Researching and analysing keywords are two of the most important tasks in your SEO workflow. However, they can also be quite time-consuming and tedious.
Nevertheless, you should get motivated. Understand that keywords are what connect you to your target audience. By using specific keywords, you tell Google, Bing, and other search engines what your website is all about, and they, in turn, place relevant sites on their search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword Analysis: What Is It?
A keyword analysis is the cornerstone of search marketing and serves as the starting point for strategies. This is because it analyses the keywords or search phrases that bring visitors to your website from organic and paid searches.
To increase traffic and conversion rates on your website, search marketers can tailor their content and landing pages based on the queries that qualified visitors enter into search engines. As a result, keyword analysis is an essential skill for both SEO and PPC professionals.
To beat your competitors, keyword analysis requires a considerable amount of time-consuming examination and decision-making, but it is an effective method of increasing conversions, finding new markets, and optimising spending.
The Importance of Keyword Analysis
It is imperative to test marketing outreach and marketing performance to optimise budget allocation and market reach. As keywords dictate the entire search campaign, keyword analysis should be the primary focus of your search marketing campaign. Analysing keywords allows you to:
Optimise Spend: Allocating more budget to successful keywords and eliminating wasteful spending on non-productive keywords.
Increase Conversions: Identifying and focusing on keywords that convert well is essential for optimising conversion rates and maximising return on investment (ROI).
Eye Trends: Understanding keyword search frequency provides insight into market behaviour that can be applied to many aspects of your business.
Prioritise Your Time: Focus on optimising areas that have the greatest impact on your bottom line.
Find New Markets: You can use keyword analysis to expand your long tail efforts and discover more specific keyword queries and their associated warm leads.
The majority of search marketers do not spend nearly enough time on keyword analysis due to its time-consuming and repetitive nature.
Why is SEO keyword analysis important?
A keyword analysis is the first step towards getting your website in front of your target audience. By optimising your website and creating content for the right keywords and topics, you will drive qualified organic traffic that is even ready to convert.
Among the most important types of traffic is organic traffic since it connects you with the right audience, allowing you to answer questions your future customers may have. Organic traffic is the only channel that can guarantee long-term success. Using our 2022 Organic Website Traffic Industry Benchmarks Report, you will be able to evaluate how your site compares to competitors' organic traffic and determine which industries attract the most organic traffic.
Using the right keywords for your website is essential if you wish to rank and get visibility in search engine results. Understanding what SEO is will help you realise the importance of keyword analysis.
Improve your online visibility with keyword analysis.
Your content can be tailored to the needs of your audience when you go inside their minds and understand what and why they are searching. The optimisation of your website through a strong keyword analysis enhances its ranking and visibility in search engine results pages. Climbing higher in search engine results brings greater brand awareness and qualified visitors to your website.
By analysing keywords, you can beat your competition
Imagine a scenario in which a consumer searches for a product or service that you provide. If you do not appear in the search results for that keyword, the consumer is likely to go to another website to fulfil their request. That website could be your direct competitor.
It is important to use your keyword analysis to optimise and monitor the terms that are most important to your business to rank higher in SERPs. The difference in revenue generation may be hundreds or thousands of dollars if you fail to reach that potential customer before they consider your competitors.
Why do search marketers analyse keywords?
There are several factors SEOs consider when determining the value of each keyword term when performing a keyword analysis:
Search volume: On average, how many people in a given geographic area search for a particular term or phrase when seeking information?
Competition: How difficult will it be to rank for the given keyword?
Intent: Is the searcher seeking general information, or is he or she seeking to complete a transaction?
Relevance: Will people searching for this keyword find the content on this page relevant?
Furthermore, SEOs need to be aware of the possibility of common derivatives, misspellings, or even different terms and idioms used by different cultures to avoid missing out on motivated visitors.
Search engine optimisation specialists can prioritise and focus on the words and phrases that are likely to yield the best results by analysing keywords.
SEO keywords: what makes them effective?
A good SEO keyword is chosen based on a combination of search volume, how competitive it is, the intent, and relevance. However, not every keyword that you target will have all of these factors. Some keywords can have little or no search volume but still convert well.
Find good SEO keywords by understanding your niche
Suppose your company provides software to the construction industry. Perhaps your website ranks for your own branded terms (if not, you likely have a problem) as well as niche terms such as "commercial construction software, which averages 30 searches per month.
In the case of head (also referred to as long-tail) keywords with a higher search volume, such as "construction software, (3,600 monthly searches), we will assume you are not ranked. The search term is broader, more competitive, and more frequently searched. However, those searching for this term have the right intent—they are likely to be looking for software options and may even be ready to purchase soon.
This is a good keyword to target since you are setting up your website for awareness on the search engine results page, regardless of whether searchers are ready to make a purchase.
Know your potential customers and their needs.
To return to our example of construction software, who exactly are these customers? Let us suppose that some of your software customers are architects, construction site managers, and construction engineers. Think about their responsibilities, which may include the following:
Architects: Planning safe buildings, collaborating with construction site personnel, and preparing specifications.
Construction Site Managers: Maintaining quality control procedures, supervising construction workers, and selecting appropriate construction equipment
Construction Engineers: Responsible for testing elevation levels, inspecting sites, and adhering to federal regulations
A keyword analysis that considers the needs and responsibilities of various members of your audience will help you to decide which keywords to target to improve your website's position in organic search results.
