Keyword research is a vital part of any SEO specialist’s toolbox, but it’s also incredibly valuable for entrepreneurs to have this skill themselves. For businesses, search engines and keyword research are the secret sauce that filters the plethora of information on the internet and directs it to a targeted audience. One of the methods used by search engines to filter this information is by using the keywords found in research within your website content.
Over the past decade, the terms keyword and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) have become inextricably linked, to the point that many people cannot differentiate between the two.
Keywords and key phrases are a vital component of SEO – a necessary part of the greater whole. Keywords can exponentially increase the chance of content being diverted to the right audience by search engines.
As an experienced SEO agency, Trafficon has the skills and knowledge to employ sophisticated data analytics to pinpoint the optimal words for attracting a business’ targeted customers to their website. It could be likened to walking into a crowded room and having to identify a specific person. If you are given a list of all the unique features that a person possesses, it is much easier to find them.
Finding Your Keywords Through Keyword Research
One of the tricky first steps of using keyword research in your content writing is the actual research part. There are a number of ways to go about this, but the most direct and simple is to use a tool, such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. These tools offer myriad functions, but the most important for us is their keyword research tools. For this example, we’ll look at SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool:
This tool will allow you to look up terms that are related to what you’re writing about, and find out how many people are searching for that particular thing in a particular country per month. So, let’s say you’re looking for data on the Russian composer Rachmaninoff. Upon searching Rachmaninoff’s name, we are shown a screen of data:
This may seem daunting at first but it’s quite easy to break down. Going by each column:
Keyword
This is the search term that users are looking up on Google. So, if you were hoping to have an article rank favourably for Rachmaninoff-based terms, these are the ones that people are actively looking for. Not all of them will be relevant to your specific subject, so make sure that you consider context when selecting your terms.
Intent
This is a guide to the type of information a user is likely to be looking for, or the type of action a user is likely to take, from looking up this particular term. It can be broken into three different user intents:
- Commercial – Investigating brands or services.
- Informational – Finding an answer to a particular question.
- Transactional – Completing an action, such as converting into a customer.
Volume
This one is the average number of monthly searches this particular term gets within your set country. For example, “Rachmaninoff composer” gets approximately 720 searches a month whilst “Rachmaninoff 2nd” gets 480.
KD%
This stands for Keyword Difficulty, and is an interpretation of how difficult it would be to rank for a particular term based on data around competition and the amount of existing sites targeting that term.
CPC (AUD)
This is the average Cost Per Click for someone bidding on this term for Google Ads, which is important, but not particularly relevant to our current discussion.
SERP Features
These are the non-standard listings available for this term, which may be anything from People Also Ask answers to Reviews or Map listings, depending on the particular keyword.
Updated
Finally, this is simply when the information you’re reading was last crawled by SEMRush filters.
So, for example, what we can take from keyword research on the term Rachmaninoff is that:
- Rachmaninoff gets 1,900 searches a month in Australia based on keyword research.
- It’s often for commercial intent, meaning people are likely looking to buy his music when looking up his name alone.
- It’s quite difficult to rank for Rachmaninoff given its high KD%.
- It’s uncommon for people to bid on Rachmaninoff for Search Engine Marketing.
Now that you have your keywords, you can then look to implement them in your writing.
How Many Keywords Is Enough?
We have all read content that has supposedly been ‘optimised’ but the overuse of keywords detracts from the flow, making for clunky and disjointed reading. The sweet spot for keyword repetition is in the range of 3 to 8 times, depending on the total word count.
Primary keywords or phrases for an article or blog should succinctly represent the overall topic as it relates to your business. As an example, if your business is waste recycling but your article is about home renovations, weave waste recycling into the content in a natural and organic manner.
Secondary keywords will act as a complement to the primary ones. In the above scenario you may use terms such as ‘waste management’, ‘environmental responsibility’ or ‘skip bin hire’.
Any additional keywords will support the content and act as a catch-all to cement the subject topic.
Keyword Placement
It can be tricky, but it is ideal to place the primary keyword in the first paragraph of your content – in the first sentence if possible. It is a balance between making content engaging and prioritising keywords for SEO. Remember, Google is not human, it is working on complex algorithms that need to be fully understood and exploited to get the most out of your content.
Where possible, include keywords in your title, since Google will associate this with your meta description and boost your prospects of being found in a search.
Website – Page Title & Meta Description
For onsite blogs and resource pages, include keywords in your page’s page title and meta description. A meta description allows you around 25 words (160 characters) to describe what your post is about and will appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
For WordPress users, the Yoast SEO or Rank Math SEO plugins can help with this significantly. For a bit of a meta approach to meta descriptions, let’s take a look at a screenshot of the Rank Math SEO tool setup for the article you’re reading right now, after it has already been published (I know, magic):
As you can see, my main keyword is “keyword research”, so I’ve added that to my URL slug, my heading, and my meta description, along with signifiers to say the site, and what people can expect from reading. It’s’ a great way to make sure that your subject matter is being hit for SEO purposes. Additionally, in the bottom right corner, you can see what Rank Math SEO believes to be your ranking out of 100 for optimisation on that particular term. This isn’t the totality of SEO, far from it, but it’s a good little guide to ensure you’ve hit the fundamentals. You can see how it has ranked my blog 80/100 here:
As you can see, Rank Math SEO has determined that most of the article is great from an SEO perspective, but that there are still some issues. The main basic issue is that my focus keyword isn’t right at the start. So, if I fix that by adding the sentence “Keyword research is a vital part of any SEO specialist’s toolbox, but it’s also incredibly valuable for entrepreneurs to have this skill themselves.” at the start. As you can see, this has pushed us up further:
I’m still only in the yellow for content length, which while good, doesn’t quite hit the length expected by Google. Naturally, as Google has become more competitive, the expected word length has gone up for articles that rank, as the expectation is a longer article is one with more information. So, whilst there was once a time when 500-word link-building spam blogs could have done the trick, that time is long behind us. Ironically, by explaining this to you, I’ve gotten the article into the green, pushing it over 1500 words, so we can look at the page’s additional issues:
- “Your title doesn’t contain a positive or a negative sentiment word.” which has been fixed by adding the word “Great” to the SEO title.
- “Keyword Density is 0.17 which is low, the Focus Keyword and combination appears 2 times.” which has now been fixed.
This brings us up to 87/100, with the only additional issues not being relevant to this blog, such as not having a number in the title.
Consistent Content Creation
Regular content incorporating strategically placed keywords, anchor text and links to internal website pages is a powerful combination. The use of anchor text can trigger Google and Bing algorithms and assist in boosting rankings.
Linking anchor text to scholarly articles that verify or confirm information in your content through statistics adds a level of credibility to your content.
Consider the following sentences:
“A lot of people use social media for marketing so it would be beneficial for your business to do likewise.”
“In 2023, it has been estimated that an incredible 4.9 billion people across the world used social media. Imagine how your business could benefit from tapping into the wealth of opportunities presented by this audience?”
The two statements above basically say the same thing but the statistics, backed by a respected source like Forbes, have far more impact on the reader.
Where to From Here?
The fact is, keywords are just one part of SEO, albeit, a large part. The end goal for both is to increase website traffic and engagement but for keywords to pack the most punch they need to be used in combination with a range of other SEO strategies.
If you are ready to open your business to a wider market share, get in touch with Trafficon today and ask us about our consultation service.
