Whenever you search for something on google, you begin by thinking of words that represent what you want to find.

Not many of us will bother to write complete questions in the google search bar. Instead, we write a shortcut version.

For example, instead of just typing ‘How old is Elon Musk?’ we might also write ‘Elon Musk age.’ This different combinations of words are what Google uses to figure out the most accurate answer possible. (He’s 49, btw.)

Similarly, it is likely that your customers have specific words (called keywords or a keyword phrase) that they use to find information. If you know what SEO keywords your customers are looking for, you can optimize your website page so that you show up in the search engine results.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research can help your business know what the best keywords are for your products are services. It is the act of gathering keyword ideas and keyword suggestions that match the searcher intent. Doing this means that whenever a person has a question that is relevant to your brand that you use the right keyword on your site.

As your site grows its domain authority, you will begin to rank for more and more organic keywords. You should ensure that the relevant keyword is being used on your website so you rank for the search term. You should also be mindful of the keyword difficulty for what you hope to rank for, so you can increase the keyword volume and topic authority on your site.

When looking at SEO keyword research, there are two types of ‘value’ that a keyword can have: search relevance and search volume.

Let’s look at each of these factors in more detail and how they increase the value of specific keywords for websites.

1) Keyword Relevance

According to Google: keywords should directly relate to the content on your website, especially the landing page. The website keyword should help answer a question or deliver valuable information that is linked to that main keyword.

People should be able to understand what kind of product, service, or other content they’ll find on your site.

When doing keyword research, it is very easy to get caught up in trying to rank for specific keywords. But you shouldn’t just focus on a target keyword, but also the search intent behind it.

As a rule, the better your webpage answers a question, the better it will rank for a specific keyword.

To discover the keyword relevance you can use an SEO tool such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to do simple research. You can then also examine the keyword difficulty, meaning how hard it will be to rank against other websites for the same keyword results.

If a particular page in your website doesn’t answer a question, then it will not be relevant, and won’t rank as well. So when it comes to relevance, the two questions to ask yourself are:

– What are the typical keywords my customers use to find me?

– How can I make my pages relevant to those keywords?

2) Keyword Search Volume

The second important factor in choosing keywords is average monthly search volume. Keyword search volume shows how many people are searching for a specific term in the past month.

The higher the search volume, the more people are asking and the more results there will be in the SERP results.

This is where competition comes into play. If you want to stand out from your competition, it can be tricky if there are thousands of people vying for the top spot on Google. This will boost the keyword difficulty and mean that your site needs a lot of domain authority (and backlinks to your content) in order to rank.

Any keyword that has a volume of over 1000 is not as easy to rank for. You might want to go for long tail keywords rather than simpler ones. This means adding more descriptive detail to your keywords that your web pages will be relevant for.

How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Business Website?

The first step is to choose a keyword planner tool. Many of the tools are free online, and can really help you to narrow down the relevant keywords for your business.

The top three tools we like to use for keyword research are:

Google Ads Keyword Tool

Formerly Google Adwords, the newly renamed Google Ads is a great way to plan out your keywords because it is designed for advertisers. Google makes its money from ads, and hence the keyword tools are very useful to use. Note that you will need an active ad campaign running in order to see exact monthly search volume.

Keywords Everywhere Plugin

A great tool that can be used with both Firefox and Chrome, the Keywords Everywhere tool gives you a list of relevant keywords directly on the google results page. Although it doesn’t show full results of the Google page, it’s a great way to get a quick feel for what keywords are a match for your business website pages.

Google Search Console

This approach is essentially the reverse of the other two, and shows which keywords are helping your website to be found. It takes a little tweaking to set up, but once it’s running, you can go to Performance and then look under queries to see which search terms are leading people to visit your website. This is important because there might be search terms you didn’t expect that is proving useful to you.

These are some of the basics of keyword research and ensuring that you are meeting the search needs of your customers. Alongside focusing on improving your keywords you should also focus on improving the title and meta description on each page of your site to better match the website keywords. The better you can make your site the go-to source for your product or service the better chance you have of ranking higher on Google.

Brandastic is a Digital Marketing and SEO agency with offices in Orange County, Los Angeles, and Austin. We help businesses to target your customers effectively, and to grow your Google rankings. We can help you to understand search intent, improve keywords, and grow organic traffic to your site with content creation. Learn more about our SEO agency services today.