If you’ve done any reading about the benefits of SEO services, you’ve no doubt of keyword research (SEO’s big brother). You might even know that it’s important for any business that operates online or at least one with a website. But the answer to why it’s important (and how it works) might be as elusive to you as catching a cheetah on the run.
No worries! We hear you. That’s why we wrote this post. So that you can better understand why keyword research is important for your business, how it actually works, and, most important, how your business can benefit from it.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the SEO practice of researching and finding the actual words and phrases people use to find what they’re looking for online. That’s it. It’s that simple. When someone opens a search engine (like Google’s home page) to search for products, services, or other general information, they type in queries—search queries—that tell the search engine what they’re hoping to find. Keyword research is all about using SEO research tools and market research to find and identify what those search terms—“keywords and key-phrases”—actually are. By creating website content—blogs, videos, landing pages, service pages, and images—that retain these exact terms—you can significantly improve how that content (and your site overall) rank in the search engines.
To recap, SEO is the process of improving a webpage’s visibility in the search engines, by leveraging an assortment of different strategies and techniques. Keyword research—or, more precisely, creating content that’s keyword optimized—is one of those strategies and a very effective one. In fact, if the only SEO-tactic you apply this year was to do keyword research and create keyword-optimized content, you’d increase your customers’ ability to find your business online by 300%. How much money would that save you in traffic costs?
Why Keyword Research Is Important
Now you know what keyword research is. But why is SEO important for your business?
As we covered in our Why Digital Marketing is Important post, everyone is online. Your prospects are online, your existing customers are online, and so is your competition. Very few people rely on traditional marketing to find information about the products or services they need or want. Rather than read the newspaper or listen to the radio, or (even) watch commercials on TV, many people only use search engines to find what they’re looking for.
What will they find when they do? Oftentimes, the product or service they find—and the product or service they buy—isn’t the one from the best company or, even, the one with the biggest marketing budget. Instead, it’s simply the company that leveraged keyword research—that’s producing keyword-optimized content on their blog and on their service pages—that wins all that search traffic, and therefore, all that business.
How much traffic? How much business? Quite a lot. In fact, with 70-90% of all search traffic going to the organic listings on the first page of all Google search results (and less than 30% even clicking on the second page) there is a tremendous amount(!) of traffic to be gained by leveraging keyword research.
How Your Business Can Benefit From Keyword Research
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: investing in SEO (by way of keyword research) can be an absolute game-changer for your business. By leveraging the power of keyword research, you can get more targeted traffic to your site—ensuring that the people visiting your site are people who need the products or services you offer—but, as mentioned, you can drive more traffic as well—lots more. Not only can this lead to more conversions and more sales, but it can create a better web experience for your customers—making it easier for them to find the products or services they need when they need them—significantly improving your bottom line.
Keyword research is also highly cost-effective. It’s cheaper than most forms of traditional marketing—and it’s often more effective than other forms of digital marketing, as well, like social media marketing, or Pay Per Click Ads. You can also hire a marketer to do keyword research in bulk—giving you hundreds of keywords and phrases to target, based on your business, your industry, and your services. Not only does this save time, but it provides an endless array of keywords (and content ideas) to focus on for the entire year—better enabling you to create marketing campaigns (and promotions) around the keyword-optimized content you have planned.
Hire an SEO-First Marketing Agency
We’ve covered what keyword is, why it’s important, and how your business can benefit from it. All that’s left is to get to it.
While the specifics of performing keyword research are too complex to cover within the scope of this post—something we’ll have to cover in a future one—we would like to close by saying that keyword research is an investment.
It takes time to benefit from keyword research—to actually do the research, to find the keywords that your customers are using to search for your products or your services, and to create content that’s optimized for it. It often takes even more time for your content to rank—often 7 to 12 months. But when you do (not if), SEO by way of keyword research can be an absolute game-changer for your business—compounding your marketing efforts and leading to more traffic (and sales) than you ever could without.
In short, you’ll be glad you did it—we promise.
Want to invest in the cost-effective, high-ROI investment of keyword research? Give Hercules SEO a call today. Our team of best-in-class SEO specialists can perform top-tier keyword research for your business, and provide a marketing game-plan to best take advantage of it. We’ll have your business ranking in no time!