The Value Of Keyword Analysis For SEO
When SEO first began, keywords were everything. Literally hundreds or thousands of times, people would type their keywords, trying to conceal them from readers by blending them into backgrounds, placing them far from the page's centre, or employing other dubious methods.
Those days are gone, so do keywords, right?
No, that's the resounding response! Let's examine why keywords are still crucial and how keyword research may help us plan our content marketing initiatives.
The core of SEO
There is no one "core" to SEO other than the desire to score highly on search engines, therefore the title of this section is rather ironic.
What on search engines are you doing well in ranking for, I ask you? After all, people still search using words, right? We want to identify the keywords that people are using to look for items and services that are comparable to yours or to locate information about your company.
These are the essential phrases.
These keywords can be sorted by purpose. Many searches are made with the intention of gathering information; the user wants to learn something. Other search terms are used with a commercial purpose—the user wants to make a purchase.
These keywords may be categorised as midway to bottom of the funnel and top of the funnel, respectively. In order to get the pages on your site to rank for those phrases, we may map out our content strategy by determining whether keywords relating to your business have a commercial or informative aim.
When individual pages begin to rank well, the entire site begins to rank highly (if your site structure is properly laid out). The foundation of SEO is hence keyword research. We can eat away at your rivals by producing more relevant content by targeting based on intent, frequency, and competition, which will allow you to get to the top of the SERPs.
Keywords aren’t dead
Some individuals will make sweeping statements regarding the demise of keywords. They'll claim that "Voice search has eliminated keywords." They will protest, "Keywords aren't relevant because of natural language processing!"
To be honest, both of these assertions are absurd.
Let's talk about the voice search claim first. There are two crucial considerations to bear in mind:
Therefore, it's still crucial to focus on text-based keywords. Voice-based keywords are still targetable; they're simply different, which also implies. Voice searches in no way imply that keywords are obsolete.
What about on the front of natural language processing? Although it may seem like we're rehashing old ground, NLP still depends on words! The mere fact that search queries are no longer prepared to meet the requirements of search engines does not imply that certain keywords or phrases are absent from a given search query. Using keywords, we can still infer subject and meaning, and we can still focus on certain keywords.
Keywords as a guide
The fundamental change brought about by NLP is that Google is now considerably better at comprehending semantics. That indicates that it approaches a page (and a site) holistically. Based on semantics, it knows what a page is about, and by connecting its knowledge of different pages, it knows what a site is about. Additionally, it comprehends requests considerably better.
This means that the information we produce needs to be both distinctive and specifically beneficial to users; we cannot just add keywords in it. Imagine that you have a shaving subscription service on your website. We can provide material unrelated to "subscription shaving services," such as:
- Guides to facial hair styles
- Guides to keeping razors sharp
- Guides to different types of shaving cream/aftershave
so on. This will increase traffic from visitors interested in topics semantically connected to subscription shaving services and will also make our website more understandable to search engines. Only by conducting keyword research, learning what the clients we want to draw are looking for, and then producing pertinent content will we be able to achieve this.
Really, this is only the beginning of the reasons why keyword research is so important; we could go into more detail on any of the subjects raised above. In our experience as an SEO firm in Winnipeg, local searches benefit most from keyword research. Need to know more? Make contact with us.
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