights into what people type when searching for products or services related to yours.
Besides, you can use Google keyword autosuggest or autocomplete to find more keyword suggestions.
To do that, paste your keyword in the search engine bar, and then hit the space bar and type any letter. You will get various suggestions, which are recent searches related to your keyword.
Here is a screenshot example:
.png "Keyword autocomplete/autosuggest")
List the relevant keywords you find as well so you can have various options to choose from.
Do Competitor Analysis
The keywords your competitors rank for can be effective for your marketing campaign, too.
To confirm how your competitors perform with keywords like yours, do competitor research.
You can do that by typing your seed (short-tail) keywords in the search engines and searching the high-ranking websites.
Then pick the websites that are relevant to your niche.
Afterward, put them in competitor analysis tools to see the traffic the pages get on the specified keywords.
The purpose is not to copy people`s content; it`s to use keyword variations that have a high opportunity to bring traffic.
For example, for content about email marketing, if you do competitor research, you can find keyword variations like
- Email marketing strategy
- Email marketing plan
- Email marketing skills
- Email marketing for beginners
- Email marketing guide
Collect various related web pages and paste the URLs into competitor research tools to find the ones with high traffic.
To do that, use tools like
To use these tools, paste the page link in the tool and click on the search button.
You will get the pages` amount of traffic, conversions, and sources of traffic.
After getting the results, list the keywords with high traffic and incorporate them into your keyword.
For instance, you may find that the “email marketing strategy and email marketing for beginners” keywords perform better.
In that case, your keyword can be “email marketing strategy for beginners”.
That will enable you to increase the chances of ranking for both the “marketing strategy and email marketing for beginners” keywords.
Read more about how to conduct competitive analysis here.
Examine Keywords with Keyword Research Tools
By now, you should have a good number of keywords, but how do you choose the best for your content? That is when keyword research tools help.
They give more insights about the quality of your keywords based on difficulty, volume, and trends.
Here is how.
Keyword Volume
The aim of internet marketing is to avail your content to the readers, but that can`t happen if nobody searches for your content.
Content appearing on readers` search results is determined by how many times your keyword gets searched monthly. That`s what keyword volume means.
Keywords with high search volume get many searches and vice versa.
That`s why you should research your keyword volume before creating your content. It will enable you to increase the chances of your content being read.
The best keyword volume to target is 100–1000 monthly searches.
Keywords with such volume have the potential to bring much organic traffic.
Keyword Difficulty
A small site can't rank for a keyword that many authoritative sites rank for. And that`s what keyword difficulty means—how hard it is for content to rank for a particular keyword.
A keyword is more difficult if it has over 70% difficult score. 30%–70% is the best keyword difficult score to go for.
Although that`s the case, choosing a low-competitive keyword that has low keyword volume doesn`t profit, even when it`s less difficult.
If a keyword has a high volume but is difficult to rank for, you can still use it but ensure to make it a long—tail keyword.
Long-tail keywords are more specific.
Here is an example of how you can make the keyword blogging a long-tail one:
If you are in the clothing niche and want to use such a keyword, you can make it T-shirt blogging ideas in Kenya.
This keyword has a high chance of appearing in the searches considering it targets a particular product and place.
If you use only the keyword, blogging to create a broad keyword such as blogging tactics, you will not easily rank. This is because there are many authoritative sites already ranking for that keyword.
Here are some of the best keyword research tools you can use to find keyword volume and difficulty:
To use these tools, paste your keywords and search and you will get the complete results.
Keyword Trends
This defines how popular a keyword may be.
A keyword is trending when it gets many searches, and as a marketer, you should know how keyword popularity increases or decreases.
You don`t have to pick a keyword with high volume today, which might decrease soon and deny you traffic.
Keyword trend tools can measure whether keyword volume decreases or increases.
They will help you know the trending topics in a particular time and place and whether the trend fades or increases.
To track keyword trends, use tools like
Use Relevant Keywords
Using high-volume keywords can make your content rank high, but it's not profitable if the traffic doesn`t convert.
To increase the potential to make purchases, use keywords aligned with your audience persona.
Audience persona refers to characters that represent your target audience.
These characters are described by peoples` demographics such as
- Age
- Gender
- Marital status
- Occupation
- Religion
If you sell clothes, for instance, you cannot use the same keywords for casual clothes content as you would for the official ones.
So, for casual clothes, you can use keywords like affordable jeans, casual bottom-down blouses, turtleneck t-shirts, etc.
For official clothes content, you may use keywords like an official blouse, formal coat, official trousers, etc.
That`s to say, use language that suits your target audience. Use formal language to a formal audience and casual language to a casual audience.
Creating such specific keywords will draw quality traffic to your content and increase the potential to make sales.
To check the audience persona relevant to your keywords, you can use tools like
To use them, you only need to paste your keywords in the tool and search. It will reveal the audience persona that`s relevant to your content.
Conduct Proper Keyword Research and Raise Your Site`s Rank
Content is useful only if it`s searchable, and that`s when the keywords used align with what people are searching for.
Furthermore, they should be relevant to the readers` persona and answer their intent.
That`s possible if you use keywords that fulfill your purpose, which involves using informational, commercial, or transactional keywords.
Besides, use high-volume keywords but make them long-tail. That will make them more specific and less competitive, hence increasing your rank.
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