Keywords are one of the most popular terms in SEO . Everyone knows the importance of keywords to position a page.
Keywords are the terms that a user enters in a search engine like Google, hoping that results of websites will appear where their search intention is resolved .
Why are they important to position your business?
Said in a very simplified way: by including in your online store the words that users use to search for content related to your products, you can appear in the results of their searches and get more visits and sales with your website . You appear at the moment that user has a need.
But can you use all the keywords you can think of? How to select the indicated ones to improve the positioning of your website? The keyword research (search for keywords) gives us those answers .
Although we must not forget that the experience and the way of interpreting the data obtained in the keyword research will greatly influence the final result.
Why is keyword research important?
The study of keywords helps you to know the terms that your potential clients use to search for you on the internet. Even if you have a lot of experience in the sector and you think you know your clients perfectly, there are as many ways to search as there are people on the internet and only with SEO tools will you be able to check which are the most common and establish patterns.
We tend to think that everyone searches in the same way that we would, but it is usually a wrong and limiting thought. Seeing it this way will make you lose visibility and opportunities to reach your potential customers. If you want to understand your user, you must carry out keyword research.
Needless to say, the way to search and consume on the Internet is far from the way to do it in a physical place . Therefore, you should not trust transferring physical experiences to the digital plane either.
A good study of keywords will serve as the basis for planning the web architecture of an online store and defining its contents. But not only will it serve for this, but it will also help us define which are the priority contents and those that will have less weight.
Almost always in online stores, the keywords that are most interesting to position are linked to specific categories , since they accumulate a greater volume of monthly searches.
Apart from this search volume, to define if a content is a priority for an online store, you can look at:
- Search intent (the more transactional, the more important)
- Price of your products compared to the competition
- Level of competition in the SERPs
- Available stock of products
- Referral Rotation
- trade margin
- Brand image
How to do keyword research
The first thing is to be clear about what you are looking for: Discover the keywords related to your products, know their search volume and find synonyms or alternative search forms. This is where SEO tools come into play.
These tools are fed from multiple sources to be able to estimate the number of searches that the different queries that are made in the search engines have.
Recommended tools for keyword research
- Top: +40 best SEO tools to optimize your organic positioning
Paid tools: these are the most complete, they offer you more detailed data and are generally complete suites (they offer more features). In addition, they have filters that greatly speed up the task. Among them we can highlight:
- semrush
- Ahrefs
Free Chrome Plugins: They have more limited results and provide less information but are a good option if you are just starting out or want to expand.
- SEO Pro Extension
- Keywords Everywhere
- seoquake
Google Search Console: free tool from Google. You can see which consultations you are appearing for and which ones you are receiving visits for. It does not provide too much data to do an initial keyword study (when the project starts from scratch) but it is an essential tool in any SEO strategy.
Google Autocomplete: It 's free and can help us supplement. When you put a word in the search engine, it autocompletes with the most common searches.
What are search intentions?
Even with these tools, we must apply the experience to know how to filter those results that really interest us , from those that do not.
When we talk about a keyword, it does not have to be a single word, it can be several or a phrase. What we know as long tail . Therefore, in the study, very similar results will come out that only vary in the order in which the words are written, if they are singular or plural, masculine or feminine, or if they have links.
A person can write the word "frame" in the search engine and we do not know what he is referring to, bike frame or frame as a work of art?
- How to create a long tail strategy for your eCommerce
That is why when making a search we specify: “electric bike frame” “child bike frame” “professional bike frame” . All these words show us the same search intention , the user is looking for a bicycle frame. By grouping all these related words, we create a context or universe that is related to each other.
There are many types of search intent and we must know how to identify them in order to correctly include these intents in each phase of the sales funnel. This article on search intentions for ecommerce explains in detail how to manage them and ideas to create new content.
With that said, we can start explaining how to do global keyword research.
Global keyword research
A few lines above, we mentioned that keywords also help us shape the structure of our website. To do this, we will have to do what we know as global keyword research. It is about creating a list of all the searches that are related to our business and filtering by volume and search intention, to know which products or types of these are most sought after.
We continue with an example on a bicycle frame: first we carry out a global study and order all the words by search volume, then we begin to study what the search intentions are.
We could observe, for example, that "bike frame replacement", "old bike frame" and "clean the bike frame" belong to different search intentions that in turn group several keywords . And if we consider that these are search intentions of our users and they have volume, we must take them into account when creating pages that respond to those needs.
It is true that we should not only be guided by the search results. In the end, a website is a business and it has to breathe personality and offer something different from the others. That is why the ideal, in this case, is to make a combination between our professional criteria and the study data.
Individual keyword research
Once we are clear, after the global keyword research, which pages we need to create to solve the searches of our potential customers, we will have to do an individual keyword research of each one of them.
In this case, it is about knowing which words have the most search volume, in relation to the main keyword of the page. But not only that, the study consists of three phases:
Keyword research
Going back to the example from before, if our page is going to be about “electric bike frame” , we will have to carry out a study of the related words that have a higher search volume with the SEO tools . For example: “mountain electric bike frame” may have a high volume, while “city electric bike frame” hardly has any searches. Therefore, only the first will be the keyword of our page, since a large volume of people search for that service through them and in this way we will be able to get them to our page.
Proposal of headers
Once we have the keywords that we must include, we must know where to do it .
In addition to including them throughout the content, they must be present in the headers that will be labeled as H1, H2, H3... following a hierarchy where H1 is the most important , therefore, there we will put the main keyword and the other distributed in the rest of the headers.
Title and description
In the title and description we must also include them. It is the first thing that the user will see when they perform a search and our website appears as one of the results. It is the first contact prior to entering the web .
The title has to grab attention and respond to their search needs at a glance, so there we include the main keyword and the rest, not all of them need to be used, in the description.
In summary
As we can see, keyword research is highly complex within the simplicity of "choosing the words that represent our business" and it is an essential phase in any positioning strategy.
Not for more words, not for more pages, not for more content, we will be able to increase the positioning of our website if we do not know the search intentions of the users, nor do we interpret them correctly.
Top comments (0)