Keyword research for beginners | How to get found by expected customers?

Keywords research is important before going into the process of content creation and/or marketing campaign design. Keyword research starts with the creation of the list of keywords. This list includes all the keywords which matter to your brand, product and/or service. Before creating the keyword list, one should know about different types of keywords. After knowing the keyword types, you can easily create a good list of keywords which you can include in your content creation and different marketing campaigns.

It is very important to know that keyword research is the base of any marketing campaign. If we selected the wrong keywords to dive into the competition or marketing campaign, it may ruin the whole campaign, efforts and money spent. And after trying again and again you may lose the hope to compete.

In simple words, keyword research is the process of collecting numbers about a keyword to see how important the keyword is between competitors on the search engine and searched by the expected customers.

Types of Keyword in keyword research

There are many types of keywords talked about in the market. The main types of keywords defined to simplicity are as follows.

Product Keywords

search the product in Google AdWords keyword planner tool and find out all the product related keywords. Also, collect the monthly searches and competition on the keywords. These keywords will help you find out the content covered by taking these keywords.

Example of product keyword is “content marketing”

Branded Keywords

These keywords are purely related to your brand. What you have to do is to put your brand as suffix or prefix with the keywords you decided to design your marketing campaign(s) gradually. Yes, always focus on the keywords in your marketing campaign according to the in-hand resources. Start from keywords which are low to medium in competition. You can add one to three high competition keywords in each marketing campaign.

Example: “Ana Maria for content marketing”

Customer defining keywords

These are the keywords and/or search terms which the expected customer is using to search in search engines. Usually, an expected customer of your product or service is searching for a problem they are facing in their day to day life. Most of the times, the customer defining keywords include a problem, expectation, and the way to doing something. For example, they can ask for why, when, what, how and where kind of words including the keyword in their searches. The customer defining keywords are very important to define and tune your marketing campaign around all these keywords.

Example: how to do content marketing for business

Competitor keywords

These are the keywords which you can be found through many online tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, MOZ keyword explorer, etc. But what exactly competitor keywords are? Competitors keywords are the keywords which target brand names of competing businesses, products, or services. Example: For Nike, a competitor keyword could be Reebok running shoes.

Market segment keywords

These are the general terms related to your business. In fact, these keywords segment a market. If a customer is searching for the general information for the research point of view, then these marketing or generic search terms can be used. For example, content marketing is a marketing segment keyword.

Geo-targeting keywords

If you are looking for a brand, product or service in your location then you will be searching like Brand name, Product Name or service in your location. Say you are searching for Uber in your city then you will be asking the search engine to find you Uber in Vancouver, Canada.

Keyword research on search span

After getting to know what type of keyword research you are targeting, find out how much weight a keyword has based on its searches in a set period. This period can be a week, 15 days, a month, 3 months, 6 months, a year or lifetime. The long-time search period of a keyword defines the importance of the keyword to focus during the year. For example, blankets can only be searched one month before or during winters. There may be very fewer searches during the summer season for the blankets. Similarly, Christmas sales related search terms can only be searched during the Christmas sales. No one can be searching for the Christmas sales before and after Christmas. On the other hand, keywords like baby diapers, toys, energy drinks, content management services are a whole year searching term.

You should know about the life span of your product or service and then you should be managing your marketing campaigns accordingly.

Keyword research for SERP competitors

The second thing is to know how many competitors are ranking in the first 10 or 20 positions at SERP. This is important to get to know what your competitors are doing taking on-site and off-site keyword management. You can better look at the content and places where your competitors are marketing themselves to get higher ranks. You can meet and exceed them.

Keyword research for similar competitors

The third thing is to know how many similar competitors are working to rank on a single keyword. This will help you find similar competitors and the competition in their work to promote themselves on the search engine and/or other channels. This research will help you meet and exceed the targeted competitors at targeted places. May you want to meet a competitor on the search engine or on social media then you will define your campaigns accordingly.

we tried to elaborate the keyword research process in easy steps. We are following the same steps doing our keyword research to get our businesses and products rank high. how have you been doing keyword research for your brand, product or service?