Making a website SEO-friendly doesn’t happen by accident.
Beyond getting backlinks and boosting domain authority, the keywords used throughout the content of a website matter. That’s because keywords are what search engines crawl for to match users with relevant results.
A lack of keywords makes it difficult for pages to be found through organic search. But, when a website has been optimised with the right keywords, this makes it more likely that the page will attract organic search traffic.
For business owners just starting their website, you might not be familiar with keyword research. So here’s a general overview to guide you.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is a central aspect of on-page SEO, and involves selecting relevant keywords and phrases to place into your website content.
SEO specialists such as ourselves here at Imaginaire use SEO software to find keywords for the content we create. Often, this involves typing in a central keyword to find related keywords, phrases and questions which may be relevant to include in the content.
The act of researching keywords can reveal a lot of things for any content strategy. For instance, the way in which users are typing in phrases related to your business, its products or services.
Also, the difficulty level of the keywords which runs on a score of 0-100. A high score denotes that the keyword is difficult to target. But if that keyword happens to be important, we can add additional details to the keyword to reduce the difficulty while improving the targeting of the search.
For example, ‘SEO agency’ may have a keyword difficulty of 100/100.
However, ‘SEO agency Nottingham’ would have a reduced keyword difficulty score, let’s say 20/100 due to us getting more specific with the search term.
As an actual SEO agency in Nottingham, opting for a lower keyword difficulty also means those who land on our page are more likely to be qualified leads, because they are specifically looking for an SEO agency in Nottingham. Whatever your business happens to do, keyword research is about applying a similar thought process to identify keywords which need to be included within your content to increase your page rankings.
SEO Keyword Terms To Know
- Anchor text
- Existing keyword position
- Existing keyword traffic
- Indexing
- Keyword difficulty
- Keyword search location
- Local SEO
- Long-tail keywords
- Meta description
- Meta title
- Monthly search volume
- On-page SEO
- Organic keywords
- Organic traffic
- Schema markup
- SEO headings (H1-H6)
- SERP (search engine results page)
- Short-tail keywords
Don’t know what any of these terms mean, or have other terms you need help understanding? No problem! If you work with us here at Imaginaire, our SEO specialists can run through anything you’re not sure about.
Why Is Keyword Research Important?
Quite simply, without keyword research, it’s impossible to know if your website is correctly optimised for SEO. Also, you could be falling behind your competitors due to a lack of keywords being implemented throughout your content.
If that’s not enough to persuade you keyword research is vital, then you should know that keyword research can also present ranking opportunities for your pages. This can include what we like to call low hanging fruit keywords, whereby the keyword difficulty for a keyword is low yet there is a high search volume. In other words, the keyword has lots of people searching for it, but there aren’t many websites competing for that keyword making it easier to rank for.
How To Do Keyword Research
To undertake keyword research, you need SEO tools as well as a strategy.
We’ll come onto SEO keyword research tools in just a second. But in terms of your strategy, you need to know what keywords you’d like each of your website pages to rank for.
If you don’t know where to start, try this simple exercise:
Imagine your potential customers out there on Google. How do you imagine they’d find your website or a specific page on your website if they had to type a few words into a search engine to do so?
It sounds simple enough, but you’d be surprised how many businesses get this wrong, because they don’t connect the right words and phrases with their content.
Back to our analogy above, we’d imagine a business in Nottingham looking for SEO services would type in ‘SEO agency Nottingham’. Not all searches are quite so literal, but it does give you an idea of just what keyword research and optimisation aim to achieve.
SEO Keyword Research Tools
- Ahrefs
- Google Keyword Planner (helpful for both SEO & PPC)
- Google Search Console
- Mangools
- Moz
- SE Ranking
- Semrush
- Surfer SEO
- Ubersuggest
Implementing Keyword Research
Once you’ve created a keyword strategy, it’s then a case of implementing these keywords throughout your content. This includes your landing pages, blogs, page titles, page metadata and image file names. If you do any kind of video marketing, then keywords should also be included in your video titles and descriptions.
Save and update that content, and give it a thorough read to ensure that content provides a relevant and helpful experience for users.
While tempting, avoid keyword stuffing or other spammy techniques. If you’re not sure why such things are bad, Google’s Helpful Content Update will point you in the right direction.
Use SEO software to track keyword positioning. Hopefully, you should find that your keyword strategy has seen an increase in the number of (relevant) keywords associated with your pages and an increase in page positioning.
Over time, refresh your content so that it remains optimised for SEO along with being up to date for users.
Imaginaire – Keyword Research & SEO Strategies For Businesses UK
Need some help with all things keyword research for your SEO strategy?
You’re in exactly the right place, as Imaginaire offers SEO services for businesses across the UK. From keyword research to content creation, we can help you across all aspects of your SEO.
Let us know more about your project by getting in touch. Please drop us a message or give us a call on 0115 697 1541 to speak to our team.