What Is keyword analysis?
keyword analysis is the process of analyzing the keywords or search phrases that bring visitors to your website through organic and paid search. As such, keyword analysis is the starting point and cornerstone of search marketing campaigns.
By understanding what queries qualified visitors to your website type into search engines, search marketers can better customize their content and landing pages to drive more traffic and increase conversion rates. For this reason, keyword analysis is an important skill for both SEO and PPC experts.
Keyword analysis helps to increase conversions, find new markets, and optimize spend, but it requires time-consuming examination and decision making to beat your keyword competition.
The Importance of keyword analysis
Marketing is inherently analytic. Field-testing marketing outreach and marketing performance is key to optimizing budget allocation and market reach. Search marketing is no different, and since keywords dictate your entire search campaign, keyword analysis should be your primary focus. Analyzing keywords allows you to:
- Optimize Spend: Distribute more budget to successful keywords and eliminate wasteful spending on those that aren’t producing results
- Increase Conversions: Identifying and focusing on well-converting keywords is good for conversion rate optimization and return on investment (ROI)
- Eye Trends: Knowledge of keyword search frequency provides insight into market behavior which you can apply to multiple aspects of your business
- Prioritize Your Time: Keyword performance guides campaign importance–spend your time optimizing areas that have the biggest impact on your bottom line
- Find New Markets: Use keyword analysis to expand your long tail efforts and discover more specific keyword queries and corresponding warm leads
How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy
I’m going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting. That way, you’ll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about.
Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You’ll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you’ll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.
Step 2: Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it’s time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.
Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyze Accordingly.
Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it’s more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. So, how does this affect the keyword research you do?
It’s easy to take keywords for face value, and unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface. Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra-careful how you interpret the keywords you target.
Step 4: Research related search terms.
This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it’s a great way to fill out those lists.
If you’re struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Step 5: Use keyword research tools to your advantage.
Keyword research and SEO tools such as keyword analysis, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.
Read also:5 Best Keyword Research Tools in 2020
