Why keyword research?

Keyword research is important because it can reveal information vital to growing your online business.

Keyword

research can tell you what terms people are actively searching for, the competitiveness of those keywords, and help guide your content marketing plan to increase organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic. It helps you discover new keywords related to your business and generates estimates of the searches that the keywords receive and the cost of segmenting them in paid advertising. Keyword research tools are essential for finding content opportunities, but webmasters shouldn't stop using Google Search to discover the jewels of keywords.

For example, if you chose that last topic for an inbound marketing software company, automation of marketing, I would brainstorm some keyword phrases that I think people would write in relation to that topic. SEMrush is an excellent comprehensive keyword research tool that can help you discover and group a list of keywords using the magic keyword tool. In addition, you can analyze other competing domains to discover more competing sites and more keyword ideas, complete a picture of your industry's competition, and find growth gaps. Search engine's highly intelligent algorithm systems show the best results to the right people based on a number of factors, but the most important thing is the keywords (and negative keywords) that the advertiser has selected.

If you haven't considered who your competitors might be, you can search for your initial keywords and see what comes up. The operative term here is themes. By researching keywords that receive a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Basically, what you want is to create content that targets keywords that people are already using to search for information online.

Google's “People Also Ask” section is another part of the SERP that you can consult when researching keywords. Developing your content around these keywords and dedicating pages to content related to the keywords gives your content a strong focus by keyword and topic, increasing the likelihood that it will rank. If you're interested in CPC pricing and also in getting keyword ideas to help you with content development, follow the results when you're signed in to Google Ads.