This is the SEO foundation: Keyword research and Competitive Intelligence.
By the end of this blog, you will be able to:
- Explain the importance of identifying user intent while performing keyword research
- List basic methods for performing keyword research
- Explain the differences between long-tail queries and short-tail queries
- Performs basic competitive analysis on search queries
Importance of Keyword research
Every search you perform using a search engine is based on keywords.
People enter keywords to find useful information as they have learned that search provides answers fast.
While selecting keywords, there are two important factors to consider: Keyword traffic and competition.
Keyword Traffic: Amount of search queries for a keyword
Keyword Competition: Number of websites targeting the same keyword
While selecting a keyword you might ideally want to pick those with high traffic but it’s not always the right approach.
You also need to consider the rate of competition.
A keyword with high traffic as well as high competition may take longer to get results.
Therefore, find keywords with high traffic but low competition for faster results.
Also, there is no harm in picking keywords with low traffic and low competition.
In fact, many businesses have been built on finding these opportunities.
User intent
User intent is paramount with keyword research.
It is what drives all the research queries on the internet.
You have people who search for something like WHO and they can mean many things by this.
It could mean the World Health Organization.
They might also mean the band.
They could also be looking for specific parts of speech.
It depends on the context of what they are searching for.
Also depends on how they capitalize it.
It’s important here to understand the intent, not necessarily the exact word that they typed into the search engine.
The intent makes all the difference.
So, let’s look at this with a more realistic example and this is something I have taken from clients because this happens all the time.
In some parts of the United States, people use the word “Lawyer” when they are talking about someone of practices law.
In other parts of the United States, they use the word “attorney.”
The difference in these is very minimal, except for when you are focusing on user intent, specifically with SEO.
What’s going to happen is that if you target the wrong version of this word in the wrong part of the country, then you won’t get search traffic and you won’t be able to get many visitors.
So, this is what I spend a lot of my time focusing on and that’s figuring out what human beings in this context put into the search engines when they are trying to find a product or service or an answer, specifically my clients or my product.
This is one of the most important versions of this.
Also, is when people search for buy vs free.
You will see this a lot in paid search.
They work on user intent also but you need to start optimizing for phrases that are going to lead to your ultimate goal, which usually means convertions.
In many cases, that’s sales.
Therefore, what does that look like?
While you want to rank for phrases like “buy cars”, or “buy umbrellas”.
You don’t actually care in most cases when something is ranking for free umbrellas or free cars or free advice.
These are things that are going to be helpful for you and actually build your business.
The intent is what you need to spend your time learning and focusing on.
Not Provided
Now that we have talked about the importance of keyword research.
let’s talk about the topic that is extremely important and very closely related, it’s called Not Provided.
Now historically, search engines would give us all kinds of data.
One of these important pieces of data they would share with us was the search volume and the search keywords that people used when they found yours website.
Hence, it looked like two things.
Firstly, we have a phase like an attorney or Lawyer.
We could see how many people were using it globally or how many people were using it within a specific region
And this was very important for optimizing our keywords and optimizing our pages before we’d even send them out and before we could even start testing against them.
We also had the data that people used when they came to our website.
Therefore, if they searched for an attorney or if they searched for a lawyer and they made it to our website.
We’d be able to see that in our analytics.
Unfortunately, this is changed.
It first started with google and then moved on to the rest of the search engines.
So today, when we look at our analytics, we see the phrase “not provided” Because that data is no longer available which is unfortunate.
Therefore, we are no longer able to make the data-driven decisions that we once were based on this keyword data.
Performing Keyword Research
Now that we have addressed the not Provided issue, let’s get back to the fun part, which is the research itself.
There are a lot of different ways to do this but I generally go into four categories.
Firstly, industry keywords. Look at what phrases human beings, actual people talk to the people in your industry, your customers, and people within the industry and listen to them when they describe what they need in terms of products or services.
This could be just as easy as walking around your office, talking to people, or especially talking to the sales team.
They know what people want and they know the words that people use.
So, you could actually go out and talk to people.
If you have access to additional data online, sometimes you can get it from other sources.
These are great places to look at what phrases, what words people use within our industry, and describe what it is that you’re trying to sell.
Now, the next area is paid search. You can find a lot of keyword information with paid search.
You can talk to your AdWords team or talk to anyone who is doing paid searches for your company.
They are going to have a lot of access to search queries and lots of phrases.
They can see the search phrases that people are using, see their ads, and go to the site.
Therefore, that’s intelligence that we can’t get from the organic site.
So hopefully, they will be able to work with you and provide a list of things that you might want to optimize for.
The next one is a little less common but certainly very valuable if you have it, and that’s an internal search.
Most websites, at least in theory, should have an internal search setup already.
The idea here is you are looking at what your actual visitor is typing into your own search box on your website and then you see what keyword phrases that they are looking for.
And that can help you understand what people would need.
This is ideal because it’s as customized and as personalized to your website as it can be.
So, if you can use that keyword data, which actually shows up in your analytics after you set it up, then you can use that to influence your SEO research.
The last one is competitor keywords.
