How to do perfect keyword research for a website

It’s 2022. And lead generation is one of the toughest challenges faced by businesses. Lead generation is the key to any business. And without it, a business will struggle to grow and expand as it will not have a steady stream of customers.

The sales departments of businesses are beginning to think that they have exhausted the limit of people and companies to sell all of their products and services to. This could explain why only 10% of marketers feel that their lead generation campaigns are effective.

The solution? Search Engine Optimisation. It is an effective way of generating quality leads without burning a hole in your pocket. Now, you’ll ask how both are relevant and how we can harness the power of SEO to generate quality leads. Here’s the answer. “SEO is focused on increasing web traffic. Lead generation is focused on increasing the number of clients/potential clients for your business. However, SEO can complement lead gen efforts by driving awareness for your company via organic traffic to the site. "

I am pretty sure most of us already know what SEO is and how it functions. Still, for those living under a rock, I will explain what SEO means. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. The unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

Your SEO strategy can be divided into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign, but they’re on completely different sides of the fence. 

Let’s have a look at what these two individual terms mean. 

Let’s start with on-page SEO. On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings. Where your website appears in search engine results pages is determined by a number of ranking factors including site accessibility, page speed, optimized content, keywords, title tags, etc. On-page SEO is about optimizing the stuff that you have control over and can change on your own website.  

Here’s a check-list you must follow while optimizing your webpage:

We’ll focus later on what do these individual terms mean. 

Let’s come back to our topic. The other half that makes SEO so powerful is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through the act of getting links from other websites.

In layman’s terms, Off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).  Along with on-page SEO, these include several of the factors of basic SEO that help a site to rank.

Optimizing for off-page ranking factors involves improving search engine rankings and user perception of a website's popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. This is accomplished by other reputable places on the Internet (pages, sites, people, etc.) linking to or promoting your website, and effectively "vouching" for the quality of your content.

If I have to give weightage, then I would say on-page would get 51% and off-page can be 49%. Thus, we can say both are equally important.

Here are a few tips to make your off-page strategy strong:

→ Creating valuable backlinks: Creating backlinks is at the core of off-site SEO and is a technique that is crucial for any site with the aspiration of ranking on page one. Backlinks are the number one ranking factor when Google determines where your site ranks. Google will more likely rank a site higher than another if one domain has more backlinks. 

→ Social Media Marketing: One of the most effective off-page SEO techniques is using social media. Using social media platforms is a great way to extend the reach of your content. Not only can social media encourage more clicks to your latest piece of content, but it can be a crucial source of valuable backlinks from a site with a high DA.

→ Guest Blogging: Providing third party websites with guest content is another effective online marketing technique that can also yield off-site SEO benefits. This could be a thought-leadership piece through to ‘how-to’ video content, something that will capture the attention of their readers. You should look to reach out to third-party websites whose target audience is similar to your own, such as niche online trade publications. This way you will be increased exposure and brand awareness amongst potential customers and heighten the chance of driving referral traffic from that website.

→ Forum Posting: A forum posting site is an online discussion board that allows users to have meaningful conversations in the form of a posted message. When carried out correctly, forum posting can bring multiple benefits for your business including exposure to new customers, a better understanding of your customers, opportunities to answer any questions customers or potential customers might have.

Congratulations, you are now an SEO marketer. You can employ these techniques for your business and improve the overall growth and revenue. 

But, wait, we are missing the most important aspect of SEO. Any guesses? 

Think hard, maybe???

Yes, you guessed, it right. Keyword Research. It is one of the most important steps in SEO. 

Keywords are the conduit that funnels new visitors to your website. The search engines use them to connect potential readers (i.e. people with questions) to your web pages (i.e. answers). If you take the business of researching keywords and catering to search engines just as seriously as scientists take their laboratory research, then you will be helping out as great a number of people as that scientist in the laboratory.

Let’s have a look at how to do keyword research on Ubersuggest.

Keyword Research is a very vast topic. As the name suggests, there’s no specific way to get the keywords. You got to research and come up with a list of keywords relevant to your business.

The first phase involves brainstorming and writing down the best keywords that you think will be searched more on Google by your target audience.

Make an excel sheet and jot down every keyword that you think is important. 

Another way to get keywords is using keyword research tools. Currently, we have a lot of keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush and Ahrefs. 

All of them are quite simple and effective. But I prefer Ubersuggest because of its ease and simplicity to do all the other SEO tasks.

Keyword Research on Ubersuggest is very simple. Let me show you how to do it.

Step 1: Visit https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ and log in with your account. If you don’t have an account, then you have to create your profile on Ubersuggest.

Step 2: Once you are logged in to Ubersuggest, you will see the menu like this.

Step 3: Click on the keywords tab. Then you have to click on the Keyword Overview tab.

Step 4: Next, you have to enter one of your keywords in the search box. Select your target audience and click “Enter”.

For instance, we have taken the keyword “Keyword Research”. Let’s see how it is performing.

The said keyword has a search volume of over 12K and a search difficulty of 80. 

Step 5: The next step is to check the keyword ideas as suggested by Ubersuggest. These keyword ideas are very important as these are the ones that the users search in Google’s Search Engine. Have a look at the relevant keyword ideas for “Keyword Research”.

Step 6: Add these keywords to the earlier created excel sheet. Voila! Your keyword research is done. Now use these keywords in your content and start ranking on Google.

Keyword Research is done to better the chances for a website to rank in Google’s search engine ranking pages. However, ideally, it should be done before a website is developed. So that the website is optimised properly with the correct usage of Heading tags and URL structure. 

It should always go hand in hand with the content that will be published on the specific page. A respective keyword should be mapped for a webpage, maintaining the keyword density of the content on the webpage.

What are the requirements for doing Keyword Research?

To perform effective keyword research, an SEO marketer should have a few things at his/ her disposal. Before starting any project, he/ she should always understand the target audience, targeting location and the competition.

If the SEO marketer has a hold on these aspects, then there will be no competition for him/ her.

Why is Keyword Research important?

Keyword Research is the most important way to help a business get visibility. Hence it should be done properly.

There are so many reasons why keyword research should be at the forefront of a digital marketing campaign. Here are some of the most crucial reasons why:

• Knowing your keywords helps you to understand your brand and your business. What are you selling? What are your services? If you don’t know this, identifying your keywords can help you to understand who you are.
• Keyword research can tell you vital information, such as where you rank for keywords, which keywords are easy to rank for and which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• Keyword research can tell you what people are searching for, rather than what you think they are searching for.
• Search engines can only rank your website if they know what your business is. Targeting keywords on different pages of your website means Google can then rank you for those keywords.
• Identifying keywords to use in blogs and outreach can drive traffic to your website.

Keyword Research is a never-ending process. People using Google’s SERP keep coming up with newer keywords. So it is very important to keep refreshing your keyword lists.

Conclusion:

I hope this article must have provided some value to your life. Share your ideas/ thoughts about the different techniques you might have used to perform keyword research for your business.