Today I’m answering one of the most frequently asked questions among small business owners. That is why keyword research is essential. And there are five reasons.
The first is to establish the actual market value of a keyword. A lot of businesses get started because people do it backward. They have something that they want to sell and then get into business trying to sell it and start struggling. Then they discover Google and search results and realize that they have to show up in search results. It’s a little bit backward.
If you could know what people were looking for and what people wanted before you started your business, that would be much more effective. Right? So keyword research is vital because it allows you to take a look at the market and see what’s popular. You want to know how many people are searching for specific keywords that you’re spending time and money promoting or incorporating into your website, right?
Keyword research will tell you how many people are searching, what the monthly search volume is, and also how much competition there is.
The second reason is that you want to find out what are other related keywords and new trending topics, right? You want to see the things that you’ve missed if you’ve already been marketing a certain way, or you already have content that you’ve been developing. Is there anything else that you could be covering?
The third is determining the keyword difficulty I mentioned a moment ago. Seeing how much competition there is. There’s something called the KEI index you’ll want to research. It’s a ratio between the number of monthly searches and people competing for the keyword. It shows how many people appear in search results that are targeting the keyword in their page title and page content.
The lower the KEI ratio, the easier it’s going to be to target that keyword. You want to go where there’s less competition, but that you’ve got the highest number of searches, right? It means that people haven’t moved into that area yet. However, it would be best if you looked at the search results before creating your content in case there is a good reason that nobody is competing.
Fourth is competitor keyword gaps, which are new opportunities. You want to analyze the keywords that your competition is going after because that will help you fill in new services and opportunities that they might be seeing that you’re not acting on yet. That’s an essential way to generate new income streams that you haven’t previously considered. I would recommend you use a tool like SEMrush for doing that.
The fifth reason for keyword research is finding long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that are three to five words combined.
These are less popular keywords, and this is the approach that you take if you’re entering a highly competitive area, and you’re just getting started. You want to sneak up on your competition. You don’t want them to see you coming. So you’re building out your online presence and working on increasing your visibility. You want to build out as much of a presence as you can because as you gain authority and trust with the search engines, you’re going to be rising in the ranks.
The more surface area that you can take up, the more you’re going to be able to occupy once you start to meet your competition at their level. You are winning small battles that they likely won’t see. That’s going to be powerful because, by the time they see you there, there’s not going to be much that they can do. They’re going to be scrambling to try to catch up with you, and they may not be able to do so.