What are Keywords?

Keywords are basically the topics which define what your content is. It is what searchers enter into the search engine to look out for something. These questions are also called as “search queries”. If you want to get noticed on the web, you need to spend a lot of time researching the perfect keywords.
 
What are Keywords
Keywords

 

So what exactly is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is a long process and you have to be patient and on your toes at all times. In this post, I will be explaining the process of researching keywords for your new website. If you already own a website with a decent number of visitors, and you want to scale it, it is a completely different process which I will be covering soon.
I am going to list down an example strategy which has benefited me a lot previously.

Step 1: Thinking from a visitor’s point of view

This is the first and the most important step in your research process. A lot of people want quick results and they forget to take their time doing the required research. 
Let us consider that we are starting an Online Apparel Store which specializes in t-shirts related to sports. So of course, you will think that is easy and put in the most common terms that YOU can think of. So let me just present you with a fact :

Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average  which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

Search Keywords
Back to the drawing board!

So did you think you thought of even 1% of the possibilities? I am probably guessing no.
This is the mistake everyone makes, you need to do your research before deciding on your keywords. 
You have to think about broader categories first before you start off, so in this case of a sports-themed apparel store..you might think about general broader categories like “Virat Kohli T-shirts”, “Ronaldo T-shirts”, “football t-shirts”, you get the point.
Now the next step is asking yourself questions about these broader categories.

Step 2: Narrow down the broader categories

Now that you have a few broader categories listed down, start thinking what people would type in while they are searching for t-shirts. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet ready for this purpose, you are going to have to add more details like Click-through-rate(CTR), Bounce Rate and it is great if you can have it in one place and look at all details at a glance! So let us take football t-shirts category, what questions can you come up with?

  • Best football t-shirts
  • Best football t-shirts in Delhi (Always think locally first especially if you have a physical store, do not miss out on the benefits of local SEO!)
  • Cristiano Ronaldo t-shirts
  • Best football quotes (provided you have those in your store)
And so on, the possibilities are endless depending on what you have in store 🙂
You are not done yet, you have just listed all the possibilities, you still have to find the best ones!

Step 3: Research related search queries

Take help from Google itself to come up with more related queries that people search for. Use these keywords to help you find what is trending in that niche! 
See! Easy! You got some free suggestions from Google!

Step 4: Find LSI or long-tail keywords

LSI keywords are Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords. That means they are semantically related to your desired keyword. And that does NOT mean they are synonyms.
Let us take an example:
Tesla was an engineer who was credited with discovering the alternating current.
Tesla is also an electric car manufacturing company
So the way Google distinguishes these searches is using LSI keywords. 
Weave a Story

**I found this example somewhere which describes LSI keywords in the best way**

LSI keywords are words that are frequently found together which give the search engine an idea of what the context of the content is!
For example, let us say that your blog is about cars :
So now it can be about :
  • Cars – vehicles
  • Cars- The movie
  • Cars- A music band
In this case, Google will be looking at LSI keywords on your page to index your content.
  • If it finds the words: ‘vehicle’,’buy’,’sell’,’repair’,’model’..etc..your page is probably about vehicles
  • If it finds the words: ‘film’, ‘movie’, ‘Disney’ etc..your page is about the movies!
  • If it finds the words: ‘music’, ‘band’ etc..your page is about the music band.

Step 5: Use Keyword tools like SEMRush or any other tool you prefer

Now that you have a set of keywords ready for use, it is time to analyze the statistics for the keywords. I personally recommend SEMRush which has provided me with the most in-depth data about my keywords. You can download their reports and look for the keywords with most search volume(highest amount of queries), best CTR(click through rate), optimal bounce rate and many more parameters.
I will be writing an article specifically on this later as the explanation will be pretty long!

That is it for now! Stay tuned!