Aro Digital SEO Series #2 - Keyword Research
Keyword Research
This week's Aro Digital SEO series is focusing on a fundamental part of SEO, which is keywords. Keywords are words that focus on ideas or topics that quickly define what your website content is about. In terms of SEO, they are words or phrases that users search in Google.
To ensure your website will rank as highly as possible, you need to plan out what keywords are relevant to your site and boil them down to a select few. This process of discovery and evaluation of keywords is known as keyword research.
If you’re going through the process & effort of updating and improving your websites SEO, it makes sense that you’d enhance your page rankings for the right keywords:
What is "the right keyword"
When selecting what keyword to rank for, you need to weigh up two key factors:
- Keyword Relevancy
- Keyword Search Volume
You will find that there are likely lots of different variations in the ways to search for your business. Alongside keyword relevancy, you should also be considering how much search volume that keyword has. Ultimately you need to be targeting searches with volume, in order to generate more web traffic.
What should I be looking for?
Here is an example of one keyword theme. Notice that pharmacy searches in their various forms have different search volumes behind them?
Pharmacy is just one example, you might find users using other variations such as “Chemist”.
Top Tips & Tools
There are a huge range of tools available to help you analyse keywords. Below we’ve touched on two of our favourite (free) tools to use.
Typically we would undertake some research using similar tools, and compile data into a sheet (similar to above). We can then look at the total volume behind these search categories and decide on what keywords we want to focus on.
1. Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a free-to-download chrome extension tool that is great for jumpstarting your keyword research journey.
It majorly simplifies the hunt for valuable search terms by making data easy to find, showing you the search volume of keywords as you put them directly into the Google search bar.
To start using it in your keyword research, all you need to do is download it here, open Google and type in the keyword that you’re interested in.
Alongside the usual search results, Keyword Surfer will let you know the value of your term by showing how many people are searching for it each month and the average price that people are paying to place ads for it.
It also provides other relevant searches & examples, giving great inspiration on additional searches that could be relevant for your business.
2. UberSuggest
UberSuggest is a free web application that provides a huge variety of digestible keyword insights, with its most valuable being new keyword ideas.
It’s super easy to use, simply place a keyword you’re interested in into the search bar, make sure to set your language/country, and click the search button.
This action reveals a dashboard chock full of insights that suggest the viability of your keyword. The search volume and the SEO difficulty in the top left corner both give a good hint, by showing how many people are looking for your keyword and how many other websites you’ll be competing with to get their attention.
With a short scroll down the page, you’ll find a list of keyword ideas. This exposes a whole bunch of terms that people are searching for which are similar to the keyword you’re interested in.
This section is great for helping you find similar keywords that are perhaps more popular, less competitive, or actually more relevant to your service.
Find the keywords relevant to your business, and keep note these for future use - We will be implementing these keywords in the next step of the SEO guide!
What's Next?
Next is including these keywords on your pages, this is known as keyword targeting or page-text optimisations. Learn how to rank & include your targeted keywords in the next article!
Keen to learn more about SEO?
Find out more about Aro's SEO offering here.