What is keyword research and why is it important?

As you are probably aware, keywords are one of the most crucial components of any search engine optimisation campaign. Search engines compare the textual content of your site to the search terms entered by web users to decide if how relevant your site is to each search. The more relevant your site appears to be, the higher it will be ranked in the search engine results pages (or ‘SERPs’).

Obviously, search engines factor in other things when assigning your position in the SERPs (including how many web users have already visited your site, how long people tend to spend on your site and how fresh your content is). However, you can’t be ranked at all if you don’t have the right keywords. That’s why we at Excalibur Digital believe that keyword research of the utmost importance. But what exactly is keyword research, and how does it work?

Simply put, keyword research is the name used by SEO professionals to describe the process of finding out what terms real web users are searching for. Once your SEO professional has this information, they can expand on these terms to create a wide variety of standard keywords and long-tail keywords.

The first part of this process is relatively straight forward. The SEO professional will use online analytical tools and data to find terms that relate to your business or website and that are being searched for on a regular basis. These terms will become your site’s core keywords.

Once they know what keywords to use with your site, the SEO professional can start finding related, similar and synonymous keywords that can also be deployed on your website. This ensures that web-users who are looking for products or services that you offer will find your site regardless of the exact search terms they use. Increasing the number of synonymous and related keywords on your site also increases the chances that you will be highly ranked for at least one of them. The SERPs are a very competitive place, so you may not be able to reach the top spot for your main keywords. However, you might find yourself in a better position for a synonymous keyword that your competitors aren’t using.

Your SEO professional should also expand your keywords into longtail keywords. One way to do this is to localise them. For example, if you run a London-based computer repair business, one of your keywords might be “IT services”. The localised version of this keyword would obviously be “IT services in London”. Long-tail and Localised keywords are more specific than your core keywords, so there is less competition for them. Ergo, you are likely to rank higher in the SERPs for these keywords than for more general ones. They also enable you to attract prospective customers who use more specific, focused search terms.

We at Excalibur Digital pride ourselves on the quality of our keyword research. If you want to improve your search engine optimisation campaign using carefully selected keywords, get in touch with us today.