Tackling your own search engine optimisation, effectively, without trusted agency support, can be difficult.

Each element of the process requires you to observe and utilise its own specific best practises, in order for each element to play its part in the overall holistic SEO process.

Keyword Research is perhaps the element of SEO that requires the most attention. In this blog, we explore what the process is, the importance of keyword research, and our recommended approach (which covers some of the key best practices).

The Importance of Keyword Research – In Basic Terms

Keyword Research, as the name suggests, is the process whereby you explore and identify the keywords with which to optimise your website copy. These keywords facilitate bringing organic traffic to pages of your website via search (google, bing etc and AI search).

Without well researched and carefully identified keywords – and website page copy effectively optimised for these key terms – your website is tantamount to a shuttered shop, where entry is only granted to those who know a secret magic password.

This is where the importance of keyword research lies at its core. Making incorrect or ill informed keyword choices, based on questionable insight, is a recipe for SEO disaster. So, it pays to spend the time and get it right.

Preparing for Success

The first step in “getting it right”, is tools. Tools like MOZ and SEM Rush, though not especially cheap, offer you the metrics and insights to make considered and informed choices, and tackle this process at a high level.

Due to the importance of the keyword research process, we don’t recommend navigating it without the insights provided by these tools. Search Engine results on any given day can only take you so far.

Tools like Moz provide insight into: term search volume, ranking difficulty, keyword click through rates, the competitors ranking for particular terms, insights into competitor optimisation choices and how it has been applied, and exactly what your potential users are searching for etc.

The All Important Keyword Research Process

Due to the importance of keyword research, much is written about how it’s done, and how to approach it.

The beauty and frustration of the process is that due to the vast level of insight available, and the huge amount of competition in almost every search landscape, you can research to an incredible depth. Truly, a “How long is a piece of string?” process.

The Marketing Optimist has been providing SEO services since our inception. We have optimised our keyword research process (no pun intended), to produce the greatest results, in the most efficient way.

Step 1

Our usual first port of call is an SEO audit. This process starts with manual research of market competition. In these documents, we assess how well optimised the client’s site is, how it aligns with their overall marketing strategy and goals, how it competes in the search landscape, and note our content, optimisation and functionality-related proposed amendments.

These audits also include a site map – an outline of the site’s architecture – this will help you to map keywords to particular pages later.

For you, we recommend your first step is to refresh yourself with your marketing strategy, conduct extensive competitor research into their websites and content (so you know what you’re trying to beat in terms of quality), and with this information, create an adapted site map/architecture list.

Step 2

With a reference for pages of your website, and the kind of copy/content that should be on these pages, you can begin the first stage of keyword research.

We use Moz’s KWR tool to collect genuine, reliable, insight into the real life search behaviour of your potential customers, helping us to identify the most relevant real life search terms, with the highest search metrics (monthly term search vol, difficulty and CTR), to drive all important organic traffic to your website.

This real-life insight, should drive home the importance of keyword research. By seeing exactly what your potential customers are searching for, KW metrics, and KW search intent (transactional, informational etc), you can optimise for these KWs, and map content styles to KWs with appropriate search intent. Zero guess work.

Use your chosen tool to search for service or product terms, various descriptors of your kind of business etc. Log the metrics, and note the tool’s
related terms that users have searched for, both short and long tail. Collect your long tails for blogs and LP FAQ’s.

Using the tool’s insights, we log a huge range of appropriate, high-volume keywords, noting the terms’ search intent, ready for the mapping process later.

Consider the following factors throughout the KWR process, as we do, for the greatest results:

• Your marketing funnel – analysing the optimisation opportunities at each stage
• Your wide range of potential customers and the actions you want them to take
• Your products/services and how they help potential customers/clients.
• The various levels of knowledge users will have upon making the search.

Step 3

As we alluded to earlier in this page, due to the importance of keyword research, and the range of insights available, you can go as deep as you like into the process. At MO, we can freedrive to the depths, but we recommend you at least go ‘this’ much deeper.

With a log of key terms collected in the previous stage, use your tool to search again for these terms. Ignore the metrics and search intent – you already noted them down. This time, find the tool’s widget that shows you the websites competing for these terms.

In Moz, I can see the SEO titles, meta descriptions, and URL’s (a great indicator of page type and whether something is effectively optimised), so I can start to see who is ranking for these terms, and how they’re optimising for it, effectively or otherwise.

Make a note of this for all terms, so you can start to build a picture of the search landscape around each term, and the kinds of content ranking well for it. Starting to see a template forming here?

At this point, you should have, for each term:

• “The keyword”
• The Search Metrics
• Search Intent
• Competitors for the term
• How they’re generally optimising for the term in SEO titles
• Page type (Page or blog) for the pages ranking for the term.

Step 4

The importance of keyword research doesn’t simply lie in finding high-value terms. Mapping the right terms to the right pages is key to SEO success. While mapping terms to the pages of your site (outlined in your architecture document), take careful note of:

• The page type you’re optimising
• The kind of key term – descriptive of a service/product (for web pages), long tail questions (for blogs and web page FAQ’s)
• The most fitting and high-value key terms (in relation to importance of page)
• The search intent of the term (ensuring it matches that of the page)
• How competitors are optimising their equivalent page

You can optimise a page for multiple terms. We rarely recommend optimising a page for more than 2 key terms.

Step 5

The next stage is content and page optimisation. This involves using the keyword to effectively optimise your page content and the page itself.

Read our Guide to Content and Page Optimisation here. 

Work With The Marketing Optimist

If you’ve gotten to the end of this blog, and now understand the importance of keyword research, but feel it’s too large a project to tackle alone, contact our team today.

We offer a full SEO service covering strategy, keyword research, copywriting, content and page optimisation, SEO for AI search, reporting and technical SEO.

Beyond SEO, we can all support you with marketing strategy, social media marketing, website design, and digital PR.