• Mikey Ryu
• November 10, 2023
• 0

Keywords: The Heart of SEO Strategy

In today’s world of fighting for attention, content is a great way to go about it especially if it is SEO-optimised.

Understanding Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks for any SEO strategy and they reveal many things about your audience and the intent behind each search. Keywords are the building blocks to any successful strategy no matter what your goal is you need to be able to identify where your audience is and what they are looking for, by knowing what they want you are able to supply them with exactly that and therefore build a reputation as being the source of information for that topic.

Why Do Keywords Matter?

Allows you to target a topic or question:

A keyword can act as a topic for the content you writing after all how can you write something if you don’t first know what it is you writing about? Keywords act as topic points and as Google gets better at understanding topical relevance it becomes easier to captivate more people.

Understand user search intent

Keywords don’t just act as a topic they can also act as a point of information about your audience, for example, if the search term begins with what, why or when then the intent behind the keyword is informational. On the other hand, if the search term is more direct like washing machine price or WordPress host UK the search intent is more transactional, as it inferses that the person is looking for a thing that can be bought.

Content

While understanding search intent is Important it’s even more crucial when writing content for keywords as the intent can show you what type of content the prospect is looking for. If it’s an informational intent they want content such as PDFs, Blogs, and other types of informational content while those with transactional intent want to see products and prices or quotes.

Effective Keyword Research

Performing keyword research without a tool can be hard but it is doable here’s a list of free keyword research tools:

• Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator Tool
• Ask The Public
• Google Trends
• Google Search Console

Now that you have access to some tools let’s talk about other ways to do effective keyword research.

A great way to do keyword research is to enter search terms that you believe your audience will be searching for and have a look at some of the top results take note of a couple of things:

1. What type of content are they offering (search intent)
2. How Much traffic that site gets
3. How Repituatble is the brand
4. And what do they offer

All of these play roles in keywords that you can use, thinking from your customer’s point of view allows you to see how your consumers are finding content and what you can do to offer more useful content than your competitors.

Competitors Keywords

Another way that you can do keyword research without needing to do much is to see what content or topics your competitors are ranking for. They may be your competition but they too can help you rank higher than them. Your competitors have done the research for you so use that to your advantage, as they are likely pitching their content to the same audience as you.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have explained the importance of keyword research and how it can prove beneficial to your overall marketing strategy by looking at your competitors and how to turn their content into useful information that allows you to captivate your audience.