Search engine optimization and keyword research can be quite overwhelming, especially considering that search engines change the rules rather often. That’s why things that were working just fine a year ago won’t be as efficient now.
Search engines became smarter, and their bots will understand what the page is about even if it doesn’t have classic keywords in its content. However, it still important to include them in texts to improve chances that your website will appear on the highest positions possible in the search. This article will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to perform keyword research to improve your SEO.
Why should you perform keyword research?
Many factors impact the positions of a website in search engines. First of all, its availability and loading speed matter — sites that are often down and load slowly usually lose users which forces search engines to lower its rank. However, if your website is hosted by King Servers, you won’t have this issue. All our servers offer high bandwidth, and we monitor them constantly to make sure they’re available — with King Servers you get to enjoy 99.95-100% uptime.
Then the content optimization remains. As we’ve already mentioned, you can simply create text for your pages without using relevant keywords, and there are chances that your site still gets to appear in search results on relatively high positions. But you also might create content that has low search volume or mismatch intent — then your site will lose organic traffic.
Keywords are words and phrases users enter into a search field to find relevant websites. Using such query in texts on your website you’ll improve the traffic as search engines will consider your site relevant for certain keywords.
Keyword research might seem to be a simple process — just gather search phrases and implement them in your content. However, there is more to it than just adding keywords in your texts.
Determine your topic
So, the first step is to understand which topic your website covers. For instance, the topic of King Servers is “servers and hostings”. Thus, our keyword list includes phrases such as dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, server protection, security, and so on.
Often, one website covers several topics. Take some e-commerce sites for example. Let’s say, it sells humidifiers and steamers — that’s two topics. Each of them should have its own list of keywords.
The best way to begin your keyword research is to create a spreadsheet with three columns:
- Keyword
- Monthly search volume
- Intent
If you have several topics, you can create a separate tab for each of them. If you feel confused about monthly search volume and intent columns, don’t worry. We will cover these details in the next step.
Choose the tool and begin the research
There are quite many different keyword research tools, and you can choose between paid and free ones. Paid tools like Moz or Semrush usually offer additional features besides keyword research — such services can become your primary instruments for SEO. However, you can use free tools and get just as satisfactory results as you’d get with paid ones.
Among free tools, we want to highlight Google Keyword Planner as it’s very simple and easy to use. All you need to do is to create a Google Ads profile and then enter your topics into the Keyword Planner. This tool will fetch you all the relevant keywords with details about them.
Another way to perform research is to enter the main keywords from your topic into the Google search and just let the system show you autocomplete options. For example, when we enter “buy hosting”, we can see options like “buy hosting and domain” or “buy hosting for the website”. Additionally, you can pay attention to the “People also ask” section that appears when you search for something. However, these two approaches should be used for finding additional keywords — focus on the Keyword Planner or any paid tool for creating the main list.
What is the monthly search volume?
Monthly search volume or MSV is the estimate of how many users are looking for a particular keyword within a month. The Keyword Planner and paid tools will provide you with this feature, and you should pay attention to it. Website owners often succumb to the desire to use only the highest searched phrases thinking that it will bring their site to success. However, the higher the MSV is, the harder it is to compete for high ranks using it because there already are websites that have a rather strong game with these keywords.
The best approach is to use a mix of high, medium, and low search volume keywords to cover as many queries as possible.
What is the intent?
The intent is the reason why a user is entering a certain phrase into the search field. For instance, they can enter “dedicated server” to look for a provider to buy one, or they simply might be looking for some guidance on how to choose a server. Thus, the intention is different.
You can check the intent of a keyword by entering it in Incognito Mode and looking at the pages that appear in the search results. They can be transactional ones aimed at capturing leads, resource pages that contain educational information, or compilation ones that allow a user to choose a certain service or brand.
Additionally, you can change the intent of keywords by adding words like “buy” or “how to” to the phrase.
When you fill in the “Intent” column, you will be able to quickly choose keywords for pages with different goals.
Use your keyword list
Now as your research is completed, you can begin optimizing your content. It’s important that you don’t just mindlessly stuff texts with these queries. They should be implemented naturally to fit in the flow of the text, and you shouldn’t go overboard with the number of keywords. Ideally, texts should have around 1-2 keywords per 100 words. Also, remember about using a mix of phrases with different monthly search values, and choose phrases with the correct intent to fit the goal of your page.
