While creating a great article full of statistics, infographics, and images is good, this is only part of the battle won. Nobody will notice your article if you don’t research the right keywords for content marketing. This is why keyword research is vital in content marketing.
Keyword research can help you gain visibility and connect with your target audience. It can also assist you in understanding your target audience, their pain points, and the questions they are seeking answers to. In this article, we will guide you on how to do keyword research for content marketing.
Importance of Keyword Research for Content Marketing
There are several benefits of keyword research for content marketing. These include:
Find Trending Topics
You need to do keyword research if you want to know which terms and phrases are trending in your niche. You can create content around that topic when you know what people are searching for. Understanding the trend of a topic can also help you create a content calendar.
Find New Audiences
The goal of keyword research is to identify what people are searching for. This can help identify new topics to write about to serve that niche. For instance, when you enter the keyword “Ford car spares” as your keyword, you might realize that people are also searching for the “best Ford Ranger wheels.”
If you do more research, you may realize that millennials search the keyword “best Ford Ranger wheels” more. Creating content around the keyword can attract a new audience to your site searching for the best Ford Wheels.
Confirm Interest
Another reason why content marketers should do keyword research is to confirm if a keyword has an audience. Probably, an idea has hit them on a good topic they should cover, or it was raised during a brainstorming session. Keyword research can help show the true picture. This can help avoid wasting time on a keyword in which people have little or no interest.
Improve Search Engine Rankings
Keyword research can help you rank better on the search engines, improving your visibility and conversion. This will help you find easy keywords to rank for depending on your domain authority. It can also help you discover content gaps your competitor may not cover.
Find Semantic Keywords
When creating content on a topic, finding all related keywords to cover is essential. Doing keyword research can help longtail keywords to use for content marketing. When you understand the keywords primarily used in a space, you can optimize the articles you are working on and build semantic relevance.
Steps to Follow in Keyword Research for Content Marketing
Here are the steps to keyword research for content marketing:
Determine Your Target Audience
Before you start keyword research, you will want to know your target audience, what they do, their interests, and their pain points. Consider if there are questions that need answers that you can provide in your content. Consider words and phrases these people may use to find your site. Make a list of these terms before analyzing them further.
Check The Seed Words In Detail
Now that you have a basic idea of the keywords to target, you must analyze them further. Your best bet is to put them in a keyword research tool showing details such as their search volume, trends, and keyword difficulty. In this case, we recommend Google Adword Keyword Planner, Semrush, and Ahrefs.
The tools will also show other keywords that you should target. Pay special attention to long tail keywords as they are more targeted and have less competition. Since they are more targeted, they can improve their chances of conversion. You can also use keyword research tools to determine which keywords drive the most traffic.
Find Business-related Keywords
If you are a business or service that offers products or services, you already have the terms that revolve around your business. These can serve as the seed keywords that will give you an idea of the keywords to target.
Explore Your Niche
Consider the keywords that are commonly used in your niche locally and internationally. For instance, if you are a small business serving a small locality, you can easily rank for a keyword by doing local SEO. But a combination of local and international keywords will serve you well if you are a large business.
Questions Your Audience Is Searching For
You can create great content around target keywords and even land on the first page of Google. But this will not help much in building an audience. You should create impactful content that answers people’s queries. You can use tools such as “People Also Ask” on SERPs and “Answer the Public” to find questions people are asking about.
Look at the Google-related Search and snippet
You should do a Google search of your target keyword and pay attention to the results. You can go to the bottom of the search page to see the related searches; consider if these are worth analyzing individually. Ask yourself if it is wise to include them in your results.
Analyze the SERPs
Another way to find keywords for content marketing is to analyze your competitors. Look at the first three results on Google. These pages rank highly because they have answered the search query well. Find out the keywords they are targeting and try to outrank them. You can use keyword research tools to see the keywords they rank for. Check the keyword difficulty to see if it’s possible to outrank them.
With a deeper analysis, you might find something missing in their articles. This is an opportunity to target to outrank them. For instance, consider if their statistics are outdated or if you can provide a new angle to the content. To outrank these top pages, you must create better content than them. When analyzing your competitor, also check the number of backlinks to their sites. Without a high domain authority, it can be hard to outrank sites with many quality backlinks.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that content marketing is key to digital success. To succeed in your content marketing strategy, you should do keyword research. This will ensure you target the right keywords to rank on the SERPs. By following the steps in this guide, it will be possible for you to have keywords that you can easily rank on the search engines.