Identify customer insights from your keyword analysis
The next step is to find out what keywords your customers are using to find the solution you offer: construction software. You can find these keywords by mapping the customer's needs to your keyword strategy.
As architects are often involved in the construction process, "architecture and construction management" would be a good long-tail keyword.
Because construction site managers manage the progress of construction projects, a good long-tail keyword would be "construction project management software."
Considering that construction engineers adhere to federal codes, a good long-tail keyword would be "construction engineering software."
Key metrics & insights:
Search Volume: The average number of times a keyword has been searched in Google per month (over the past 12 months).
Search Visits: The number of completed searches in which a user clicks on a search result to reach a non-search engine page.
CPC: The estimated cost per click of the search term in Google Adwords for the selected country over the past 30 days.
Organic vs Paid: Difference between organic traffic (visits to your website resulting from unpaid "organic" search results) and paid traffic (visits to your website following paid advertising promotions).
Traffic Share: Approximately what percentage of traffic is sent to each of the analysed domains (or pages) compared to the total website traffic?
Change: Change in traffic volume over a selected period. Sorting by Change is a great way to discover trending keywords, fast-growing companies, and new business opportunities.
Position: The organic position of the URL on Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) (over the period selected).
Destination URL: The traffic generated by the selected keyword is directed to this URL.
Website Industries: The industries that best describe the website.
The process of keyword analysis consists of three steps:
Brainstorm: If you are working alone, with team members, or with trusted customers and clients, you should begin by brainstorming a list of your best keywords. These would be the words you think your ideal customer would use when searching for a product or service like yours, or phrases you wish to rank well for. Using five perspectives to generate the best keyword phrases, I discuss everything from “Boston tax accountant” to “how do I write off a business expense?”
Test: To determine whether your keywords will bring you enough traffic, you will need to generate them. Often, we use jargon in our industry that our prospects do not understand. Using a tool like Google Adwords Keyword Tool can assist you in determining which words and phrases are most likely to attract the most qualified traffic to your website. We may be missing out on new, related phrases that could attract new customers.
By entering your phrases into this free online tool, you can discover how much competition you will have from other sites to rank well for a phrase, as well as how many people search for that phrase. In addition, GAKT will provide a lot of related phrases that may perform better than your original list.
Rewrite: You should put your best keywords in strategic places on each page of your site, including the page title, and any headers or subheaders, early and often in the body copy, as well as in intrasite links.
What methods can SEOs use to scale their keyword analyses?
You have the best problem in the world - your company is growing! Whether you are doing SEO in-house or working on several client accounts, the ability to scale is crucial to your success.
Automation is the key to scalable SEO.
As of June 2021, Google processes over 5.6 billion search queries per day and 166 billion per month worldwide. A keyword strategy cannot be implemented at scale if SEOs attempt to do everything manually. Using a combination of third-party tools for specific purposes (SEO Book, Google AdWords Keyword Tool, SpyFu, Moz Keyword Analysis, WordPress, etc.) can help SEOs transition from manual to partially automated. However, there is still an issue of assembling all of your keyword intelligence in one place. Finally, it must be put into practice.
Analyse and optimise keywords for the best results.
The benefit of combining keyword research and analysis with your SEO efforts is that it saves time and ensures greater accuracy. With fewer steps, the information driving your SEO efforts becomes closer to real-time. As a result, human errors are eliminated. The software continually scans and checks for new opportunities, providing greater insight into more keywords than humans could ever imagine. With the automated analysis of keywords as well as the use of that intelligence to power optimisation efforts, SEOs can scale to hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords.
SEO relies heavily on keywords
In general, the more you analyse and prioritise, the more likely you are to be able to optimise your website with the keywords and phrases that matter most to your customers. Make sure your content is high quality and relevant to search queries, including headings, images, title tags, meta descriptions, and body copy.
Experiments are essential for the optimisation.
Over time, you may find that some keywords or optimisation strategies work while others do not. Make changes accordingly by trying the following:
Improve the quality of your content to better meet the needs of buyer personas and customer journey stages.
Create smaller, more focused pieces of content by breaking up larger ones.
Redirect existing posts to strengthen the authority of a single page by combining small pieces of content into one large piece.
Your internal linking structure should be improved—the pages you wish to rank should be linked from other pages on your website.
Changing aspects of a page such as CTAs, images, colours, and fonts in an A/B test will help you determine which elements convert best.
Keep a record of the changes you make as you experiment with the keywords and topics from your analysis.
What are the signs that it is working?
Search engine visibility rarely improves overnight. Adding new, keyword-rich content to your blog or website over time will improve your search engine ranking and attract more qualified visitors.
There are two reports available in Google Analytics that can assist in determining if this is occurring. The first of these can be found under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimisation> Queries. This report shows your site’s average ranking for any keyword that “resulted in impressions, clicks, and click-throughs.” You can see if your ranking is increasing or decreasing over time.
A second report can be found under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimisation Landing Pages, which shows you how your pages are performing in search engine results.
Finally, examine your overall search traffic and the number of leads you're generating from your website. If you're generating more leads each month, your efforts are paying off.
