Keyword research is a crucial factor in the content marketing strategy success of your small business. Determining the correct keyword phrases to target will make all the difference to your strategy.
Importance of intent
Before delving into keyword research, it is vital to know the intent behind these keywords. Like humans, search engines today are sophisticated algorithms that can figure out the intent behind a user’s search.
Let us take an example. If you search for tires in Google, the listings on the first page of search results are about major brands of tires. Google is not sure what the user’s intent is. It tends to show generic results.
If you refine the search to say tire repairs, Google shows list of local mechanics/tire shops followed by more tire repair sites. Adding the suffix repairs changes the intent of the keyword phrase used. It is clear to Google that the user is looking to repair tires. When the search becomes more specific, the results are highly accurate that matches the intent.
Short tail Vs Long tail keywords
If your business sells bags, the short tail or head keyword for your niche would be bags. Let us assume you sell only sports bags of international and generic brands. Your short tail keyword is sports bags. There are approximately 1.2 billion results today on Google for this short tail keyword sports bags. It is a tough ask to rank on the top page of Google SERPs competing alongside likes of Amazon, Walmart, Adidas and Nike, to name a few.
When you look at a medium tail keyword made up of 3 words, as in generic sports bags, Google shows 53 million results. Although you find major players on page 1, you can find smaller brands as well, those that have been around for a while and done lot of work building content over the years.
Our point of interest is long tail keywords. Any keyword that contains 3 or more words is classified a long tail keyword. As length of the search term increases, it becomes more and more specific. If a user searches for navy blue canvas duffel bag, whoa, this has 5 words but it is so specific that Google has no problem with the intent of the searcher. It throws up around 13 million results.
From the above example, as the specificity increases, the number of results drops correspondingly. What this implies is that it is easier to rank for long tail keywords compared to short tail or medium tail keywords. Also, long tail keywords convert extremely well compared to short tail keywords. If you are looking for something specific, and a search result you click gives you enough information on what you are looking for, it is a win win for you and Google.
Research shows that short tail keywords comprise of nearly 18.5% of all searches made. Medium tail account for roughly 11.5%. Lo and behold, 70% of searches are long tail keywords. When you target long tail keywords to develop content, you have a far better chance of attracting targeted visitors to your site.
The beauty of this approach is that over time, as you create content targeting long tail keywords, with enough critical mass, your site ends up attracting visitors using short tail and medium tail keywords. Note the caveat here – over time. This gives your site time to build domain authority and trust authority and all the long tail keyword content culminates in ranking the representative short tail head keyword phrase.
Source: https://neilpatel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image07-6.png
Keyword Search Volume
When focusing long tail keywords, another important metric is the search volume of a keyword. The higher the volume of searches made using that particular keyword, the better it is to optimize your content for. Additionally, it is ideal to know the competition for keywords of interest, showing how hard and/or easy it is to rank for those keywords.
Search volume of keywords can typically be historical data. But that does not deter you from gaining a great idea of which keywords are popular, be they long, medium or short tail.
Also, if your niche is influenced by evolving trends, a look at social media will give you enough keyword fodder to develop content.
Free Keyword Research Tools
One of the best free keyword research tools is Google Adwords Keyword Tool at https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
All you need is a free Google account which can be created using a gmail account. Once logged in, you get to see the paid keyword search volume for all types of keywords straddling various niches.
Another couple of great free keyword research tools that gives you search volume counts are:
Uber Suggest
Keywords Everywhere
Paid keyword tools reveal your competitor’s top keywords, number of back links to their pages, ranking position on Google SERPs etc. All this data gives you a clearer picture of the search landscape for keywords in your domain of business.
Don’t Ignore New Keywords
You will come across new keywords that have zero search volume. Do not ignore them. There are several trillions of searches made on Google every year. Google confirms that it sees at least 15% of the searches made everyday are NEW, never before seen keywords. What is not popular today can gain strength and be a force to reckon with in a year.
Revisit Target Audience Persona
You worked hard to create a targeted audience persona for your small business. Visit that again and get into your customer’s head and think of her/his behavior, what thoughts she/he has and how it reflects in their searches made. Use these as seed keywords in the above listed keyword tools for further keyword research.
Doing Keyword Research
When you start with a seed keyword, it will give rise to several variations and associated keywords in that niche. Copy them into an Excel file along with search volume, back links, competition etc. For sake of simplicity, let us assume you run into several hundreds of keywords.
Start grouping related keywords and arrange them in descending order of search volume. These keyword groups should be tight knit and have a common theme running through them. As an example, all blue duffel gym bag keywords can form a tight group. This will be the focus of a page of content.
If you have cheap or discounted blue duffel gym bag keywords, it can be listed as a product for sale on the same page of content. Make sure that you do not bring red duffel bag keywords into this mix. It should have a separate page of content.
When you write content for tightly targeted keyword groups containing between 10 and 15 keywords, weave the keywords naturally into your content. It should flow naturally from start to finish. Do not repeatedly spam the content with the same keyword phrase just because it has the highest search volume. Also, add synonyms to the mix.
Manual Keyword Grouping
There are tools available in the market for grouping keywords. From my experience of doing keyword research, I have found that human intelligence combined with hard work of manually grouping various keywords into specific groups has fared much better than using automated tools. When done with lot of attention and care, keyword grouping creates so many opportunities to create specific targeted content for different variants of long tail keywords.
At the end of your keyword research, if done well, you should see a clean hierarchy of keywords in your spreadsheet. Starting with the short tail keywords (which naturally have higher search volume) arranged in descending order of search volume, you can see the long tail keywords at the bottom of each keyword group and also new keywords right at the bottom.
As a small business owner, you have to run your business on a day to day basis with all its accompanying joys and headaches. Leave this critical yet time consuming work of keyword research for developing your small business content strategy to us folks here at Traffic Alignment to deliver the goods. Give us a call or drop us a line.
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