What is keyword research?
Keyword research has a simple objective. Find out how people are finding your website now, and how they could in future. Once done, you might be surprised on how much traffic you are missing out on. With a little planning and effort, you might just find a tweak on your on-site SEO or some new content will drive more organic traffic . What does traffic equal? Conversions! Through keyword research, you can also make sure you are attracting the right kind of visitors to your website – visitors that are more likely to convert. Keyword research will help steer your content strategy, SEO efforts and general messaging.
When should I carry out keyword research?
Don’t expect to do a quick job of keyword research, build the foundations of your website based on those keywords/phrases and then sit back. Your website requires monitoring and re-evaluating to keep up with how the market is moving. It is not a one time deal as the needs of your audience will be shifting constantly. I recommend that you carry out extensive keyword research when you’re looking to create a new website and then analyse performance and changes in search behaviour once a month. It ensures you have the right knowledge to adapt and change focus as necessary. Remember your competition might be doing the same thing, so if you are performing on a phrase one month, it could be a different story next. Don’t get comfortable if you want your website to consistently perform over a long period of time.
By regularly assessing what people are searching for, you’ll be able to meet the needs of your audience. Meaning you can continue to create content your audience will appreciate and engage with.
If you want to carry out keyword research for your website. I recommend you start using Google Search Console.
Google Search Console
I’ll soon be writing a guide to help you get the most out of Google Search Console, but for this article I’m going to stick with the topic of keyword research.
How to use Google Search Console for keyword research
Start with logging into your Google Search Console. you will need to navigate your way to the ‘performance’ page, which you should find in the navigation bar. This will display a variety of web data in the form of a table, including number of clicks and impressions for your site.