Imagine having a treasure map where each keyword represents a shiny jewel that leads your target audience directly to your virtual door. Understanding the art of choosing the right keywords is like having such a map. It guides you through the complexities of search engine algorithms and helps you achieve top rankings for your chosen keywords.
This guide aims to demystify keyword research and provide insight into choosing the most effective keywords for your SEO efforts. Whether you’re an aspiring blogger, a seasoned marketer, or a business owner looking to grow your online presence, mastering keyword selection is key to unlocking your website’s full potential.
Tips for Choosing the Right SEO Keywords
Below you will find information on choosing the right keywords without spending much time, effort or money.
1. Consider Your Audience
When it comes to finding the right keywords for SEO list of real telephone number data considering your target audience is an important and often overlooked aspect of the process. Keywords act as a bridge that connects your content to users who are actively searching for information, products, or services online. If you understand your target audience, you can easily choose keywords that fit their preferences, needs, and search behaviors.
There are several ways to understand your audience's needs and choose relevant keywords to reach them. These include:
Competitor analysis: This is a common method for many website niches that involves analyzing your competitors’ marketing efforts and the audience they target. You can identify gaps in their strategy and opportunities to differentiate yourself by appealing to underserved segments.
Buyer personas: If you sell a product or service, you create detailed buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. These fictional characters embody the specific characteristics, goals, and challenges of different audience segments, making it easier to tailor your content and SEO efforts.
Market research: Here, you conduct extensive market research to determine the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of your potential customers. Use surveys, focus groups, and interviews to gather data on their interests, challenges, and buying habits.
Website analytics: If you already have some traffic, it’s a good idea to analyze your website traffic data using tools like Google Analytics. This data can reveal valuable information about your audience, such as geographic location, browsing behavior, and device usage.
2. Look at Search Intent
Even after you have a deep understanding of your target audience and their needs, you’ll still need to use specific keywords for every piece of content you publish. Search intent refers to the motivation behind a user’s search query—what they’re trying to accomplish or find when they type a certain set of words into a search engine. Paying attention to user intent will help your content get in front of the right eyes and increase your conversions.
Here are the different types of search intent:
Informational intent: Informational intent users are looking for answers, explanations, or information about a specific topic. They might use keywords like “how to,” “what is,” “tips.” Understanding informational intent helps you create comprehensive guides, tutorials, and blog posts to answer users’ questions.
Navigational intent: In this case, users are searching for a specific website or brand. They enter the name of the website or brand directly into the search bar. Navigational keywords like "[company name] email address" aren't SEO-friendly, but they are vital for brand awareness and monitoring your online presence.
Commercial intent: Commercial intent is when users are interested in purchasing a product or service but may still be in the research phase. Keywords like “best,” “reviews,” “comparison,” and “deals” indicate commercial intent. Optimizing for commercial intent helps attract potential customers earlier in the purchasing process.
Transactional intent: Users with transactional intent are ready to make a purchase. They use keywords like “buy,” “sale,” “order,” or “coupon” to find a specific product or service. Targeting transactional keywords helps capture users who are close to completing a purchase.
Helpful Tip on Finding Search Intent
If you’re not sure about the intent of a particular keyword, look at the search results for your target keywords to understand what’s ranking well. If the top results are mostly blog posts or guides, this indicates informational intent. If the results show product listings and ecommerce sites, it indicates commercial and transactional intent. Understanding SERPs will help you tailor your content to meet user expectations.
Consider the example below, which includes a search for "video editing apps."
Searching for video editing apps on google
Initially, you may think that the searcher wants to know what video editing apps are. But in the real case, they are looking for video editing app options. You can see that there are some FAQs in the Users Also Ask section that contain terms like "best", which means the purpose is commercial.
Once you’ve determined the search intent behind your target keywords, you need to create content that meets that intent. For informational intent, focus on in-depth guides and valuable information. For commercial intent, include product reviews and comparisons. For transactional intent, provide clear calls to action and easy paths to purchase.
3. Check Traffic for Each Keyword
Keyword traffic refers to the volume or frequency with which a particular keyword is searched in search engines over a specific period of time . Analyzing keyword traffic helps you determine the popularity and potential of keywords to drive organic traffic to your website.
For example, if you are a new blogger, you may be tempted to choose a keyword that people aren’t searching for because it’s easier for you to rank for. If people aren’t searching for the terms you’ve included in your post, you can be sure that your post will get very little traffic.
According to Semrush, a good keyword should get at least 100 searches per month. As a new site, you can focus on a keyword that gets anywhere from 100 to around 3,000 searches and still get a good amount of traffic. In fact, targeting a few of these small but high-potential keywords can help increase your overall site traffic over time.
4. Prioritize Long-Tailed Keywords Over Short-Tailed Keywords
Prioritizing long-tail keywords over short-tail keywords is a strategic approach that offers several benefits for your SEO efforts. Long-tail keywords are more specific and usually consist of three or more words, while short-tail keywords are shorter and more general phrases.
The feature of long-tail keywords is that they more clearly show what users are looking for. Since they are more specific, they align better with user intent.
When users find content that exactly matches their search query, they are more likely to engage with that content, resulting in lower bounce rates and higher user satisfaction.
What’s more, short-tail keywords often have higher competition due to their broad nature. As a result, it can be difficult to rank well for these keywords, especially for new or smaller websites.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, have less competition due to their length, giving you a better opportunity to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
How to Find Long-Tail Keywords?
To be honest, short-tail keywords are random and can be almost any word or phrase you can think of, like “WordPress,” “horoscopes,” or “men’s fashion.” Long-tail keywords combine short-tail keywords into more words, so they’re harder to find.
You can find long-tail keywords for free using Google’s autocomplete feature. Type something like “game console” and you’ll see more ideas for longer-tail keywords that people are searching for.
