Think of keywords as the navigation system for all your internet marketing efforts. The wrong keywords will cost you, while the right keywords will catapult your brand to high rankings in search engine results and optimize the relevance of your content to users.
A keyword analysis is about finding such hot keywords, the ones your audiences use all the time, the ones that will make you show up in all searches related to your products, services, or industry.
How Keywords Influence SERP
Perhaps your site has the most magnificent design, and you have an experienced staff photographer and an A+ team of writers. But why isn’t your website showing up in search engine results? You sure seem to have gotten your content game right, and user experience looks satisfactory too.
Keywords are what you need. Keywords still matter and have never stopped influencing search results.
When search engine robots crawl on your site after a user posts a search query, they look for relevant information; keywords that match the phrases in the search query.
The crawlers will scan your page title, heading, written content, images, and links to establish a logical correlation between the information on your site and what the user is looking for.
If there is no content-query correlation, there is no top page ranking for you.
As you can see here, all the pages are here because the keywords are included in their meta title tags and description. They’re all bolded.
Other Critical keyword factors that affect search engine ranking:
- Backlinks— search engines read your backlinks anchor text to establish your site’s relevance
- Location — your content might be exciting, but if there is nothing to show your location relevance, you may not show up in SERPs
- Meta-descriptions— meta desription tells the search engines what your page is all about, and you need the right keywords to do that effectively
- Page copy— a logical use of keywords in your copy makes your website look appealing to search engine robotics, but an attempt to game the system with keyword stuffing is detected as spam
- Images and videos— images and videos can improve your SERP ranking but not by themselves, you need keywords in the image and video description, captions and alt text
Why do Keyword Analysis?
Before engaging in content creation, you need a keywords analysis to inform your direction. The study helps to find what audiences search for the most when they do research online.
The insight from the review will help you better customize your landing pages and provide the content that solves their problems and increase conversion rates.
Keyword analysis identifies the most profitable keywords
Your content and marketing campaigns need to show up on the first page of internet search results for you to increase sales. 75 % of internet users never look past the first page of search engine results; that’s why.
You might want, therefore, to capitalize on the search phrases that have the strongest purchase intent to increase conversions.
You get tons of organic searches
51% of website traffic comes from organic search. It makes sense, therefore, to optimize your content for this type of users, the ones who will be looking for information and detailed content.
These users might not have a strong buying intent, but they have started the buying journey which is the information search process in the Buyer Decision Process model.
You can enrich their information search experience and expedite the sales funnel with the right content, but you will need to first understand their search habits.
Keyword analysis helps to reveal the information-seeking habits of your audiences. Keywords show every detail that you might want to know about your consumers, including location, age, and preferences.
When you sit down to create content, after learning all that, you hit the nail on the head, and the resultant content outperforms every one of your competitors in SERPs.
You learn who your audience is
Let’s say you sell a variety of running shoes. Your audiences would include people searching for the best running shoes, running shoes for injured knees, running shoes for kids, women’s shoes, sports shoes, and so forth. Keyword analysis helps you focus where a majority of your shoe searches are.
If a majority of your users are looking for running shoes for women, and your content focuses on running shoes for injured knees, a lot goes to waste. Your conversion rates will stagnate or decline all together because of the irrelevant content.
Understanding Keyword Metrics
Now that you understand keyword analysis is beneficial, let’s get started by understanding key metrics. Your competitors understand that 80% of search engine queries are not first-time searches, and so they boldly make predictions on the expected performance of their keywords using these metrics:
Trends
The keyword trend metrics measure the popularity of a specific keyword when compared to related search terms. Finding out the popularity of a keyword is critical in any keyword analysis process. You can get Keyword Trends using the Google Trends feature, which analyzes and compares top searches in a given amount of time.
Volume
The keyword search volume refers to the number of searches that have been made using that keyword in a particular time frame.
This metric should give you an idea of the favorability of a search term among users, and reveal what they look for the most when they conduct online searches.
