Do you know? Approximately, 8.5 billion searches are happening on Google every day across all industries as per Oberlo statistics.
By seeing those numbers, how can you know what your target audience is specifically searching on Google in your niche on those searches?
And, If you have an idea what your audience is searching for, it might be something too broad in your niche, but there will be low-hanging keywords with less competition that helps to rank on Google SERP.
So, I have written this article to make you understand why is keyword research important for SEO with examples, So that you can implement the process for your website.
Without wasting a minute. Let’s dive into it.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of finding the words or phrases that people type in the search engines like Google or Youtube.
Keyword research helps you to understand the user intent behind the particular query to produce quality content.
These keywords will be included in your content strategically so that your content appears higher on the search engine results page.
People type search queries on Google, And they don’t know about the keywords, they only come to Google to search for information with a particular Query. And it is your process to find out keywords from those search queries according to your business niche.
For Example: If you’re a Yoga trainer, keyword research will help you discover keywords such as “Yoga for weight loss”, and “Importance of yoga”, etc. to target your potential audience.
Now, let’s see why is keyword research important for any SEO marketing campaign.
Why Keyword Research is Important?
Keyword research is the first pillar of any successful SEO campaign. And, without doing keyword research you will never understand your audience’s problem in the form of queries on search engines like Google.
Your entire SEO strategy depends on your keyword research. It helps you to find topics and keywords in your industry or niche that your target customers are searching for online.
If you don’t know what your ideal customers are searching for online, then you will end up targeting and optimizing for the wrong keywords that do not drive traffic to your site.
If there is no traffic to your site, then there will be no conversions or no sales will happen on your website organically.
By saying that, here are the 7 reasons why keyword research is important for every website’s SEO success as shown below
Now Let me take you through each one of them.
The Main Important Reasons for Keyword Research
1. Gives Insights into SEO Campaign
Keyword research is an essential part of starting any SEO campaign. It helps you to find the terms people use while searching for your product or services on search engines.
By conducting keyword research, you can make an SEO strategy for your website, and it also helps to implement relevant words and phrases in your website content.
It is important to find relevant keywords for your website. Otherwise, your entire SEO Campaign will not be worth it.
So, Performing keyword research should be the first step that all website owners and SEO marketers should follow when creating new content for a website.
2. Find What Customers Search Online
Keyword research helps you to find what exact keywords your target customers are typing on search.
Every SEO marketer and website owner should know about their target keywords according to their services or products searched by the potential audience.
It’s not about creating content that you think is good for people, It’s all about creating content that people are searching for as per their requirements or problems in your niche.
To give an example, Look at the below image, I just gave three words ” best dentist in” Google autosuggest is giving a list of other keyword ideas that people are searching around the dentist.
So, performing keyword research helps you to find out what your target customer’s searching for according to their problems. So that as a business owner or website owner you can provide a solution to their requirements and be visible to them.
Also read : Pros and Cons of SEO here!
3. Understand the Search Intent
Understanding the search intent is crucial for a particular search query to provide relevant content to the users.
And, Google also mentioned that they show relevant websites on search results based on user intent behind the query.
So, Keyword research helps to understand the user intent behind the particular search query. Understanding user intent allows you to write quality, relevant content to rank on SERP.
For example. Let’s take a search query “keyword research tool”. Let’s see what Google is showing if someone is searching for that query.
As you can see in SERP, Google shows the websites providing keyword research tools for that query. Here, the intent behind the query is people looking for the tools for the process to do keyword research.
So Google understands the intent and shows those results on SERP.
Now let’s take another example: “keyword research tools list” When I search this keyword on Google, the results on SERP are different as shown below
By looking at search results, the intent behind the keyword is to know different types of keyword research tools, So, Google algorithms understand the search intent behind keywords and show the relevant search results as per query.
Here you can understand that, by doing keyword research and by typing the keyword on the search, you can know what the user intent behind the keyword is by looking at SERP.
Understanding customer requirements is essential for your business or niche to provide quality results to them. You can understand what your target audience is looking for by performing keyword research.
