If you want to drive more useful organic search traffic to your website, you need to rank high on the search engines. This is something that can only be achieved with the help of SEO.

With a great SEO strategy and the right keywords, you’ll rise to the top of the ranking and increase your revenue steadily over time.

To know which keywords are going to be typed into search engines, and thus lead people to your website, you need to undertake the process of keyword research.

Keyword research is when you find out who your audience is, and what search queries they are looking for, in order to align with them. This makes keyword research a vital step in the SEO process, and it’s important to get it right.

Relevance – At the heart of Google’s algorithm is relevance. Google wants to show all its users only the most relevant content for their specific search needs.

Authority – The next thing Google wants is content from trusted sources. This means that content that comes from an expert or influential domain will rank higher in search engines than the same content on a random website.   

Search Volume – This is where you understand how many times a specific keyword is searched in Google each month, and this is intended to tell you how much traffic each keyword can bring.

Step #1. Know Your Audience. 

Before you start researching, you need to know who’s looking for what you’re offering. 

Within SEO, and overall, within running a business, understanding your target market is vital to know what to offer and when.  

In the industry, this is called buyer personas, and these are factors that make up your audience. By looking at your customers as individual people, you can humanise the process and take the sales element out of it, understanding this audience’s needs faster. 

Once you know your audience you can pinpoint the keywords they are using to find what they need. Additionally, you can use this data on social media ads and social media marketing overall. 

To know everything about your audience, this is what you need:

• Their gender
• Their age
• Their average income
• Their interests
• Their key problems that you can solve
• What they intend to accomplish
• How your products help them

Step #2 Know What Topics Are Relevant to You

When it comes to keywords, you need to be as specific as possible, and this is because there are millions of keywords for each topic. So, it’s important to brainstorm broad topics that relate to your business. You can do this by looking at the main focus of your website and noting the most common words, or you can list the services you provide your customers.  

For example, if you’re a florist, here are some topics you may have: 

•     Buy flowers
•     Flower delivery services
•     Flowers for occasions
•     Personalised flower arrangements

Step #3 Find specific keywords

When most people or businesses look for keywords they use keyword suggestion tools, and this is a matter of the most popular words. But you can’t just rely on the most popular words, and this is because if you try to target absolutely everything, you’ll be more likely to target nothing. It’s actually best to mix the popular keywords with specific keywords.  

The aim is keywords that are not narrow or limited to a tiny audience, when looking for a niche keyword, you need one that will cover a broader topic without being overly generic. This is where you can use search engine tools to identify the number of times these search words are used, and then brainstorm words from the topics themselves. Now that you have a great list of initial keywords, the job is not yet done. 

Step #4 Find long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are a great way to increase your sales conversions and traffic. These types of keywords are longer versions of mainstream keywords, and they make up almost 70% of all the searches made, meaning you’re tapping into a wider market and covering keywords throughout the buyer’s journey. 

Again, if you’re a florist, a long tail keyword may be ‘vibrant flower bouquets for sale’. By using these longer keywords, you can answer questions people may have, while also establishing yourself as an authority in the field. 

Step #5 Use Search Engines

If you intend to rank on a specific search engine, that search engine is the best place to go. For example, if you’re wanting to rank on google, you can use Google to do your research. Lots of businesses use forums for keyword research. This is because these forums immediately tell you what questions people are asking. You can then use these forums to see what people want, and then fill in these gaps in your own website, both in keywords and in the content.  

This doesn’t mean just using one forum, you can use multiple to find out what different audiences are looking for and then go with the ones that resonate with your business the most.  

Step #6 Finalise Your List of Keywords

Now you should have a large list of keywords, but this is not the final list of keywords you should use. In order to get the absolute most out of your keywords, they need to be chosen carefully.  So look at your list of keywords and consider the following things. 

Question 1: Do the keywords align with your search intent? If you’re a shop, you may need more commercial keywords such as ‘shop now’ or ‘buy here’. 

Question 2: Do the keywords have a high volume? Although too many high-volume keywords aren’t a net positive, a few of these keywords mean that you’ll get short-term results. This is a good idea as SEO can take a lot of time, and short-term results can tide you over for some time.  

Step #7 Test Your Chosen Keywords

This is where you make sure you’re using the most profitable keywords for your particular needs. By testing your keywords you can see if the keywords will actually work the way you want them to. 

The best way to do this is to take your final list of keywords and test them using Google Ads. You can run a small paid search campaign with the exact match option. This will help you how much search engine volume and traffic the keyword generates. 

It’s best to run the campaign for 24 hours and then use Google Analytics to see the number of conversions. If you’re happy with the number, you can keep the keyword, if the numbers aren’t good enough, you can change or remove the keyword from your list. 

Now that you know how to get the most out of your keyword research in 2023, you can get started now for the best start possible!