In this article, let’s see a practical example, of how to perform keyword research to achieve SEO ranking of your new website.
As I always say, keywords are important, but even more important is the content of our article.
People who search online do so for a variety of reasons, but essentially they are looking for an answer to their question.
He is probably looking for a job, or a recipe, or a seafood restaurant in a specific location.
Whatever the need, the response he receives must be precise, detailed, rich in information.
These are the principles behind the strategy defined as SEO copywriting.
SEO: what is it
Let’s start by saying that it stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO stands for search engine (and user) optimization.
It is a web marketing discipline that aims to increase visibility in organic (not paid) search engine results to get quality traffic.
The goal of SEO is to make a website appealing to both crawlers and users; in fact, good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website.
Keyword research: are they all the same?
Realizing that the content must be extremely interesting, to make it visible to search engines, it is essential to prepare a proper SEO strategy.
SEO is based on multiple aspects among which we find the correct use of keywords. Topic of this article.
It is essential to be present where our potential customers are. Yesterday it was markets and malls, today we are talking about online.
This is evidenced by the fact that all major commercial chains, also have their own online storefronts.
It is a market that must be manned, otherwise it may become the preserve of our competitors.
Knowing how customers search for our products and services online is critical to the development of our business strategy.
For this reason, before implementing a marketing and communication strategy, an SEO analysis of online competitors is carried out.
To see how and where they are positioned, both from a web (website) and social perspective.
Knowing where customers are, how they search, what their needs are allows us, also, to implement the right SEO Strategy for ranking our company.
Beware because sometimes caught up in the heat of doing great SEO we can risk:
- inserting too many keywords: this activity is called keyword stuffing and can be penalizing;
- Cannibalizing keywords: occurs when multiple pages on the same website compete with each other to rank on the same keyword in search results.
Analysis of the most searched keywords
And now we come to the focus of this article. The famous key words or keywords in English.
Keywords are generally composed of two or more words.
They rarely consist of a single word.
They indicate what the user is looking for online.
They express the value, the user’s interest in a given topic.
We can divide keywords according to two main factors:
- Research Intention
- Research volume
Search Keywords: search intention
Search intention expresses the reason that leads the user to perform a search. Generally it is a question, curiosity, interest.
Search intention can be classified into 3 different types of keywords:
(a) Informational Keywords
Informational keywords, as the word implies, are those used by the user to search for information online: a corporate event in Milan, a pesto recipe, a new car model.
b) Transactional Keywords
These types of keywords encompass the searches of users who want to make a transaction. For example, buying a trip, buying a book or a piece of furniture, etc.
(c) Navigational Keywords
Navigational keywords are intended to find a specific website. For example: Instagram, Factory Communication (just to mention ours), Ferrari etc.
The number of monthly searches for a keyword
Monthly search volume, indicates the number of searches made by users on the engine, such as Google, for certain keywords.
The search volume can be divided into three groups according to the search queries.
(a) Top Keyword
By lead keywords, we refer to keywords consisting of a single term, such as apple.
They generate very high search volume and high competition (so many sites use that keyword).
It is generally very difficult to rank a site for this type of keyword, except in the case where the word is fictional such as prisencolinensinainciusol (who remembers this Celentano song) etc..
(b) Medium tail keywords
They indicate a more precise search term consisting of 2 or 3 terms. The user is performing a clear and targeted search: “Fiat dealer Milan”.
It expresses a distinctly clear search. In this case, it generates less competition than the “leading keyword” and lower search volumes.
(c) Long tail keywords” (Long tail keyword)
Long tail keyword is particularly used in SEO strategy.
Identifies keywords “keywords” generally composed of 3 or more words that generate low monthly search volume, but usually express more specific search intent and higher likelihood of conversion via SEO or PPC.
The user knows exactly what he is looking for. “fiat dealer milano viale certosa”.
He does not want to waste time on the search engine and wants a clear and specific answer.
Generally this type of search falls under those defined as transactional.
Compared with keywords defined as “short-tailed,” which consist of one or two words, long-tailed keywords, precisely because of their articulated characteristics, allow for the implementation of a long-tailed SEO strategy.
Long-tail SEO is a strategy that has, as its goal, to generate high-value traffic to our website.
They represent a great opportunity, because they are the ones least manned by competitors.
They allow us to better position some strategic content on our website.
Many times it is not used because it generates low search volumes. As we often say, it is not how much traffic we generate but the value of the traffic we acquire that is important.
Long-tail Search Engine Optimization on the one hand generates low search volumes, on the other hand corresponds to a lower competition rate and, on average, a higher conversion rate than short-tail keywords.
Semrush, one of the best performing web analytics and seo platforms defines long tail keywords as a search query that falls within the “long tail” of the search query curve.
Seo keywords: Google searches
It is the same Google search engine that helps us choose keywords and finalize our search on the SERP.
This aspect is very important because Google does business primarily from the ads on its search engine.
Therefore, it is critical that people continue to use the engine to secure their business.
This is why Google is continually changing, integrating and updating its Algorithms, with the goal of improving the user experience more and more: finding what they want right away with as much accuracy as possible.
Searching for the right keyword to include in our site then becomes an extremely time-consuming, laborious and onerous activity.
This is why so many seo tools have sprung up to help us with specific keyword research.
Google’s free tool is called keyword planner and you can find it in the Google ADS service.
It is the suite that allows you to place paid ads on the search engine.
We at Factory Communication also use Semrush, one of the best performing and versatelike suites available on the market.
