Keyword research, the pivotal activity for an effective strategy
Still nowadays, in 2020, to many people doing keyword research still mean comparing research volumes, fishing from “offline” words, focusing on keyword density in the creation of a content and, on a wider sense, thinking in quantitative terms.
This generally leads to two unavoidable situations: web pages are not competitive and do not rank, or maybe they do rank but now only obtain unqualified traffic. The underlying problem is that this approach still focuses almost solely on the keyword and little on the search intent and the study of entities, which are the elements that should instead guide our strategy.
Google’s evolution and the foundations to look for keywords
Even with Google’s constant changes and updates, running an effective keyword research is the first step in planning the strategy for our online project, and from the pages of our blog we addressed the topic several times, trying to report some keyword tools, giving you some insights on how to use SEOZoom to choose keywords or, more specifically, as a keyword planning tool.
Today we are going to try and clarify some things starting from the basics, quickly explaining what keywords are, why they are so important and what keyword research tools can be used, even the free ones.
Understanding how Google works so to offer useful contents
Google algorithm evolves in order to identify high-quality contents that are also relevant to users’ search intents, we have mentioned this several times. Trying to simplify the mechanism of the search engine, the algorithm tries to categorize each article by comparing it to related ones; not knowing all the criteria of the algorithm (the famous 200 ranking factors), we can only try to match the rewarded focus and stay on track with what the search engine likes at the current time.
And this is where the search intent comes in, which is the purpose and very reason why a user has performed an online search, what he expects to find in the result pages. Still simplifying just so to be clear, all online searches are aimed at satisfying a real need, which can be related to the need to find some news or a specific topic, to request services, purchase products, or simply display a specific website.
To make a content rank also passes through the ability to understand what people are looking for, how they look for it and what language (and keys) they actually use.
What are the keywords
The term “keyword” is one of the most used in the online strategies field, given the fact that in the end it refers to the ultimate goal of optimization activities, that is to find keywords, those “special” (and almost magical) formulas that allow the placement of a page on search engines, because they respond to the word or to the set of words that users use in the search bar to obtain information or consult the sites of their interest.
By simply writing keywords on Google over half a billion results will appear, so it is blatant that the topic is very central, and a similar interest in it are showing queries on how to find keywords and similar, which generate millions of pages in English only.
The search for keywords for a project
What is the keyword research
From the practical point of view, then, keyword research literally translates with “search for keywords” and is the task to perform in order to obtain a list as wide as possible of keywords with which try and make your project rank, that must be the very foundation for your strategy to be put into practice.
It should always be stressed, however, that there is no universal and always working approach for who “looks for words“, because everything depends on a number of different factors: first, you have to evaluate your site (from the points of view of authority, number of pages, quality of contents and so on), and then identify the goals and targets you wish to set for yourself (that can be to reinforce the brand, increasing traffic, visibility or sales), consider budget, resources and deadlines and, lastly, study your own production segment and competitive scenarios.
Also because, as we will see, keeping an eye on the strategies of competitors is often a good way to find ideas and inspirations to relaunch your project online.
The importance of keyword research
An effective and properly executed activity is important because it clarifies which search terms your target audience actually uses; the opposite risk is to lose potential customers due to a mismatch between the words used in an article or on the site and the real search intent of the online audience, intended both as the most searched keywords for that content and that topic and as the ultimate goal of what users want to know or buy.
Briefly, we want to remind you that it is used to identify three specific types of intent: informational, transactional and navigational searches.
It should be easy to understand that there is no sense in optimizing content for words that people do not use, just as it is strategic to know the intention and interest that actually leads our customers, so to answer them efficiently. For instance, if people are essentially interested in buying a product, we do not (and it is rare) need to place ourselves in SERP with content that instead offers information, and vice versa.
To know the audience helps us enhance our performance
Understanding what your target audience and potential customers want and what their needs are means to become capable of:
- Plan our strategy in advance.
- Choose more targeted keywords.
- Write more effective content because more useful.
In principle, in order to effectively choose keywords you should evaluate a number of factors including the average monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, the number of results placed in SERP for that keyword and its seasonality. With SEOZoom, we can do all these operations in no time.
