What is keyword research for SEO?

When it comes to implementing SEO on your website, pretty much the very first thing you’ll need to get started with is your keyword research. This is probably THE most important step to take. So what’s keyword research for SEO all about? Let’s find out…

As you might have heard me mention before, when it comes to SEO, there is no SEO without content, and there is no content without, well, keywords!

Confused? Bear with me and I’ll explain.

Your website and your online presence consists of words, writing, verbiage. The written word is all over your site, your social media platforms and any online store you might be running.

When it comes to SEO, what we need to make sure we do is optimize those words towards the type of language and the actual words that our target audience use online.

Remember the example I gave you in one of the previous Seo Made Simple series blogs - if you are a physiotherapist in Cheltenham, UK, you’re going to want to make sure that you, your website & your overall online presence comes up for people searching for such services.

Figuring out what the right keywords to use are is an integral piece of the SEO puzzle.

It’s also the first place to start. You might be wondering why?

Well, simply, because unless we know what we’re optimising FOR, we can’t optimise!

You can do all sorts of other optimisations on your site like improving your site speed, adding image tags and the like, but when it comes to optimising your content, you need to know WHICH keywords you are going to optimise that content around (remember, there IS no SEO without content!).

How do you know which keywords you need to optimise for?

In order to know this, we have to do a little bit of keyword research and decide on one, two, or three that make sense for the page in question.

Now I know this sounds like something super dull, a bit boring and not how you fancy spending your time - but it really doesn’t take long and it’s an essential step to take if you’re serious about raising your online visibility.

When we do keyword research, we’re sense checking.

Your SEO strategy should start with finding the right keywords to drive conversions for your business.png

Am I on the right path here?
Do I use the same terminology my target customers use?
What do people really want to find when it comes to my topic?

There is no point writing the best, most relevant, incredibly valuable, packed-full-of-expertise blog post that you've ever written to funnel people through to your online passive income product, but then never even mentioning those all-important keywords within your post - if you do this, your content will never be ranked for those keywords, and you’ll be losing all that potential traffic!

So before we start writing, we need to check in with our keywords.

A note on keyword density

A phrase you might have come across before if you’ve done much reading up on SEO is “keyword density”. This (unsurprisingly!) refers to what percentage of words on your page match your chosen keywords.

Now, keyword density is nowhere near as important to SEO as it was a few years ago.

For successful SEO, you need to understand who your prospective customers are + what they are searching for.png

Remember I told you about black hat techniques, and how Google wised up to those? Well, as part of that, Google now no longer rewards the pages with the highest keyword density (because they sound like they’ve been written by a robot with a somewhat tenuous grasp of the English language…).

However, keyword density can still be a useful tool for you to check in with to make sure you’re covering your topic (read: keywords) enough, and to help you see if you’ve perhaps gone a bit, shall we say, overboard and are verging on robot-territory.

A loose rule of thumb is to try to keep your keyword density on any given page between 1% and 3%. This won’t always be the case but it provides a good guide.

If you want to learn HOW to do keyword research in a very simple, straightforward way that DOESN’T take much time, then you need my SEO Made Simple training! Module 2 covers keyword research, and I walk you through the EXACT steps you need to take, where to click, what to type .... it couldn’t be easier when you follow my guide! We’re not spending hours on this! We’re just going to do what we need to do to get the information we need. Nothing more, nothing less! You in? Check out the self-study course here.