Last Updated: 1 August 2024
The keywords you choose can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful SEO campaign. If you choose the right keywords, you have the potential to attract valuable organic search traffic for years to come. If you choose the wrong keywords, you could get no traffic at all. This step-by-step guide will set you up for success — from understanding your niche to identifying and analysing the best keywords for your business.
1. Understand Your Niche and Audience
The foundation of any successful SEO campaign starts with an understanding of your niche and target audience. After all, converting website visitors into clients is often a matter of choosing and targeting the right demographics.
Ask yourself: Who are your target audience? What are their needs, pain points, and interests?
You should also understand the latest trends, competitors, and market demands of your niche, and how this might impact your target audience and keyword research process.
The “right” keywords for your website are ones that cater to your audience and help you reach your objectives.
2. Initial Keyword Ideas
Once you have a thorough understanding of your niche and audience, it’s time to brainstorm initial keyword ideas.
Start by listing down core topics that are closely related to your business. These topics should be broad enough to encompass a variety of related keywords but specific enough to be relevant.
For example, if you run an online bookstore, your core topics might include fiction books, educational books, and book reviews. From these core topics, you can then derive more specific keywords based on your offerings, such as types of educational books — history books, language learning, or GCSE textbooks, for example.
Right now, you don’t need to worry about any other metrics, just focus on those key terms.
Not sure where to start? Free tools, like Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner can help generate initial keyword ideas based on your core offerings.
3. Keyword Research
You should aim to find keywords that are niche relevant and not too competitive. Keyword research tools provide critical data that helps in refining your keyword list, ensuring that you’re targeting terms that are both relevant and achievable.
We recommend Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, SE Ranking or Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool. These tools use data from search engines, like Google, to estimate search volumes and trends, and help users discover relevant keywords by providing suggestions based on initial inputs.
These tools can also show you keywords that your competitors already rank for, helping you to identify potential opportunities and threats.
4. Analyse Key Metrics
Not all keywords are equal, and some are much more competitive to rank for, so it’s best to check a keyword’s key metrics.
- Intent: The reason behind a user’s search. Is it informational, navigational, transactional or commercial?
- Search Volume: This metric indicates the number of times a keyword is searched per month. While high search volume keywords can drive substantial traffic, they often come with stiff competition. For new sites, in particular, you need to strike a balance between relevance and what is achievable.
- Keyword Difficulty (KD): This score reflects how challenging it is to rank for a specific keyword. A higher score means more competition, often dominated by established sites.
- Cost Per Click (CPC): Particularly useful for PPC campaigns, CPC indicates the average cost advertisers pay for each click on an ad. It can also hint at the commercial intent behind a keyword.
- Competitive Density (Com): The level of competition between advertisers bidding on a listed keyword within their PPC campaigns. Competitive Density is often shown on a scale from 0 to 1.00 with 1.00 being the most difficult to rank for.
While it might be tempting to choose keywords with a higher search demand in an attempt to improve your SEO, this represents a bigger risk if you’re not able to compete for the keyword. This is where short and long-tail keywords come in.
Long-Tail vs. Short-Tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords are short, general phrases consisting of one to three words. They typically cover broad topics and have high search volumes. Long-tail keywords are more specific, multi-word phrases that cater to niche segments
Long-tail keywords tend to have a lower search volume than short-tail keywords, but long-tail keywords often have a higher conversion rate because they cater to specific needs or intent. In other words, users searching for long-tail keywords are often closer to making a decision, resulting in better conversion rates.
For example, a short-tail keyword would be books, fiction, non-fiction or eBooks, whereas a long-tail keyword would be top science fiction books for teens, self-help books for entrepreneurs, or the name of a specific book. By competing for the long-tail keyword in this instance, you’re able to compete within a heavily saturated market and attract people with a specific search intent.
Long-tail keywords related to science fiction books, with much lower search volume.
What About Domain Authority?
Domain authority (DA) is a ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine results, ranging from 1 to 100. There are numerous factors that go into calculating a DA score, from the quality of your website’s content to the number of backlinks that your website has. Although not an official metric from Google, it can be useful to use DA to determine the strength and credibility of websites currently ranking for select keywords, and where your website might fall.
Although there are exceptions to this, and it can pay off to be ambitious once you become a bigger authority within your niche, it’s good to play it safe when you’re first getting started. In highly competitive niches, in particular, focusing on low search volume and/or long-tail keywords can be a more effective strategy for websites with a lower domain authority score.
In conclusion, you want to weigh up all of these metrics to find a balance between what keywords attract traffic and what is achievable for your business. A brand new business is unlikely to rank for a broad 10,000+ volume keyword, but it might be able to rank for a longer-tail 10-100 volume one.
5. Consider Search Intent
Search intent, or user intent, is the reason behind a user’s search. It is essential to match your content to the intent to meet the user’s needs and rank in search results.
- Informational: Users are looking for information, such as the best books for learning Python.
- Navigational: Users are searching for a specific website or page, such as Waterstones.
- Transactional: Users are ready to purchase and are searching for a product or service, such as buy The Great Gatsby paperback.
- Commercial: Users are researching products or services with the intent to purchase later.
As such, when it comes to researching the keyword in question, it’s important to examine the intent and existing results with care. For instance, if you choose a keyword on the best books for learning Python, users will expect blog posts or responses from real users on forums, such as Reddit or Quora.
Identifying search intent is crucial because it will help you learn which type of content to assign or create for each specific keyword.
Conclusion
In conclusion, selecting the right keywords is pivotal to the success of your SEO campaign. The process involves understanding your niche and audience, generating initial keyword ideas, conducting thorough keyword research, and analysing key metrics like search volume and keyword competition to determine if you can rank. Finding the balance between short-tail and long-tail keywords, while considering domain authority and search intent, also allows you to target keywords that are realistic and effective
At Lumen SEO, we know first-hand how overwhelming SEO can be when you’re first getting started. Whether you’re struggling to get to grips with keyword research, are looking for an SEO team, or simply require some coaching to learn how to do your own SEO and keyword research, we can help. Contact us on our website or message us on either our LinkedIn or Instagram pages.
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