Keyword research is an integral part of every SEO. It’s not only about finding queries people are looking for. There are a lot of benefits of using keyword research.
From finding the niche for your business to scaling the business, we can use the keyword research. So today, we will explore some of the major benefits of keyword research.
Before we start, let’s quickly discuss the keyword research first.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of analyzing different terms or queries that people use to search on the search engines. It involves finding
- Keywords people are using to search
- Number of times the keyword is used
- Competitors ranking for that keyword
- Difficulty level to rank for the query
- Different variations of the keyword
- Search engine’s understanding of the keyword, and many more
Benefits of Keyword Research
Now that we have some understanding of keyword research, let’s directly jump into the benefits of keyword research.
1. Find the Niche for Our Business
That’s right, we can use keyword research to find the niche for the new business or blog.
Suppose we are confused about starting our business on Digital Marketing or Web Development. Now in this case we can use Google Trend to compare both the fields.
Visit Google Trends, insert both the terms, and compare them.
Here, we can customize our search according to
- Country
- Year
- Business Category (Finance, Computer, etc)
- Search Platform (Youtube, Image, Web)
We can also check for any business trend in any field we like. All these data might help us make a decision to start a business.
2. Plan Our New Blog Titles
Now that we have decided our business. we can also use keyword research to plan the blog for our business.
We can find a list of topics people are looking for. Based on the topics, we can plan our blog strategy.
Suppose we want to start a blog for our Web Development business. We can use Reddit Keyword Research Tool to find what people are looking for in our field.
Here, all we have to do is enter the name of the subreddit based on our business field. It then shows a list of different keywords popular in the field. Besides, we can also get the total search volumes of each keyword.
We can also export the whole data in excel which is really helpful.
We can also use a tool called AlsoAsked. Suppose we want to plan for the blog on the Digital Marketing business. We can visit the site and enter the term digital marketing.
Here, we can find all keywords related to digital marketing. This will definitely help us gather tons of topics for our blog.
All these data are extracted from the People Also Ask (PAAP section of the SERP. If you don’t know about the PAA section, visit What does Google SERP Look Like?
3. Find Topics to Be Covered By the Blog
Sometimes it might be hard to decide what topics to be included in the blogs and what topics should be excluded. In this case, we can use keyword research as well.
Here, we can use the keyword research tool called AnswerThePublic. All we have to do is enter our blog topic and search. It will show all the related terms people are looking for.
Let’s search for the topic, Digital Marketing Types.
This is just a demonstration of data in a single section. It provides huge data in nicely organized sections.
However, we can only get limited number searches per day in the free plan.
Also, we can use the Searches Related To section present at the end of the search engine result page. Here’s what the section looks like for the same title, Digital Marketing Types.
As we can see the searches related to section can also be used for our keyword research. It provide topics that can be included in our blog.
4. Choosing the Right Form of Content
I personally feel that keyword research should not be used only to find the right topics and keywords. We can use it to plan the format of our content.
For this, the search engine can itself become the best keyword research tool.
We just have to search our topic on Google and analyze all the top-ranking pages.
If all top-ranking pages are
- Videos – We should consider videos as our content format.
- How To Articles – We should create articles in the same format, and so on.
This is because search engines always try to provide the most relevant content to the users. And, a particular format of content might be more relevant. So making content in the same format might be more effective.
5. Get the Number of People Interested in a Topic
Till now we are generating keywords and topics. We can also get the proper data using keyword research.
We can get information like the number of people searching for a keyword, the location of people searching, and so on.
For this, I would recommend the Keyword Planner. It is a free tool from Google.
Here is what the keyword planner looks like for query digital marketing.
As we can see, it shows the range of average monthly search, related searches, the level of competition to rank for the keyword, and we can also modify the search for location and date.
Alternatively, we can also use Ubersuggest. It is also a free tool available right now. And, quite easier to use than the keyword planner. You should definitely give it a try.
6. Find the Average Word Count of Top Ranking Content
It’s true that word count is not the ranking factor. However, knowing the average word count of top-ranking pages will be beneficial in some way.
If you can manage to get paid tools like SEOSurfer, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, then those will provide more efficient data in an organized form. However, we are just considering free tools in this blog so these tools are out of option.
As for the free tool, I would say the extension Keyword Surfer gets our job done. It is the extension from SEOSurfer. And, is available for all Chromium browsers.
Once we install the extension, for every search, we can see the search volume for the keyword and a box from Keyword Surfer on the right side.
On the box, we can see a chart with options, Traffic, Word, and Keywords. When we switch to Words, we can get information about the word count of top-ranking web pages for the keyword.
This is a highly recommended extension for SEOs. Make sure to get the full benefit of it.
SEOquake was another extension quite useful for many things. It has recently switched from free to paid. But we can get quite some information using it for free. Worth a try.
7. Get the Long Tail Keywords
As the name suggests, long-tail keywords are longer versions of a specific keyword. For example, the best seo tools in 2020 is a long tail keyword for the keyword seo tools.
They have low search volume and low competition. This is why ranking for long-tail keywords is quite easier than actual keywords.
Google’s Autocomplete, People Also Ask section, and Searches Related To sections are the best tool to find long-tail keywords.
Here we can see the list of long-tail keywords for the query seo tools using Autocomplete.
Now let’s see some of the suggestions from the People Also Ask section in Google.
As we can see, we can also use the search result page as the free keyword research tool. Here, we can get different long-tail keywords for our new blog.
Final Takeaways
The benefits of keyword research is not limited to only those mentioned above. We can achieve many more.
But before using any tool, make sure to have a clear idea of what we are trying to achieve. And, find the tool that serves the purpose.
If you want to find out about the popular keyword research tools then visit these articles
Another good thing about keyword research is we can use one tool for multiple purposes and multiple tools for one purpose.
Like, the Searches Related To section in Google SERP can be used to find the title of new posts, topics for the post, or long-tail keywords. So, just because I have used a specific tool for the specific work doesn’t mean you should be doing the same.
Try the tool. Find what it provides. And, then use them to get the best possible outcomes. Don’t just use them to find the keywords to stuff in our content.
