With many businesses moving online to serve their customers, search engine optimization (SEO) is an imperative tool that businesses need to master to provide them with a competitive edge. Key word research plays an integral role in achieving that objective. By analyzing the words being used by their target audience, businesses can optimize their platforms to ensure maximum customer traffic and sales conversions consequently. Focusing on the audience and using keyword data to hone those insights will make for much more successful campaigns than focusing on arbitrary keywords for a business.
Keyword Search Tools
In order to look for these keywords, businesses and individuals should use a keyword search tool to get to know what words their audiences are searching for the most in recent times. This would help them understand the trends and slangs existing in the society and market their campaigns effectively. By incorporating the key word research in search engine optimization strategy, a firm not only ensures its competitive edge in the marketplace by adopting a customer-centric approach but also achieves a higher position in the results page thereby increasing its chances to expand its customer base at an exponential scale. However, in the cycle of searching these keywords, the search-volume of these words may differ greatly. While you definitely want to target terms that your audience is searching for, in some cases, it may be more advantageous to target terms with lower search volume because they’re far less competitive. A good combination of both high- and low-competition keywords can be advantageous for your website to provide it with the biggest strategic advantage.
The Negative Side
A drawback of a higher search volume, however, is the presence of increased competition that exists. Unsurprisingly, all of the competitors that exist in the marketplace will try and capitalize on the most famous words. The higher the search volume, the greater the competition and effort required to achieve organic ranking success.
Long-Tail Keywords
In many cases, it may be most advantageous to target highly specific, lower competition search terms which are known as “long-tail keywords” in the domain of search engine optimization. These long-tail key words are more specific and generate more useful insights than the commonly used words with higher search volumes. For example, if you use a search engine to search for the word “car”, it is likely that even though you are looking to purchase a car, you might come across results of car racing because the two results are correlated with one another. These key word searches can be broken down into several components which can help you target your audience behaviorally, demographically, seasonally, etc.
An important step in the keyword research process is surveying the SERP landscape (like featured snippets, knowledge graph, carousels, etc.) for the keyword you want to target in order to get a better gauge of searcher intent. If these strategies are executed effectively, key word research can play an integral role in transforming any business and provide them a competitive edge.