What Is Keyword Research?

Date First Published: 2nd December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 4/10

Learn more about what keyword research is in this article.

Keyword research is the process of identifying words and phrases and understanding how a website is ranking or could rank for them. Keyword research can be used to discover keywords to target, the search volume of those keywords, their ranking difficulty, how competitors are ranking for these keywords, and more. Researching keywords gives website owners a better understanding of how high the demand for keywords is and how easy it would be to rank for those keywords in the organic search results.

After website owners have found the right keywords for their websites, they should reevaluate them every couple of months. As websites gain more authority in the SERPs, they will find that they can add even more keywords to focus on as they work on maintaining their current presence in the SERP.

Benefits Of Keyword Research

The benefits of keyword research are:

• It can help to increase organic traffic. Identifying the best fitting keywords for published content can help to rank a website higher on the search results page. The higher a page ranks, the higher the chances of organic traffic.
• It can help to answer questions that the target audience has and meet their needs. Researching keywords for their popularity and general intent can help answer questions that the target audience wants answers to.
• It can help websites compete better and discover which keywords their competitors are ranking for as well as how a website performs in comparison to its competitors.

Elements Of Keyword Research

There are three main elements of keyword research, which include relevance, authority, and search volume.

Relevance

Relevance is about determining which keywords are relevant to the page. Relevance to queries is the main factor that search engines use to determine the order of pages. Content will only rank for keywords if it is relevant to the searcher’s query.

Authority

Authority is about how a site performs in comparison to its competitors. New websites always start with no authority and large websites usually have a high authority. Search engines always boost pages with a high authority in the SERP. The main factor that determines the authority of a website is the quantity and quality of backlinks, which is an off-page SEO factor.

Search Volume

The search volume is the number of times that a specific keyword is searched for in a given period of time, such as every month. The search volume should be considered when researching which keywords to use in content. Ideally, the keywords should have a balance between rarely being searched for, meaning that people may not find the page and being searched for hundreds of thousands of times or even millions of times a month, which are often keywords that are far too competitive and cause newer sites to get stuck at the bottom competing with very large and high-authority sites.

How To Carry Out Keyword Research?

A free keyword research tool by WordStream can determine which keywords a website could rank for along with the competition level and the top of Google Ads bid range.

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