One of the essential parts before writing the content strategy and SEO site strategy is keyword research.
In this article, which I adapted from the Yoast SEO site and added some additional points, I intend to introduce you to the 6 basic steps for keyword research as one of the most basic and important steps in SEO. It should be noted that this guide is completely practical and will guide you well toward achieving your goals.
Table of Contents
1) Determine your goal
Before starting any work, by discovering and finding the business angles and the main goal of the project, try to answer the following questions clearly and clearly:
What is the main goal of your company and organization?
What sets your business apart from the competition?
What point does the organization want to reach?
What promises do you make on your website to customers and employers?
In short, you should clearly define your mission from accepting an SEO project and launching a website. With this, you have taken the first and most important step in writing your keyword strategy. The market you are in determines whether your goal and mission show enough taste to get a high ranking or not.
In the meantime, some markets are very competitive, and large companies, which of course have high advertising and marketing budgets, dominate the search results. As a result, it will be difficult to compete in these markets and it will be difficult to get a high ranking among these companies.
Instructions: To be able to compete in these markets and not disappear under the heavy shadow of competitors, try to limit your target community and instead of competing with a big shark in the ocean, be a big fish in a small pond. This strategy is undoubtedly the best solution that you can use in big competitive fields.
2) List of keywords
After defining your goal and mission, you should do keyword research. For this, you must first get the employer’s target keywords, which are often not the right choice, and increase the scope of your keywords with your knowledge of the target community of your business. Next, use Google suggestions and keyword analysis tools like kwfinder to make your list more productive.
You should ask yourself some important questions when choosing keywords:
What words or phrases does my target audience search on Google to use the products I offer?
What problems does my target community search for these words to solve?
What words (services) differentiate my business from others?
Now try to enter these words (on average 200-300 words) in an Excel file so that we can analyze it together.
Note 1: Note that the use of long tail keywords is one of the parts that is usually paid less attention to, even though these words will generally have a great impact on improving your position.
Usually in this section when SEO experts tend to focus on very common short terms. Unfortunately, these keywords are often occupied by large businesses, but on the other hand, long keywords have less search traffic, but importantly, these words have less competition.
So it’s easier for you to rank for these keywords. In addition, long-tail keywords have the potential to get higher conversion rates because they focus more on a specific product or topic: a niche.
Tip 2: Note that the longer your search time is, the deeper the structure of your site page, to which the landing page belongs.
3) Keyword analysis
After sorting the list of keywords using keyword research tools such as kwfinder or keyword explorer of the Moz site, apply some important criteria and factors in selecting the best keywords in your list.
1) Difficulty of keywords
2) Monthly search volume
3) Conversion rate or CTR
These three criteria, which include keyword difficulty (0-100), monthly search volume (the more the better), and conversion rate (0-100), are among the criteria that should be calculated and researched for each keyword.
Instructions: After completing this step, choose the words that have the most monthly searches, the least difficulty, and the highest conversion rate, and specify them along with one or two of your main words as target keywords, and base the rest of your strategy on this basis.
4) Analysis of competitors in the final keywords
After you have removed a few keywords from your list, search for them in Google. To do this, start with your hardest (shortest) keywords and check the search engine result page (SERP) results.
Under each keyword search, there are several websites that you have to compete with, but to better understand the angles of your competition, ask questions and answer the following questions clearly:
Do your competitors have professional websites in specific keywords?
Are you and your business equal to these companies?
Is your website among these sites?
Can your company financially support you as much as your competitors?
What are the weaknesses of your competitors? (Content, website design, services, etc.)
Tip: Competitors’ weaknesses are a good way to surpass them, and be sure to find them and cover them with a detailed strategy in your business.
5) Take a closer look at the search goals
Today’s SEO strategy should focus more on answering the questions people have or providing the best solution to their problems. What we want to do is to ride the wave of problems that are asked to Google millions of times a day and present ourselves as the best solution to the user.
So, in the whole SEO process, try to understand what your audience wants from Google when they search for a specific keyword:
Do they have an informational goal (trying to find information about a specific topic), do they want to access a specific website, do they have a commercial goal (do they want to research something before buying something), or do they have a transactional goal (to Looking to buy something now)?
You can learn more about search intent by looking closely at the types of pages that have already ranked for that query. And answer these questions honestly:
Do you see more product pages?
Do you see a lot of informative blog posts?
Do you watch the training video?
And …
These are all clues about what Google intends to do when searching for a particular query. Find out which type of intent applies to keywords and add your findings back to your spreadsheet!
6) Determining a strategy for the keyword
Based on the data you have now collected, you can determine a very strong strategy to compete on a specific set of keywords. If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have a spreadsheet with a significant amount of keywords and information about your competition and what your audience is searching for those keywords. At this stage, there are generally two basic approaches, the main difference between which is the financial budget allocated to the SEO field.
If your business is on par with the competition in terms of volume and marketing budget, focus on the most direct way to enter the competition on all keywords. But if that’s not the case, try long-tail keywords first. Focusing on the long tail and compound keywords can very well bring you a lot of traffic.
Once you’ve managed to rank for those long-tail keywords, targeting more phrases becomes a little easier.
At this stage, also try to determine the strategy regarding the type of your content. For this, you should consider the style of writing your content, the topics and sub-sections that should be addressed, the number of articles in each sub-section, the arrangement and method of publishing the content, the methods of improving the quality and upgrading the content, etc. A short and long-term strategy, guide and guide your content team to achieve the goals you have in mind.