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Keyword Research Tips – In doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for our website and its contents, keyword research is a practice that should not be performed carelessly. It is one of the most fundamental and weighted, for it would influence almost all other steps in SEO.

Take a look at content creation/optimization for example, it heavily depends upon what kind of keywords are being used. Stuff like keyword placement, content type, title tag, meta description, and many more are being affected by the keyword we’re using. 

Furthermore, all of the stuff we’ve mentioned before are amongst the ranking factors of SEO. So once again, it’s pretty essential. Here’s a more detailed article about SEO ranking factors you should be aware of.

With that being said, what are the things we should look out for when performing keyword research? This article will provide you with a quick answer of 5 aspects you should look out for when researching a certain keyword, let’s dive into these keyword research tips.

1. Search Volume

Have you ever wondered about the numbers of people going into search engines and typing in their certain queries? That basically is a search volume. It is an estimated number of people searching for certain keywords within a month.

So, it is some kind of a benchmark telling us how precious that keyword is, for it has the potential of providing us with a bunch of traffic if we had focused on that keyword. But how do we know for certain if a keyword is used by a lot of people?

There are two ways to find out, actually:

a. Rely on Google’s suggestion, whether it is from a suggestion when we’re typing the queries, or the one at the bottom of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), either way is fine. It would save us a lot of time because Google itself is going to tell us keywords that are being searched by a lot of people.

b. If we want to get technical, then use additional SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and many more. This way, we can look at the exact or estimated number of people searching certain keywords in a month. This way, it is much more technical and useful for reporting.

2. Keyword Difficulty

The second thing from our keyword research tips is to pay attention to the keyword difficulty. There are so many websites dwelling in particular industries, let alone in the whole world. One keyword can only bring several websites into the first page of the search engine results page. Therefore, it is a fierce competition out there.

So, we can think of keyword difficulty as the competition level of a keyword A.K.A how hard it is to rank our page or content by revolving around that keyword. Just like before, we can use certain SEO tools to know the estimated number of keyword difficulty, usually ranging from 0-100 to represent it.

If we happen to not having an access to SEO tools (most of them are not free, of course), we can always determine the keyword difficulty based on its type; fat head, chunky middle, or long tail. Fat head keywords consist of just one broad word, and is having the highest level of competition. Chunky middle keywords usually have 2-3 words with mediocre competition level. Whereas the long tail keywords consist of longer phrases with the lowest level of competition.

Go for long tail keywords if your website has just started and have a little authority score, take baby steps and you’ll get there eventually!

3. CTR Potential

CTR or Click Through Rate is quite similar with search volume, both describe the popularity of a keyword in a general sense. The major difference is that CTR shows exact numbers of people that actually clicked into a particular website focusing on that keyword, not just numbers of people typing it into search engines.

Now, the question we all having is what exactly prevents them from clicking into some website? Isn’t that what they typed those queries for? Well, here’s a thing that possibly preventing them; featured snippets.

Featured snippets tend to spoil the essentials of information related to search queries from a high authority website straight into the search engine results page. Therefore, people don’t really need to click into websites if the answer is already provided in the results page.

In a simpler term, check your planned keyword first, make sure you don’t have to compete with featured snippets in order to have a higher CTR potential. If you want to dig more about CTR, this article might help you.

4. Keyword Trends

Not everything is always popular in the long run, there are some things that blew up in a moment, then went straight down rock bottom, some other things were never that popular, and then some other things were meant to be everlasting.

In order to create content that generates good traffic for us, we need to find out the trend of our keywords, which phase they are in right before we create a content revolving around that keyword. If it’s in the start of emerging, go for it, as well as if it has a stable trend. Avoid using keywords that are already not that popular anymore.

Google Trends is a perfect tool for this. We can check the trend of certain keywords, or topics if you want to be general. Furthermore, we can set the geographical settings and also the time frame to be more precise with our needs.

5. Search Intent

In order to generate traffic into our website, we also have to align our keyword with the user’s search intent when typing those keywords. 

People have different things in mind when going into a search engine, maybe they want specific information, an account log in page, a place to buy/rent something, and so on. That’s what we have to figure out.

Think carefully before deciding to go all-in into certain keywords. Ask ourselves “what do people usually want to achieve when they’re using this keyword?” 

Take the word “Twitter” for example. Say we want to create informational content about twitter generally, we’d want to avoid using “Twitter” as a keyword, because people mainly type in “Twitter” to go into the login page, not to look for any information about twitter.

That case is pretty much applicable in every other case of search intent context, the bottom line is ask ourselves first about the intent of users to type in certain keywords into the search query. You can read more about search intent here.

So, to wrap this up, those are our keyword research tips. Make sure your keywords have a decent search volume – at least for your industry. 

Do not take on featured snippets head-to-head in order to have a higher chance of CTR. Pay attention to trends also, you’d want your content to be everlasting. 

And lastly, keep the user’s search intent in your mind always.