How to find keywords with SEOZoom
Coming to the practical side, our suite offers a number of “keyword tools“, meaning those kind of tools that can help your online strategy; their reference area on the platform is indeed called Keyword Research and is subdivided in several different features.
The first is “Site builder“, a feature that allows you to design and structure a site from scratch, intervening both on the operational component and on the strategic plan, while “Your keyword researches” represents the history of your activities, allowing you to save lists of keywords to use to write articles together with the precious help of other tools.
SEOZoom’s Keyword Infinity, an ever-expanding database
An important assistant on how to search for keywords is our Keyword Infinity, which we can define a true and proper ever-updating database that, moreover, can be further enriched by every single user.
If in fact the keyword that we intend to observe is not already listed in the database, we can insert it manually and wait about 10 minutes to discover the results of the work of the specific engine dedicated to this operation, which will expand and display new correlated keywords.
On the practical side, this function has a very easy-to-read interface: by typing the keyword in the bar at the top of the page you can launch the research, that will provide as results query groups within which you will find the desired keyword declined in all of its possible variants, alongside a set of values such as search volume, potential volume, level of competition, the average CPC and a graph of the average seasonality of the keyword.
The scan highlights two different types of search intents, both Informational and Transactional, and the tool is then completed with the Keyword Graph, a graphical or tabular representation that reports the information on the average volumes of queries used by users relatively to the main questions, and with the Knowledge Search Graph, that allows to search for the recognized entities of the semantic web for the entered keyword (and which likewise appear in the Google Knowledge Graph).
SEOZoom’s keyword tools
With the Keyword search intent function it is instead possible to view the main topics regarding the keyword, eventually filtering the obtained keywords by subject: it is therefore a tool for keywords that helps us choose the most suitable terms for our project, thanks to the indication of values such as Keyword Difficulty, average CPC, monthly estimated traffic volume, as well as the list of results present in SERP, a bar chart with the monthly search volume and the button to display the latest registered SERP on Google.
SEOZoom’s “find words” feature is called “Discover keywords“ and is the tool that allows you to get innovative results on the keywords to use on your website, perhaps adding terms that we had not even thought of in the beginning. The analysis starts from a specific keyword, which the system will investigate for a short period of time: the answer will be a cell chart in which are contained all the branches of that word, with long tailed keywords and keywords correlated to the main one that can be further “navigated” and explored in order to acquire other results.
The keyword tool for a specific niche
The offer of our suite in this area is completed by two other tools: the first is Interest Finder, which allows you to discover groups of keywords useful for our project and match the specific aspects of a central topic on which the most part of user interest is focused.
In this case too a cell display will appear, with which SEOZoom proposes groups of long tailed keywords grouped by similar topic, with an indication of the monthly search volumes of the single keyword and the total volume of the analyzed keyword group. Furthemore, this tool is very useful for those working with Amazon affiliates as it immediately detects products related to the text we are writing.
Lastly, Niche Investigation is the right function to find new high-profitable keywords starting from a reference domain for a certain niche; this means that we can intercept keywords of a stronger competitor with interesting volumes, always with indications of difficulty values, average CPC, monthly search volume, number of results present in the search indexes and number of ads in SERP, useful to refine our strategy in a careful and more targeted way.
Other tools for the online keyword research
What we have written so far applies to both the newest projects, which therefore have to undertake activities from scratch also “picking ideas” from competitors, and to those who have been online a bit longer and perhaps already are leaders in their market niche. Leaving SEOZoom aside for a moment, then, and wanting to use other tools you have to know that there are plenty of choices out there, starting with the Google adwords Keyword Planner, the AdWords keyword planning tool that supports you during the building phase of your campaigns and allows you to “stay up to date on keyword trends so to enhance the campaigns in the research network and ensure that your contents will remain relevant”, as Brad Beiter, Vice President of Performance Content, Performics, says.
In fact, this feature comes from the“ashes” of two previous Big G’s products, called Keywords Tool and Traffic Estimation Tool, that have since been merged to create a free keyword research tool that allows you to identify and analyze keywords and discover the possible performance of a keyword list, as well as several other additional features.
We should not overlook on Google trends, then, a database of the searches performed all over the world at that specific time that also reports the most important trends, or what probably is the easiest way to search for new keywords, a.k.a the automatic completion of the search that you get through the search bar of the world’s most famous and used search engine.