In an ideal world, you could just ask your competitor what are you ranking for but in the real world, nobody is going to tell you.
So, you have to go a roundabout way of doing this.
Now you could look at other paid search tools and they will show you what your competitors are bidding on and from those, you can figure out their strategy.
Demo: Keyword Research tool (coming soon)
Keyword Research and Competitive intelligence
Now, let’s dig in a little further on how to use a keyword research tool.
You see, it’s much deeper than simply making a list of keywords.
Too many people attempt to do SEO and all they have is a list with a few keywords.
That’s not going to get you far.
Keyword research doesn’t just tell you the words people use.
You can find intent, what they really want, what’s important to them, preferences, opinions, and ideas.
You also see what they need and how they express it.
Now, part of SEO is writing articles, blog posts, and social posts.
But how would you know what to write about if you don’t know what people really need?
So, this is where you dig in.
The amount of time you spend on keyword research will be greatly rewarded.
The better you understand the searchers, the better you’ll deliver to them what they want.
Now, i break this down in four ways.
Firstly, Look for the brand name.
Then I look to see what words people have associated with it.
I might find there are other brands with similar names.
I may also find issues if people are associating negative words or ideas with the brand.
That shows that there might be some work to be done to rebuild trust.
Also, I want to connect popular brand searches to the destination pages, which page ranks for those brand terms and also, are they my pages.
I want to know if someone else is ranking for any of my branded terms or if better pages can be ranking on my own site for my own brand.
Secondly, look for the related concepts of the keyword.
Then start grouping and categorizing larger groups into smaller groups.
Find as many different associations as with the keyword and then categorize them.
You can group them by sales cycle if you can identify words that are used early and words used as people move closer to their decision.
The groups would each show a different intent of the searcher.
Thirdly, look for specific indicators of time, location, or features.
These are words or related words that may indicate a city, a region, or a location.
also, any time frames, seasonality, or trends to the words throughout the year and then any associated dates or events that people use and features.
Features that are specific to your product, your business, and your industry as obviously are important If they make it into the keyword.
Then finally, I want to identify the specific questions or needs that people have.
If they are actually asking a question, that’s great.
More words give me more context and I want to know what they want, and how they express that need in words and categorize those needs.
These steps will not only help you in crafting good SEO but also in developing content that will enable you to communicate effectively to the site visitor and understand the context of the market.
Types of Queries
When you’re looking at your organic search queries, it’s easiest to divide all of your searches queries up into two broad categories.
These categories are what we call short tail and long tail.
So, what does that mean?
Firstly, the short tail is going to be short and frequently searched for broad keywords.
Now more often than not, this is branded keywords; searched for broad keywords.
What’s the name of your company or key product?
Again, these are very very short keywords; one or two words.
People search for them all the time and especially with your brand, they will come up frequently.
But also, they’re very very broad.
They typically are one or two words that indicate an entire industry.
Not using any other descriptive words, it’s just the simplest way of explaining a product or a service within a large industry.
Secondly, the long tail is exactly the opposite.
This is what’s important.
The long tail is going to make up the vast majority of your traffic.
The reason is that well, people are going to mostly search for very broad terms utilizing multiple words.
You see, most people are going to be very descriptive when they are using words to search for something specific.
Typically, they’re closer to buying or making a decision so they tend to add more attributes to their search terms: color attributes, product numbers, locations things like that.
Long tail and short tail are kind of hard to define from a quantitive perspective.
But generally speaking, when you have more than three words, it’s going to be longtail.
If you have one or two words, that’s typically a short tail.
Short Tail Query: Pros and Cons
Let’s cover the short tail a little bit further.
Now, there are pros and cons to trying to rank for short tail words.
Therefore, the biggest pro, the biggest good of a short tail word is that it’s typically a very general word.
If it’s your branded term, you may already rank for it.
But short tail keywords are so general and they apply to such a large industry and maybe even across different industries, they became very difficult to rank for.
Hence, it takes a very large budget to go after some of these very short tail terms.
Now, here’s an example.
Many people in the automotive industry would love to rank numbers for the word cars.
However, the word is so broad that it doesn’t apply to anyone specific.
Someone might only sell new cars, or old cars, or small cars, large, expensive, cheap, and we haven’t even gotten into the brands.
Now you see, we need these additional words to help provide guidance.
Otherwise, we don’t know what is meant by this single word “cars.”
As I said, most in the automotive industry would love to have that ranking but that’s not what people need.
People might search for cars and realize how big that is and then use additional words to drill down.
Now, if I’m selling cars, obviously I’d like that but someone’s searching at that level isn’t going to be relevant, specifically if I’m in a specific location.
I only offer a certain type of car. I have additional services or brands.
Firstly, you should start optimizing for your business and your location and you’ll naturally grow in relevance.
Now, if it’s in your strategy to go after short tail terms, be prepared to work hard and be prepared to spend a lot of money.
It’s not going to be cheap to accomplish and it will take a long while to happen, especially if you are just starting out with a new website.
Long Tail Query: Advantages
Now that we’ve talked about the short tail, let me explain why the long tail is so amazing.