4. Identify the Competition and Find New Topics.
By doing keyword research, You can know how competitive the keyword is to rank on Google.
If you target low-competition keywords it will be easy to rank on Google, which builds your website authority at the beginning.
There are different types of keywords in SEO to target your audience, and it is essential to know how much competition each keyword is there to target your potential audience.
It also helps to find different keyword ideas and content topics related to your product or services.
For example: Suppose you run a “travel blog”. Let’s take the keyword “places to visit in India”. I have put the keyword in the Ahref free keyword generator tool to get an idea of the competition for the keyword, so it gave the output as shown below.
From the above screenshot, you can see that the keyword “places to visit in India” has a keyword difficulty of 30, which is said to be medium competition to rank on Google.
These metrics may not be accurate, but you can use them to get an approximate idea to batch your keywords and create content accordingly.
And for example, if the travel blog has some authority, you can target the medium competition keywords. Otherwise, you need to pick low-competition keywords which help to rank easily and drive traffic to the site so that you can make money from it by monetizing.
And also, you can see that the tool shows the different related content ideas or keywords people are also searching online related to travel in India.
So, this is why, by performing keyword research you will able to identify the competition and content topics to create content as per your target audience.
Also Read: Short tail and long-tail keywords differences here.
5. Understand the Competitor’s Market
Keyword research also helps you to understand your competitors and market by finding keywords related to your business.
After finding your target keywords, you can just put that keyword in the Google search, to see some of the direct and indirect competitors ranking on top of search results.
Let’s take another example, if I want to rank for the keyword “SEO freelancer in Bangalore” and also if I want to check who my competitors are, I can type that keyword on Google to identify my competitors, as shown below.
You can make a list of competitors and sort out direct and indirect competitors to make your own market to rank on Google.
It also helps you to identify competitors’ keywords. Knowing your competitor’s keywords helps you to produce more targeted and relevant content, which allows you to outrank your competitors.
6. Helps to Make Your Content Better
Keyword research also helps you to produce quality content or it helps to improve the quality of your website content.
And, Finding specific intent keywords by doing keyword research according to your target audience helps you provide high-quality content on that specific keyword.
For example: Let’s say you’re into the weight loss niche, By conducting keyword research, you might find keywords or topics such as “weight loss for thyroid patients” or “how to lose weight at home”.
By finding these types of keywords you can create quality and relevant content targeting specifically thyroid patients who want to lose weight, and which is valuable to your potential audience.
And to produce quality content, performing keyword research and understanding the intent behind the keywords is crucial.
Also Read: Which element is most important for On Page SEO
7. Helps to Increase Website Visibility
The most obvious benefit of performing keyword research is you will find the most popular and relevant keywords used by your target audience.
By identifying relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for, you can create quality content and optimize it for search engines, which helps rank and increase your site’s visibility.
For example: let’s say you run a yoga studio in Hyderabad City. You should optimize your website and content for keywords like “Yoga classes in Hyderabad,” “Pregnancy yoga classes in Hyderabad,” etc.
By adding or optimizing for those keywords, your website would be more likely to appear in search results when people search for those terms as shown below.
So, when your website appears at the top of search results, the visibility of your site increases, which leads to attracting more visitors and potential customers to your business.
So these are the 7 Keyword research Importance in SEO that helps to make your SEO campaign successful.
Keyword research is not one time process in SEO, you should always need to look at what people are searching for in your niche regularly. So that you can create quality content and be ahead of your competitors.
If you want to know how to find keywords for your website, I have covered the in-depth topic of
how to do keyword research which will be helpful to you to perform keyword research and find keywords.
Conclusion
Keyword research is crucial for SEO, As I said it reveals all the important keywords your potential audience searches on Google. And it also gives insights into your competitor’s websites to outrank them.
The main reason why keyword research is important because that it helps to target the right keywords on your website and to build a successful SEO campaign by driving traffic to the site.
So, this is why keyword research should be your first step before starting any SEO campaign.
I hope this article helped you to understand the importance of keyword research. If you have any queries, please feel free to ask in the comments. I like to read and reply.
Thank you!