If no one is searching for the keywords you have in mind, don’t use them! But remember that your competitors are also highly targeting the ‘hot keywords,’ those with a high search volume.
You may, therefore, want to enhance the high ranking keywords with location, time, price and other details that make you stand out.
You can get data on keyword volume from Google’s Keyword Planner or other intelligent SEO tools, such as the Live Keyword plugin, LSIGraph, or BiQ.
CPC
If you are going to implement paid advertising in your internet marketing strategy, you must analyze a keywords CPC or cost per click. The latter is a metric that determines the amount of money you pay a search engine every time a user clicks on your campaign.
Trendy and high volume keywords tend to be costlier. Your competitors, therefore, shift focus on keywords that they already rank for, which helps to save costs. Remember too that Trends and Volume do not relate to traffic – directly anyways.
Competition
This metric shows you how hard it would be to rank for a particular keyword. The competition metric relies on analyzing your page authority, domain authority, link profiles, and content optimization.
Latent Semantic Value (LSV)
Latent Semantic Value is a measurement created by LSIGraph. It measures how valuable an LSI keyword is in a context or topic.
It takes into account the keyword search volume, competitiveness, as well as the traffic potential of the keyword in a particular niche. Here’s a look of it:
How to Select the Best Keyword for Organic Searches?
i) Check the Search Engine Results for the keyword
One of the best practices is to check the SERP shown for that keyword. It tells you whether or not your keyword matches the intent. This action similarly reveals the ranking potential for that particular keyword.
I’ve given an example of this in the blog post I’ve written earlier: Search Intent.
But, let’s go through it again. Let’s say you want to write an article that teaches people how they can optimize website speed.
Some of you may have targeted the keyword “website speed” but it’ll show you results of tools you can use.
However, if you target “improve website speed”, it’ll show you articles and tutorials of how one can improve their website speed, and that’s where you want to show up for.
Analyze the keywords’ metrics using tools
The keyword parameters, including Trends, Volume, CPC, and Competition, as seen earlier, reveal essential data regarding a keyword’s popularity, frequency of use, price, and ease of ranking.
When selecting the right keywords for your SEO, use keyword analysis tools such as Google Keyword Planner to learn accurate metrics data.
Find keywords that your competitors are performing for
You want a competitive advantage in the search engine rankings, and that’s why you are doing SEO. You can, therefore, check what your competitors are doing and improve on it.
This is called keyword gap analysis, and it helps you discover ranking opportunities that you didn’t have before.
If you’re looking for a tool to do this, try BiQ’s Rank Tracking Tool. All you need to do is enter the competitor’s domain and you’ll see a bunch of keywords they are ranking for in their “Keywords” tab.
Measuring a Keyword’s Success
i. Google Search Console
Now, here’s a tool that lets you see whether you’ve had any success with the keyword you’ve used. It’s the Google Search Console.
It’s free to sign up. With the tool, you can see what keywords you’re actually getting impressions and clicks. With that information, you can focus on getting those keywords to rank.
ii. Google Analytics
This is where you get to measure the results of your hard work. Use Google Analytics to see if your page is getting more traffic than previous posts.
On this platform, it is easy to see how your site is performing. You should see an increase after if your keyword analysis is done well.
Tools for Keyword Analysis
- Google Keyword Planner — you can use this platform to search for keywords and analyze metrics including Trends, Volume, and CPC
- LSIGraph — it helps in LSI keyword search, and it shows keyword search volumes, CPC and competition
- BiQ Keyword Intelligence — helps in keyword intent analysis (buyer intent), LSI keyword search and local SEO keyword search
The takeaway
Keywords still matter. Keyword analysis helps to create useful content for your audiences and improve your search engine rankings. The keyword analysis process can be tedious and time-consuming.
Keyword analysis tools can enhance the process and help you measure the success of your keywords. In the comment section below, let us know how it goes for you!
Updated: 21 July 2021
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