Keyword Research for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide

The most common mistake people make when starting with SEO is targeting the wrong keyword. Keyword research is extremely important for any SEO project as it can give it direction as well as an actionable roadmap to success. If you’re not targeting the right keywords, then your project will be stuck without rankings and without organic traffic. The best way to ensure that your pages are getting traffic is by doing keyword research to target the right search queries.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is what you should do before deciding what content you are going to write for your website. By doing keyword research, you will find out:

• How many people are searching for a particular search term?
• What websites are ranking on the first page for that search term?
• How hard it will be for your page to rank on the first page for that search term.

If you’re just starting out with a new project, chances are that a lot of the keywords that you want to target will be too hard for you initially. The beauty of keyword research is that it will also tell you what keywords you can expect to rank for relatively quickly, thus allowing you to grow your project’s organic traffic. With the right keyword research, you will save time and resources by focusing on keywords that you can realistically expect to rank for before you are able to rank for your ideal keywords.

Keyword Metrics to Look At

When doing keyword research, you should be looking at the following metrics for your keyword as well as related keywords:

• Volume: you want to look at how many people search for this term per month.
• Difficulty: how hard it will be to rank for this keyword.
• Cost per click: will tell you if other businesses are willing to pay to show up at the top of the SERP for this term. It will let you know how commercially useful a keyword is.
• Click-through rate: This will tell you how many people who search for the term actually click on one of the pages.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a great place to start. When doing keyword research, you should also look at softer metrics like brand image and business fit when deciding which keywords to target.

Top Keyword Research Tools

There is an abundance of keyword research tools out there. Depending on who you ask, you will get a different answer as to which tool is the best. Some of the industry-standard tools for keyword research are:

• SEMRush
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Keyword Surfer
• Ahrefs Keyword Generator

You should give all of these tools a try and see which one meshes with you the best.

Conclusion

Keyword research is something that you really should not go on without. Doing SEO without doing keyword research is like going on a hike in the woods without a map. Use the information on this guide to create a winning SEO strategy by doing keyword research. If you need more help with keyword research, contact Auxilium Technology. We are a full-service digital marketing firm with years of experience helping businesses gain more traffic through SEO.