The study of keywords is one of the first SEO actions that we must carry out. Once we know the customer and their project, its product offering and end customers as well as their website, the next step of the SEO strategy is to conduct a study of keywords or keyword research.
There are frankly improvable websites, and before doing any SEO action, it would be convenient to improve them from a technical and structural point of view. But to prepare the web architecture, it is important that we also have a previously carried out keyword study.
Here we will indicate the elements you need to do a keyword study, which is only part of a complete SEO audit, which includes much more information.
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What Are The Keywords?
Keywords or search keywords are those terms that users type or search when they want to find certain information.
For example, if you have an online luggage store, your keywords will be those that users who want to buy luggage would type in Google to find stores like yours. For example: “online luggage store”, “buy luggage online”, “buy luggage”, etc.
Keyword Types
Keywords can be of various types. Commonly in SEO, we call them short-tailed or long-tailed.
- Short tail: are those keywords that have many searches, perhaps thousands of searches per month. Therefore, they are also usually the ones with the most competitive on Google. They are usually made up of 1 or 2 words, sometimes more.
- Long tail: these are those keywords that have few Google searches per month, maybe a couple of hundred, but have less competition. They are usually made up of 4 or 5 words, or even more. Sometimes they are whole sentences.
Getting # 1 on Google for a short tail keyword is not easy. Many times it takes months and years of work. On the other hand, if you manage to rank for many keywords that are not very competitive and with few searches, it is easier for you to be # 1 and that you can get the most of that traffic.
When users put a word on Google, a series of results, ads, and other elements come out. You have to compete with all of that. Generally, organic results usually take 40% of the visits (it depends on many factors), and as we go down positions, we obtain a lower percentage of clicks or CTR.
This is not really an exact science. There are keywords that, for example, have YouTube videos positioned at the top, and sometimes it can be very difficult to get a good percentage of clicks, even if it is the first result.
How To Do A Keyword Study
To do a keyword study, we need to use one of these tools:
- Google Keyword Planner
- SemRush
- Sistrix
- Keywordtool.io
- Dinorank
Many of these tools are paid or require you to have an open advertising campaign, such as Google Keyword Planner, which is Google’s keyword planner.
Once you choose one of these tools, you can type random keywords related to your business website. In these tools, you can find suggested keywords.
So, the idea is that you download all the keywords with their searches in Excel so that you can organize your keywords.
From there, what it is about is to order the ones you need and discard those that you are not going to use.
If, for example, you have six service pages, the ideal would be to choose the main keyword for the content of that URL, and about ten secondary keywords that we will introduce throughout the text (and which should be related to the main keyword). This is very important; it is not about choosing a keyword and repeating it lots of times.
It is about creating an original and natural text focused on the user, which also includes the keywords related to which a user can locate you. Because maybe you put in the text “online luggage store”, but there are many users who also search for other keywords such as “buy luggage”, “buy luggage”, etc.
What Does Keyword Research Help You?
Keyword research helps you in several ways:
- It helps you avoid cannibalizations: you have to select specific keywords for specific URLs and texts, preventing pages oriented to a specific product, for example, from being positioned better than our generic pages, and vice versa.
- It helps you get more traffic: if I know what users usually write the most in Google, I can create the contents of the web orienting it to those keywords. In this way, our texts will be better worked for SEO.
- Helps you know related keywords: You can’t imagine all the ways users search for information. Knowing them will give you ideas to create related content in your URLs.
Also Read : Differences Between Short Tail And Long Tail