Why have such a Keyword Research in your marketing materials? There are several reasons. You'll discover how your field is searched, how people ask questions in search engines, you'll uncover different types of keywords that may have some similarities and some differences - in short, you'll find out how people navigate in your field and thus you can make it easier for them to navigate through websites.
If you are serious about online marketing, then keyword research should not be missing in your materials for increasing website traffic from internet search engines.
Thanks to the research, you'll discover which phrases are relevant and beneficial for your website. Subsequently, you can propose the best possible information architecture for the websites or, for example, it can help you with improving your content strategy or building backlinks as part of link building.
Keyword research is a list of keywords, queries, and phrases, to which valuable information useful for your business is added. With this information, you can optimize your website for search engines in various ways - e.g., designing information architecture, revising content strategy, determining the benefit before expanding the business, etc. Furthermore, the analysis helps you understand how your field is searched and whether you cover all possible segments.
The analysis not only helps in SEO (I've also come across the term "SEO analysis," which I don't think is equivalent - SEO analysis should review the overall state of websites from an SEO perspective), but also in PPC (e.g., excluding words for advertising campaigns), mailing (e.g., newsletter - most searched products in the Czech Republic in your field), content marketing - copywriting (SEO texts, SEO articles, ...) and many other areas.
You may have also come across the term KWR, which is not exactly a good abbreviation - Czech and English together. More likely, you would have encountered KWR, which comes from the phrase "Keyword Research".
What is the purpose of the research
- You get a list of relevant phrases, queries, and keywords, as people search for you
- You find out whether people search according to certain rules/patterns
- Materials that you use in various areas of online marketing
- You find out which segments you don't cover and thus lose potential visitors
- You can discover keywords, for example, that the competition doesn't cover
- When designing the information architecture for website creation, or when making adjustments
What will I learn about keywords?
Let's look together at what it's good to find out about queries through keyword research. What you should learn about them, I've divided into several subtopics:
- Relevance to your field
- Conversion potential of the keyword
- Competition/difficulty in making an impact
- Segmentation of keywords
Relevance to your field
Are the keywords from the research relevant to your business? Are they beneficial and help you convert a visitor into a customer? Aren't you using keywords that are far from your field and for which you have a high bounce rate? Simply put, you'll find out how important specific keywords are to you and whether you are using them correctly. If you have, for example, an e-shop focused on selling fashion accessories, definitely avoid words like "clothing, garments, ..." Just because you think they are highly searched words (although they are no longer relevant).
Conversion potential of the keyword
Analyze how specific keywords perform in terms of sales. Do the keywords bring sales or just high traffic? From the research, you will learn which KW are beneficial and which you should rather exclude. Your goal is certainly not just to have the highest traffic, but for visitors to fulfill your planned goals - whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or writing a comment. This way, you can increase the conversion ratio and offer people what they really want. After analyzing the queries, you can easily find out how to increase sales.
Competition/difficulty in making an impact
Have you found a segment that you want to optimize? And do you know how difficult it will be? The research will tell you this easily. For example, imagine you have an entry page on the first page of search results at about the 9th position and you decide that you want to start optimizing the given KW - which is highly searched. At the same time, however, you know that you have another entry page with lower search frequency, but it appears on the 5th page and you have almost zero traffic on it. What do you think, will it be easier to optimize the entry page appearing on the first page of search results or the entry page appearing on the 5th page? From experience, I know that it is often worth optimizing pages that are poorly displayed in the results - it takes far less time, you can move the page to, for example, the 2nd page in the results, start driving much higher traffic and thus you can convert visitors into customers sooner (and in the meantime, you manage to optimize other entry pages, than you would have finished optimizing entry pages appearing on the first page). For pages that are well displayed (first page of search results), it is harder to gain better positions in a short time - but it is possible :).
Also, the keyword research over a certain period will tell you, for example, how much a particular keyword brought in sales, what the competition is like in search results, what margin you have on a given segment, what the priority of the business is for selling a particular segment, and many other metrics that you use to determine the difficulty in making an impact.
