What are keywords and why are they so important for SEO?

Are you a business owner, online marketer or content creator? If so, most likely you would like more people to visit your website, read your content and buy your products or services. The easiest way to achieve it is to find out what those visitors are searching for on Google and create content on your website around these topics.

Every search reflects people's needs, wants, interests and desires. Imagine how your business would benefit if you could analyse search trends on Google, find search terms that are related to your business domain and customise content on your website to serve the actual needs of your customers...

A Quick Guide to Keywords

What is SEO?

SEO or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ is the act of not only increasing the quantity of traffic but also quality of traffic through organic search results on a search engine. Organic search results are those on search engine results pages (SERPS) that are unpaid (i.e not paid ads). If your website is already suitably built for SEO, then this brief insight into Keywords will outline some quick and easy ways to set you well on your way to top-tier SEO.

What are keywords?

Keywords are those words or phrases that search engine users are searching for. Through keyword research it is easy to find what users are searching most often, and this can be used to leverage SEO. How to do this you might ask? There are a number of tools you can use to make this a relatively short and simple task. Google’s Keyword Planner is a good place to start, and is free to use. Here's an overview for how to get started.

Using Google’s Keyword Planner

Simply type in keywords relevant to your business in the ‘discover new keywords’ search box, choose the relevant locations and hit ‘get results’. In general you can expect the keywords with the highest average monthly searches to have the most competition, which is why this isn't necessarily the most important keywords to target. More refined keywords can expect lower average monthly hits, and, although there is less traffic, there is also less competition. Targeting these will generally result in a higher spot on the results page and also higher quality traffic to your website.

As you can see, searching for ‘home gym’ in London, UK, shows an average of 2900 monthly searches with high competition, whereas ‘easy workouts from home’ results in just 140 and next to no competition. Google’s Keyword Planner will also give handy suggestions of keywords which makes the whole process easier. Backlinko.com also has a great comprehensive guide if you want to read up some more.

Incorporating Google Trends

There are plenty of different platforms available to be used in conjunction with Keyword Planner that provide relevant information to aid in keyword research.

Google Trends allows you to type in any word or phrase and see where the searches peak in the year. So now we can see what keywords or phrases will perform best and in which months. For example, searching ‘ice cream’ shows a peak from May to August, and falls off in the winter months. By seeing where the spikes will be you can create content before the peak and get ahead of competition.

How does this help your SEO?

Of course the big question to be answered is how does this help SEO (and your business)?

Now you see how important exploiting keyword research is as a tool to improve SEO. The easiest way to increase traffic to your site is to target the words, phrases or questions people are searching, but making sure to pinpoint a smaller more relevant search term in order to also increase the quality of traffic.

Now that you know what people are searching for, you can target them by integrating relevant topics into content on your website – for example, on a blog post like this!

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