Google Keyword Planner. What it is.
Keyword planner: if you know how they search for you, you know how to be found
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that allows you to find the right keywords both to make an Advertising Campaign and to create the content of a site in SEO.
What is Google Keyword Planner used for?
Also referred to as a keyword planning tool.
Google’s Keyword planner was created to help advertisers who use Google ADS, also known as Google Adwords, to place advertisements on the search engine.
It is also used by SEO Specialists to perform keyword research, which is useful for SEO strategy.
Like its siblings Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which are used to analyze traffic on our website, Google keyword planner is also a free tool.
For access the service it is essential to have a Google account.
Our advice is to create a Gmail account to use for all services made available by Google.
Keyword planner: what information does it provide?
Whether you are implementing a campaign, or seo strategy for a site, the Keyword planner is an extremely valuable tool for:
- Conduct a keyword search related to the category of products or services we offer.
- Finding the keywords most relevant to our business.
- Find out how often specific keywords are searched for and how their searches have changed over time.
- Building thekeywords tree ideal for our business.
- Understand in advance the budget of an ADS campaign based on the keywords chosen.
And now we come to our practical example.
The goal is to find the right keywords and competitors for a new bathroom furniture store in Savona.
We will need the keywords to draft the texts, while checking the competitors will be useful to understand how they are positioned.
Having discovered the keywords users use to search and how our competitors are positioned, we can implement the right strategy to position the new website.
Keyword research to index a new bathroom furniture sales site in Savona
If your company sells bathroom furniture, it is critical that users, when they search, come directly to your website pages.
To accomplish this type of research there are several online services. We at Factory Communication as a tool for keyword research use the Semrush platform, one of the best performing and versateli suite available on the market.
Below is an initial analysis produced by Semrush, using the example keyword “bathroom furniture.”
Analysis by keyword “bathroom furniture” is generic is produces a large number of results
Let’s analyze the data together.
Organic research: Volume
As you can see, based on the keyword “bathroom furniture,” Semrush detected 49,500 monthly searches. That is definitely a lot. The temptation to use this keyword is strong, but it is quickly diminished by looking at the next value.
Organic Search: Results
This value expresses the number of content present online, indexed for the keyword “bathroom furniture,” as many as 148 million. Really a lot. The keyword “bathroom furniture” is definitely broad, including production, sales, installation etc…
Paid search: CPC
The CPC or cost per click, indicates how much would cost on average one click of an advertisement, made with Google ADS (Adwords) that contains the keyword “bathroom furniture.” In this case the cost is 0.36 euros. So every time a user clicks on your ad, Google collects 0.36 euros.
Paid search: Competition
Competition is the index that expresses the complexity or competition of a keyword. It indicates the amount of pages that are trying to rank for this keyword in Google (0.0 is the lowest value and 1 the highest). In this case, just because “bathroom furniture” is too general a word, the competition is high. In principle, it is better not to base our strategy on this keyword.
Related and phrase-matching keywords
Now let’s look at two additional types of keywords.
Keyword phrase matching
As you can see Semrush identified as many as 13,271 of them. By phrase matching, we mean all search terms related directly to and containing the main keyword. In our case the words furniture and bathroom.
Clearly we can extract from Semrush an excel file with all the keyword combinations.
Related keywords
This section contains keywords indirectly or semantically related to the main term. For example, we can get results such as “bathroom furniture stores,” “bathroom furniture,” etc.
In this case Semrush identified as many as 1,769 of them
Clearly we can extract from Semrush an excel file with all the keyword combinations.
Both in terms of and related keywords.
Organic search results
In this case, Semrush displays SERP (list of results on Google) results for the keyword “bathroom furniture.”
This data is extremely important although unreliable, because as we saw earlier, it refers to an overly generic keyword.
Ad texts
As you can see in this screenshot, the ads propose totally different competitors than in organic search.
This element needs to be taken into consideration, because ads change from day to day, consequently so do competitors.
As we said at the beginning of this article, the first goal is to find the right keywords to write the texts for the new website.
The second goal, however, is to understand how our competitors are positioned.
Having discovered the keywords users use to search and how our competitors are positioned, we can implement the right strategy to position the new website.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are defined as keywords consisting of 3 or more words that express a specific search intent.
The analysis by keyword “bathroom furniture savona” is specific and produces a low and qualified number of results.
With this type of research, we get keywords that are more specific and close to our area(Local SEO).
We could say that we can more accurately identify our competitors.
For simplicity’s sake, we do not report again the explanations of the data found at the beginning of this article.
As you can see the numbers are significantly lower and we have a clear indication of the competitors.
Search overview for the keyword “bathroom furniture savona”
We immediately note that there are no active PPC campaigns.
Keyword phrase matching
Related keywords
Organic search results
Competitor analysis
Once we have identified the competitors, Semrush allows us to understand how they are positioned.
We report a brief analysis of the first search result www.outletarredamento.it/arredo-bagno_savona
The analysis can be further explored. The objective of this article was:
- Present a process for understanding how to perform keyword research
- How to identify my online competitors
Main information framework
Main organic keywords
This data is crucial for making the content of the new site. Basically, they show us what keywords the site is ranking for.
Keyword research: Conclusions.
To perform a proper analysis, the same analysis, carried out for multiple keywords and all competitors, at least those positioned in the top search engine results.
Keywords (keywords) are essential for creating your website content (content marketing) so that it will be indexed by search engines.