Segmentation of keywords
As I've already written in the previous point, you'll learn from keywords to which segment they belong - it's kind of a categorization of keywords. From the keyword research, you can filter out whether you are interested in keywords relevant to a certain category, keywords relevant to product pages, informational queries, etc. But that's not all, you'll also find out all the parameters that are searched with it - it could be, for example, color, type of drive, range, power, brand, gender, seasonality, etc. This way, you'll find out which segments are missing on your website - and so the analysis will also help you in designing the website's information architecture - i.e., you'll find out what to use in the main menu, in supporting menus, categories, tags, filters, what entry pages to create, and much more.
If you work on the website considering the research, you won't only gain higher traffic from search engines (or higher positions for current KW), but you will also get a picture of your visitors. You'll understand their searches and can offer them answers, generally speaking, you'll prepare for them and already know what interests them.
The keyword research itself is just one of many pieces to the successful optimization of a website, it's important to also consider on-page factors. If you don't cause problems for search engines in the technical part of SEO, these steps can help you get ahead with search engines. And who wouldn't want to have nice positions on Seznam and Google, or other search engines, right? 🙂
What to Look Out For When Choosing a Keyword Research Provider?
As it often happens, even in the Czech Republic, I encounter marketing agencies or marketing consultants/specialists who create a keyword research and deliver it – unfortunately, it often lacks several factors that help you understand what actually makes sense in reality. Usually, it's just "blindly" researched words from tools – Keyword Planner (Adwords) and Keyword Suggestions (Sklik) – and the associated search volume, sorted from the most searched phrases. In my opinion, these people are more interested in profit, not in standing by you and helping you "kickstart" SEO. If you are a manager or an SEO specialist in a company, the analysis should show you a long-term plan – you need to understand which direction you are heading and why. If you receive an analysis from an agency or freelancer that only contains points for optimization, you won't understand what is more beneficial for you in the long run. In other words, which changes are one-time/short-term, what KPI will the change bring, how is it prioritized, and why,...
So, if you are choosing an agency or a specialist to create a keyword research for you, you need to be cautious about several things – mainly, you must consider what you expect from the research and where and how you want to use it (or the SEO consultant can advise you). Generally, you will probably be interested in:
- What segments are not covered, or which ones are not in a "good" state + recommendations on which segments to optimize first and which later, so that you can achieve your set goals as quickly as possible.
- What the information architecture should look like – are categories, tags, filters, content pages, etc., correctly designed?
- Are we using the right keywords within our content strategy or in naming pages/sections?
- Which segments are worth better linking (both internally and through backlinks)?
What Should Not Be Missing in a Quality Research?
- Priority – What is currently a priority for me? What can I do later and what should I do now to avoid unnecessary work?
- KPI – What will be the result? What will each change bring and how will it manifest? How can I check the change and track further development?
- Roadmap – Will I have an overview of all the changes that should be made, and can I record the current progress? Or do I have materials from the provider in which the points are described, showing where to start with optimization and how to continue (closely related to priority)?
Research from the Client's Perspective
Now you will learn what to watch out for when requesting a keyword research. It's important to think about what exactly you require from the research. You can either leave it to the SEO specialist, who will agree on a specific solution with you, or set goals beforehand that you want to achieve through the research.
The research can be done just for a certain area – for content strategy, analyzing a specific product segment/categories, a basis for the SEO specialist – or the keyword research can be broadly focused on your entire segment.
Updated Keyword Research
If you update your keyword research, you will discover new and new topics. If your competition doesn't follow search trends through SEO tools, then you can quickly tap into a segment that will be business-beneficial and yet non-competitive for you. And if you optimize these new segments according to the research (creating new sections/categories/tags/filters, writing articles on current topics, etc.), you can look forward to top positions and an exclusive position in the results 🙂 (of course, it can happen that suddenly the competition starts to push). How to discover new segments and trends, you will learn in a multi-part series on creating a keyword research.
Create or Have KWR Created
If you've read this far, you might decide to create a research. To make your job easier, I have prepared a series of guides for you, where I will take you through several basic steps of creating and explain how to create such a basic keyword research.
Or you can have the research created by me, where I use a more advanced and comprehensive approach, so the output is of very high quality. The described series of guides serves more as an illustration of the research process and as a basic guide.
