With so many free and paid tools that help with keyword research, you can easily get lots of keywords to the point where you get confused about which one to use or ignore. For the best results, you need to know which keywords are helpful for your goal. To do that, you should leverage analytics data to get better insights into the results you get from a keyword research tool.
Importance of Keyword Analysis
After keyword research, you must take your potential keywords through analysis. This is the process of determining which keywords have the potential to benefit your campaigns. Some of the benefits of keyword research are:
- Get key data. Keyword research will help you know which keywords are important for your campaign. It will show you which keywords you can easily rank for and which ones you can’t.
- Improve conversion. You can increase your sales by understanding and focusing on keywords likely to convert.
- Understand search intent. Keyword analysis will also show you why people are using a particular keyword. You can then focus on creating content that responds to their search intent.
- Narrow down your search. If you have several keywords and are confused about which to target, keyword analysis can help you determine the best one.
- Optimize your budget spend. When you know which keywords are more valuable than others, you can spend more money on the keywords that are more likely to succeed.
- Increase your traffic. By finding new long-tail keywords, you can easily find keywords that will bring more traffic to your site.
- Keyword mapping. Keyword analysis can also help you in the mapping of your site. This involves determining a unique keyword you can focus on each of your pages. You will want to ensure that the main keyword of each page appears on the url, title, and subheadings.
How to Do Keyword Data Analysis
When doing keyword analysis, there are several metrics that you will be looking at. These are:
Monthly Search Volume
Monthly search volume refers to the number of times that a certain keyword is searched for. You might think a high search volume keyword will drive traffic to your site. But before you start celebrating that keyword you have found with thousands of searches, remember this: everyone else will want to benefit from such a keyword.
What does that mean to your Seo efforts? More competition, even from authority sites. This now takes us to the next metric you should consider.
Keyword Difficulty
We have already seen that competition for high-volume keywords will likely be stiff. But how do we measure the competition level of a keyword? If you use a keyword research tool, many paid tools will help you measure that. They will show the competition level in the form of a metric they refer to as keyword difficulty(KD).
While different tools have different ways of measuring the keyword difficulty, most use a number between 0 and 100. For instance, in our image above, the Ahrefs tool shows that the keyword research analysis has a difficulty of 93.
This means it’s an extremely difficult phrase to rank for unless you are an authority site. If your site has a DA of less than 20, targeting keywords with a difficult score of less than ten would be advisable, as such a keyword will be easy to rank for. Semush categorizes its keyword difficult score as follows:
However, note that this score isn’t always accurate, and you may want to check the SERPs manually to see the type of content the top sites are ranking for and if you can create better content than them.
Cost Per Click
Another metric you should analyze in your keyword research data is the cost per click. This shows how much advertisers are bidding for a keyword. The metric is important as it will show the potential for keyword conversion.
When the CPC is high, it usually indicates a highly competitive keyword that multiple advertisers are bidding to appear on the search results. Such keywords often have a high conversion potential.
Search Intent
To better understand a keyword, you should find out why searchers enter it on the search engines. To do this, you should understand the search intent. This can be categorized as:
- Informational
- Transactional
- Navigational
- Commercial
While this will not be shown on keyword research tools, you can determine the search intent by looking at the wording of the keyword. For instance, an informational keyword will start with “why” and “what.”
Competitor Analysis
If you are doing keyword research analysis for an established site, you should also check the current rankings of your keywords. Also, look at what the competitors are ranking for. Check the domain and page authority of the sites ranking higher than you on the SERPs. If competing against authority sites, you should consider changing your content strategy. Focus more on less competitive longtail keywords.
Analysing Keywords for Local Seo
Also known as geotargeting, local seo involves optimizing a keyword for a certain location. This is important as Google now provides users with answers closest to them. For instance, when someone searches for the keyword” dentist near me,” Google will provide them with sites with the term “dentist” optimized for the user’s location.
Therefore, if your business provides local solutions, it is important to analyze keywords and look for ways to geotarget them. All you need to do is to include your location next to your keywords.
Seasonal/Trending Keywords
When doing keyword research, you will also want to determine if the demand for a particular keyword keeps rising and falling depending on the season. For instance, the keyword “valentine roses” may have a higher search volume in February before its volume drops to almost zero. By understanding when the demand for particular keywords rises or falls, you can better organize your content strategy.
Trending keywords are often some kinds of buzzwords. While they have no season, their search volume may rise due to a particular event. At one time, their demand will also fall when they reach saturation. By doing keyword analysis, you can identify such trends and optimize for them before they drop.
Final Thought
A keyword analysis is an important part of SEO that can help you determine if a keyword is worth pursuing. Choosing the right keyword is a process that requires a lot of searching and sieving different options. Analyzing the data we have discussed lets you easily discover keywords that will work best for you.
