How to do Keyword Research for SEO – The Ultimate Guide in 2022

The keyword is “KEY” to drive truly qualified leads to your website. Keyword  Research in SEO helps you to reach business goals like getting more pageviews,  higher ranking on search engines, capturing potential leads, and so on.  

In this guide, you will learn one of the important concepts of SEO – Keyword  Research 

If you are a beginner then this guide is for you. Read on to learn every aspect of keyword research in search engine optimization. 

It is important to define what you want to achieve before you begin. So today my  goal is to define: 

1. What is Keyword Research? 
2. Importance of Keyword Research
3. Benefits of Keyword Research
4. How to Perform Keyword Research for SEO? 

Now let’s begin… 

 

What is a Keyword Research for SEO? 

 

Keyword research is the process of finding focus keywords to drive more traffic to your business. It provides insight into the search data that your target  audience is looking for on the Google search engine, which helps you to understand 

What searchers are searching on search engines? 

How many searchers are looking for it? 

Let me simplify it for you,  

Imagine you are planning to publish a blog of pasta recipes, where you want to write on topics like – 

Pasta recipe step by step | Easy recipes

Pasta recipes with white sauce | Simple Italian recipes 

Easy pasta recipes | Recipes for beginners;

but you are unsure how these blogs are going to drive traffic

So, if you want to drive good traffic then you need to take care in choosing the right keyword to get the right traffic. 

This all starts with keyword research. 

 

What is the Importance of Keyword Research for SEO?

 

Keyword research is one of the most important steps in search engine optimization for getting the right traffic to your website. The difference between a website getting millions of traffic through an organic search channel and those getting no traffic at all are the keywords you employ in the content. If you don’t pay attention to this factor, it is sure you will miss the mark on your market. 

If you are still asking, why keywords research?  

Let me simplify it a little more for you, 

Say that you are writing a lot of different topics around Pasta recipes, but you are not sure about how your blogs will drive traffic.  

For example, 

Someone wants to make a pasta recipe so he goes online and searches for “Best pasta recipes” or “Red sauce pasta recipes” on his smartphone and the search engine shows him results. But your page is not listed on the first page of the search engine page results.  

“Easy pasta recipes | Recipes for beginners “may not be the right choice of keywords for your pasta recipe blog. 

Generally, people do not go past the first page on the search engine page results.  So, the aim of a blogger is to get to the top position on SERPs.

So, Hey! 

You need to find the best keywords to align it to your content and find out what the target audience is searching for online. 

That’s the idea why we would do Keyword Research for SEO.  

 

Benefits of Keyword Research for SEO

 

If you have a website, but you are unaware of what people are looking for online will leave your business stranded in a desert of inactivity. 

This issue is solved by researching keywords. 

So, let’s understand the importance of keywords in SEO. Here are a few benefits of  Keyword research. 

• • Gives You Direction

When you start researching keywords, this gives you more focus and direction.

For example, if you are writing a food blog, you may have an idea about what you are going to write. But you must focus more on what people want to read. This will help you to understand people’s reading interests. 

• • Makes you find new topics

If you have a topic in mind keyword research helps you expand. 

• • Gets you the best listing in search engine

Proper research on keywords can help you to choose low-competition keywords with the highest chance of being listed.

• • Helps you to target the right audience

When you build a website, you need the right traffic to be successful in your business. A good keyword search will help you gain the right audience. 

• • Gives you life skills

Learning about the dynamics of researching keywords can never go in vain. All these topics you’re learning are going to help you throughout the journey of your life. Once you learn to find the right keyword, you can employ it for any website or business.

 

How to do Keyword Research for SEO?

Now that we have understood what keywords are, let’s learn how to do Keyword research. 

Firstly, understand that you can look for keywords in all those places where people do searches – 

•  Google

 It is the most commonly used search engine by people to search for queries online. Google search provides actively searched queries that can help you to get the most targeted keywords. 

 

For example, let’s say for a search query “simple pasta recipes” you get a  list of suggestions by Google search engine. You can use these keywords to align it with your blogs, if the content is good there is a chance to rank in the top position. 

Let’s also know about Google’s LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing)  which help to deeply understand the content on the webpage. LSI  keywords are texts or phrases closely related to your search topic. 

For example, imagine that you just published a blog about “Ice-cream recipes”. 

Google will not only scan your page to find the term “Ice-cream recipes” in your title tag and your content; but it will also scan your page for terms like  (“Ice”, “cold”, “milk”, and “cream”, “dessert”). 

When they find all these related keywords in your content, they believe that this page is about the topic of ice-cream recipes.

A recent Google Research Paper says that semantically-related terms help to determine a page’s topic. 

•   YouTube 

YouTube is not a search engine, but if it was a search engine it would rank 2nd most popular search engine after Google. Billions of hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day, so many people go to YouTube to get an idea about what kind of content is being searched for and consumed. 

 

•  Quora

Forums where people post a question and hold discussions are the best sources to discover “long-tail keywords”. You can search for the term – “Keyword Research” and check how many questions have been listed out by people who are seeking answers to their questions. You can list these questions and discover “long-tail keywords”. 

 

•  Google Keyword Planner

It is a free tool that allows you to discover important keywords and find data for keywords like estimated monthly search numbers, competition, and ad pricing.

 

Usually, this tool is used by marketers to identify keywords for their running ads, but you can discover the right keywords by using this amazing tool. 

Paid tools like Ahref, SEMrush, Keyword Insights, Keyword Everywhere, etc are available in the market and are actively used by people to find out keywords, keyword trends, and content ideas. 

 

• Competitor Research

 This is one of the underrated forms of research in digital marketing, but the most powerful tactic is to find relevant opportunities by researching their competitors. There are tools that allow spying on your competitor and their keywords.

 

Conclusion 

Keyword Research is an essential part of digital marketing and search engine optimization. It helps you understand what works and what doesn’t.  

“Keywords can either make or break a successful business” Use of the above-mentioned tricks can help you find potential keywords.