You see, the long tail keywords phrases are more descriptive and more targeted, which is great because it means that if someone comes in one of those phrases, they’re much more likely to convert.
These are really wonderful phrases especially when you are just starting out.
It’s much easier to be the only person who is trying to rank for one specific phrase, if it’s extremely long, descriptive, and targeted.
It’s easier than trying to rank for one term that the whole world is competing for.
So, when you are just starting out with search engine optimization, you want to have a realistic expectations.
You should be focusing initially on a long tail with longer-term goals on the short tail.
Let’s start there.
Your clients and you may like this because it means a smaller budget.
Long tail results happen very quickly as there is much less competition and it is much easier to establish and show rankings for these phrases.
Competitive Analysis Overview
Now, analyzing competition is the easiest and early activity that an SEO can undertake.
It comprises checking the keywords that the competition ranks for and studying their content.
Is this the content that you eventually want to rank for?
This information is useful in building your content and keyword phrases.
There are four areas that you can look at while performing competitive analysis.
Firstly, identifying competition that may include websites such as Wikipedia or Directory sites.
An SEO must know who the competition is.
You will know the challenges and the resources required to rank for competitive terms.
Secondly, taking a realistic perspective.
Based on the competition, how difficult will it be to rank for a given term.
If your competition is a gigantic international corporation that has the keyword you want in its domain name, it will take years to rank well in the keyword search.
Now, this is indicative that you might not want to waste time trying this keyword but look to your efforts elsewhere.
Thirdly, studying the content that’s powering the success of competitors.
Observe the content format of blog posts, videos, and images so that your content may be similar for ranking purposes.
However, it’s vitally important to remember this.
Just because a competitor has words and their strategy and they are ranking well for those words, it does not necessarily mean that those words are bringing them business.
When you evaluate competitors, you’re only evaluating half of the picture.
The other half is their analytics and their sales data.
You can only see what they advertise, not what makes them money or bring them business.
So, be careful the thinking that because a competitor uses certain words that they’re also successful in that use.
There’s not a direct correlation.
Finally, analyze user experience.
Check why people are linking to some content, what their incentives are, why Google has ranked certain content for a certain keyword, and so on.
Factors in Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis can get highly technical.
So, instead of going extremely deep into that, I want to show you the general ideas and the metrics that I look for when I am doing this.
The one is the domain name of any competitors.
I want to look at this from a few different angles.
In terms of what I am looking for, I want to see how established that brand is both online and offline.
Does the domain name contain the keyword that I am trying to rank for and if I am trying to rank for the term, let’s say Wikipedia and you notice another website that happens to be called Wikipedia, you are not going to be able to compete with it.
So, I am just giving that as an example.
You want to look at how competitive that is and how much is the domain name going to have an effect.
Now, the next one is domain authority and this is slightly different because it is an actual metric.
It’s something that you can look upon online.
What this will tell you is what the link profile of that domain looks like, does it have a lot of links, are those links coming from trusted sources, and are those links coming from sources that are going to be hard to compete with?
All these things are important for evaluating how strong of a competitor this is already.
The next one is the number of indexed pages of the competitors.
This will tell you how much the search engines like this domain.
If the search engines like this domain and that website have a lot of pages, it’s going to be extremely difficult.
So, you’ll be able to see the score with the most SEO management software.
The last thing to look at is the page search terms.
Look at what ads are around the keyword when I search in the search engine.
It’s going to tell you what companies care about that keyword and targeting in their paid search campaigns.
If they are spending their money on it, it’s an important metric to look at.
Now, we can look at this and say, okay, I have searched for the generic term and I see five companies that have paid money to buy these ads.
I am going to add that keyword to my competitive list.
Then I am going to go through the first four and see how much of a threat they are.
So, I want to make it clear that there are lots and lots of different metrics you can look at.
But these are the four places to start.
B2B vs. B2C
One of the biggest benefits of SEO is the foundational elements equally apply to other potential markets.
While the keywords that you target will change somewhat for business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing, the high-level strategy that you use with SEO will remain exactly the same.
Your best execution of SEO will require following best practices of keyword targeting and on-page optimization so that your URLs and product will show up in the search engines when potential buyers look for your product.
Now, regardless of your niche, the SEO best practices remain the same.
Imagine you have a business-to-business oriented business, you’re developing leads online, and you have a salesforce.
Now your salesforce might be calling potential customers and meeting with prospective buyers and other businesses.
Now, even though your goals and your sales cycle would be very different than a small business-to-consumer business, SEO is the same.
You’re following best practices: Keyword targeting, and on-page optimization, and you’ll be targeting something that is specific to your business.
Either way, you accomplish results by producing high-quality, well-optimized information that answers people’s questions.
When you develop great content that informs, educates, and entertains, you’ll naturally develop links when people like your content and share it with others.
Key Takeaways
- User intent is the driver of word choice and searches demand. It is the foundation of strong SEO strategies.
- Some basic methods for performing keywords research include analyzing industry keywords, paid search campaigns, internal site search, and competitor keywords
- Short tail keywords are typically short, have high search volume, and have broad intent.
- Long tail keywords are typically long and have lower search volume and specific intent.