Keyword research is the single most important task a content writing team or and SEO Strategist performs. We all know it helps you determine what to write, but what other benefits does this critical step provide?
User searches on Google, keyword research, and SEO do have a strong connection. Most people don’t remember more than a handful of websites. For everything else, there is Google. You just type in what you want to know, and Google will take you to the best possible answer to your query.
And that’s because Google knows which website has the best answer. If you are creating a website or content for a website, and you want to rank higher, keyword research and leveraging that keyword research in your SEO strategies are extremely important.
Benefits Of Keyword Research
If you are still wondering, why is keyword research important for SEO? Some of its benefits might help clear things up.
Marketing
Keyword research aligns your user demand with your marketing efforts. It allows you to understand user intentions better, which in turn lets you use your marketing “mojo” more potently. The frequency and seasonality of the searches and related keywords can also help you keep your marketing fresh and relevant. It also tips the cost-benefit analysis in your favor, if you go towards paid search.
If your product/service line is extensive, keywords research can allow you to arrange your content in a way that appeals to most of your website visitors. Creating content and clustering them together into silos of content. This provides both the user and the search engines with an extensive library of content, showcasing your knowledge on whatever topic you are writing about.
Conciseness
Despite living in the most rapidly evolving times, we humans are creatures of habit, and we seek familiarity. This is why it’s so difficult to keep the focus “external” when you are writing about your product and services because it’s something you thoroughly familiar with. Keyword research helps by putting you in your user’s shoes.
When you know what they are searching for, what aspects of your product/services they are most interested in, and what is it that they don’t want to know, you can create content that’s concise and hits the mark. By helping you avoid internal jargon, keyword research allows you to write what your audience wants to read using the words that they use.
Ranking
Better ranking and the generation of more traffic are two of the core aims of SEO. They also happen to be two of the major benefits of keyword research. If you know the keywords (both root and related) your target audience is searching for, and you can create content to satisfy them better than the current top ranking sites”
It’s, of course, more complicated than that. There are many other variables in play here. But establishing yourself as an authority in a niche is one of the most trusted ways to rank higher, and that’s something keyword research helps you with by staying focused on what the search user is looking for.
Focus
Content creators can stay focused on selecting and working around a few SEO keywords. Otherwise, they might create several tangential posts and write articles that are barely connected to the main theme. This will increase the “volume” without actually adding any “weight” to it. The result would be less dense and less potent.
Here, keyword research almost acts as a playbook. By identifying the right keywords (and most important variations), you can keep your eye on the goal and not waste your energies (and resources) in creating content that doesn’t add value to your SEO.
Conversions
Any topic about the importance of keyword research in SEO might be incomplete without addressing conversions. When your keyword research helps you create content aligned with what your audience wants to read, is concise, potent, laser-focused, and ranks, it’s a lot easier to convert leads.
Keyword research helps you stay relevant, which results in more conversions. And that’s equally important for both seasonal and evergreen content pieces. The latter allows you to create helpful resources, establishing you as an authority. And seasonal content brings more traffic to your site.
Expansion
As a content creator, identifying user intent is important. It allows you to satisfy a keyword and own a topic. But to grow beyond that point requires you to connect the dots. Google knows what the search user is likely going to search, even before they search it. The related terms section at the bottom of Google’s Search Results provides an excellent resource for keyword research. This section tells you all the topics that are closely related to the original target term. Creating good content for these terms both establishes you as an authority and expands the possible reach you have in the search engines.
Competition
When you are searching for keywords, it’s a common practice to learn from your peers, especially the highest-ranking peers. You learn what they are doing and how they are doing it. If you can improve upon what everyone else is doing, you can get a competitive edge. But it’s a constant process.
Insights
When you conduct SEO keyword research, you don’t just learn many things like current market trends, shifting user intent, related topics, etc. You are dissecting what your target market is searching for, and how they are searching for it when you perform keyword research. This results in a wealth of insights that you can apply to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns.
These insights go way beyond the scope of your website/blog alone. They can help you with social media marketing, paid campaigns, influencer marketing, etc. You can even use these insights to improve your product/services.
Summary
Keyword research is a crucial part of content creation, and by extension, SEO. Once you’ve finalized the reason behind creating a website/blog, keyword research is part of the first steps you take towards your goal. It shows you where to start from, how to start, and how to approach the whole content creation process and effectively populate your website.
Good quality research allows you to create effective content right from the beginning. And you don’t have to prune away irrelevant and deadweight pages, just to improve your SEO and SERP rankings.