While many things have changed as SEO has evolved, keywords and links have retained its importance.

To use websites for communicating with the audience, you must create good quality content that conveys value and to know which kind of content to create you must engage in keyword research. Keywords are essential in reading the mind of the audience to understand what they like and provide direction in creating the right kind of content that gains high visibility. In the absence of proper keyword research, your New York SEO campaign will plummet and fail to provide the desired results.

Search engines too rely on keywords for ranking websites which makes keywords more critical. Keywords are like a double-edged sword that serves the purpose of winning the hearts of the audience as well as search engines. Doing keyword research helps to select search terms that you would like to rank for. Therefore, doing keyword research remains fundamental to SEO throughout the marketing journey and it is equally vital for content marketing and link building too. Viewing keywords from a marketing perspective would reveal that websites that perform well have the backing of proper keyword research.

Keyword research

Trillions of keywords are floating around the internet, and the task is not easy when you sit down to find out some selected keywords and keyword phrases that directly relate to your business, products or services and are popular among searchers.  The popularity of keywords determines its value because of its powers in driving more traffic to websites, which is the reason why highly popular keywords face too much competition and are expensive.

Keyword research revolves around listing and analyzing keywords to find out the actual search terms that people are using for searching products or services that match with your business interests. Gathering knowledge about the search terms helps to develop a content strategy and also the overall marketing strategy.

The process of keyword research

To begin the process of keyword research, create a list of generic topics you want to rank for. Make a short list of topics that are most relevant to your business and then scan through it to fish out some specific keywords that connect to the popular search terms in the niche. To get hints about the topics, you can focus on the threads of sales conversations and even think in the way buyers would view your business to get an idea about the topics that would be interesting for them.  If you are selling beauty products, you can think about topics on ‘cosmetic surgery,' ‘facelift procedure,' ‘Botox for wrinkle removal,’ ‘anti-aging cream,' etc.

Once you have chosen a few topics, identify some keywords that fit within those. These are keyword phrases that you think should help to rank well in SERP assuming that your target customers are using it for searching.  Some suggested keyword phrases related to the above topics could be ‘facial rejuvenation,' ‘how to hide signs of aging,' ‘correcting sagging jawline' etc.

Another way of identifying keywords that work is to look for keywords that users are already using to reach your website. By using Google Analytics or some other similar tool, you can scour the organic search traffic to identify keywords users are using to arrive at your site.

Ascertain keyword difficulty

Having a list of suggested keywords is just the beginning of the process because your goal is to create a final list of keywords that can rank well in search results. You must understand the potential of keywords in driving traffic by looking at the performance data of keywords. It helps to determine how difficult it can be to rank with those keywords.  Try to understand the popularity of the keywords by knowing how many people are searching for it. What other websites are targeting those keywords should help to judge the level of competition. Finding out the answers should help to understand the ranking potential of the keywords.

It is not just enough to know about the most effective keywords and stay prepared with suitable content because it is more important to ensure that you can cope up with the competition to enjoy the benefits. If you are unable to withstand competition, your SEO efforts would never pay back.

Long tail keywords

Keywords and keywords phrases in its earlier form used to carry enough hints about what users are searching for but it would never be so specific that is easy to understand the exact intention behind searches. Nowadays long tail keywords have become very popular which is very close to spoken words and presents more specific search terms like ‘tips for content marketing.’  Long tail keywords have low volumes but are highly effective in producing search results that are closest to the searchers’ intent. When you are using long tail keywords, it ensures that only qualified traffic reaches your website because anyone not interested in the topic would not click on it thereby minimizing competition. Chances of finding similar long tail keywords on other sites are also less.

When keywords are long and more specific it faces less competition as fewer people would search for it, but the prospects of ranking well increase because most pages would not be optimized for those keywords. Searchers would also gain from visiting the page that contains the topic that they are looking for because it was specific to the search term.

Use the right SEO tools

Identifying the right keywords is good, but you must be able to figure out its worth by knowing its monetary value that helps to work out the expected returns. You must also be aware of the market and competition.

For gaining insights about the commercial feasibility of keywords, you must use the right SEO tools that provide the answers you are looking for. It would help to find out keywords that effective and remunerative because the monetizing abilities of keywords are extremely important for business.