Keyword Research

Keywords! One of the most heard and most sought after terms in Search Engine Optimization. While choosing right keywords can make your campaign successful, wrong choice of keywords can completely ruin marketing campaigns. Wrong set of keywords or untargeted keywords can bring unqualified traffic to the website. Keywords are phrases or words that a user types in a Search Engine to find information he is seeking. Not just for search term, keywords also play an important role in indexing, cataloguing and ranking of websites by bots. So, keywords are an integral part of SEO campaigns and need to be used with other on page optimization factors.

Search engines use robots or bots to analyze blogs, web pages and any other form of content available online. Then, these web pages are organized, using complex algorithms, according to their relevance to particular search terms. Keyword research involves understanding different phrases that users might type into search engines. While doing keyword research, you must be able to peer into mind of the searcher and figure out their intention behind the search. So, every title you choose or content you write needs to have relevant keywords so it can be ranked for those keywords. Thus, with keyword research you can ensure that the website gets maximum exposure on search engines and maximize audience reach.

Keyword research basically consists of –

• Finding search terms
• Understanding how these search terms influence competition and traffic.

It is important to know different types of their keywords like long tail keywords, broad keywords, phrase match and exact match keywords.

Keyword research helps in understanding demand for keywords and keyword referrals. Some keyword tools also predict cost involved in running paid campaigns for those keywords. There are several benefits of keyword research –

• Bring qualified traffic to the website
• Lowers bounce rate of website
• Optimize website for keywords
• Increase search engine ranking
• Improve traffic to website
• Understand search behavior
• Develop effective marketing campaigns

Thus, keyword research is basically market research and getting better understanding of the customers. It is not possible to optimize a web page or lead traffic to a website unless you know which words and phrases are important to the website.