Keyword research is important because it can reveal vital information to grow the traffic and revenue for your website. The keyword research process can help you discover which words and phrases your target audience is actively looking for in the search engines, the competitiveness of those terms, the amount of traffic each one can potentially bring to your website, and an estimate of how valuable those keywords can be for your business.
Keyword research is a crucial part of the content creation process because it helps you develop a more effective content publishing strategy. Although it can be fun—or even cathartic—to write about topics you’re interested in sharing with the world, the fact is there’s a high probability that you’ll end up with a bunch of articles on your website that people are not interested in reading if that content is not centered around specific keywords.
In other words, all of the effort you put into writing and publishing content that you think is worthy of being found on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing will most likely be wasted because your articles won’t get the traffic or attention they deserve.
Understanding how to do keyword research is also beneficial for your website’s SEO. A good keyword research strategy can help you make better research-based decisions for optimizing new and existing content to improve its rankings in the search engines for specific terms.
Without doing keyword research, you would have no idea which words or phrases to include in your content to gain favor with the ranking algorithms. Instead, you would just be guessing at what search engines like Google want with no clear direction on which keywords actually matter the most for your website’s SEO.
Additionally, keyword research can help you determine which terms are worth pursuing or not for your website based on the level of competition in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, some keywords are very difficult to rank high for in the SERPs unless the website has a strong Domain Authority and/or individual Page Authority scores. And to secure those top spots in Google, Yahoo, and Bing often requires a strong backlink profile that many newer websites cannot compete with. This is a prime example of swimming in a red ocean that’s full of bloodthirsty sharks.
However, the opposite is also true.
Some keywords can easily be ranked in the top 10 SERP positions without needing powerful SEO metrics for the domain or individual web pages. But you wouldn’t know this unless you did good keyword research. This process is the only way you can find hidden gems like that to gain more website traffic without facing fierce competition in the SERPs. And this is a perfect example of swimming in a blue ocean with very few sharks around, which is exactly where you want to be as a website publisher.
Another important thing to think about with keyword research is the value that each phrase can bring to your business. The fact is every keyword is worth a price for both website publishers and advertisers. Some terms are worth a lot more money to both publishers and advertisers because those keywords offer a higher return on investment (ROI).
For example, a keyword that has high commercial intent, like “buy car insurance”, could be worth $50 or $60 for each Cost-Per-Click (CPC) a car insurance advertiser is willing to pay to get a hot lead to their website. On the other hand, some keywords have little to no commercial value at all (e.g., $0.10 or less CPC value) and are only good for bringing in new website visitors for brand awareness.
Fortunately, the keyword research process can help you uncover the best terms that can deliver the highest ROI for each article you publish and optimize for SEO.
With all that being said, when you understand how to do keyword research in the most efficient way, as it’s outlined later in this playbook, you’ll be able to develop a more effective content publishing strategy that can get you closer to your website goals.
The fact is that well-thought-out keyword research can drive tremendous results for your online business. Not only does it help you increase your website’s overall visibility in the SERPs, but it also works to bring in higher levels of traffic and total revenue through data-driven insights.
In other words, you’ll no longer have to guess what works to achieve better—and faster—results for your website when you’re publishing quality content based on keyword research and optimizing it for SEO.
Keep Reading the Free Online Version
- Next Chapter: Types of Keywords
- Previous Chapter: What Is Keyword Research?
- Back to the Table of Contents
Get the Paperback Book Version
