Reasons Why Keyword Research is Vital and Top Tools to Employ

Even with multiple ways of generating traffic available to online marketers, one of the most popular ones to get visitors to your website is still SEO. This is principally because the SEO implementation is relatively simple and inexpensive. However, the days of stuffing keywords and achieving top ranks for them are long gone as are the chances of posting content in the hope that they will get good ranks. Now, you need to be extremely critical and identify keywords that have the ability to pull in traffic as well as achieve good ranking results.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Because most people are impatient when they are surfing, they rarely devote time to scan results beyond the first page of the search engine results page. This makes it important for websites to be included in the first page to attract visitors and that is only possible if you are better than your competition for the keyword or phrase. It is in this context that keyword research becomes important. With it, you can identify a phrase or a long tail keyword that you can aspire to get a good rank for since these tend to be low volume searches, and hence easier to get a superior rank.

Finding Keywords

The two issues involved in identifying keywords are finding them and ascertaining that they are of use. Finding keywords goes beyond listing the one that you can rattle off from the top of your mind because there is usually quite a large number that is obscure that you do not know about or cannot recall. This is exactly the reason why keyword research tools come into play. With the use of keyword research tools not only can you discover new and valuable keywords but also whether they are actually useful given the search volume. If there is nobody querying with it or if a large number of competitors are using it, there is no point in trying to use them to achieve a good ranking.

Useful Keyword Research Tools

Google’s Keyword Planner: One of the most popular keyword search tools, it comes from Google and is also free. Built for paid advertising, it does not give detailed keyword overviews but is still a great tool for identifying new keywords.

Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions: You can very easily type in a keyword partially in the Google search box and observe what the autocomplete suggests. The validity of the results is established since the autocomplete takes into account actual searches conducted by users. The main issue is that you have to operate it manually.

Übersuggest: Works similarly to Google’s Autocomplete Suggestions but it makes life very easy by generating all the suggestions that are pertinent to a particular keyword. Though the tool comes without any metrics, its utility is in its ability to produce a very useful list of seed keywords. You can go one step further with Yoast Suggests that works very much like Übersuggest but has the ability to provide an output in the handy CSV format.

Answer the Public: Based on Google’s Autocomplete Suggestions, this tool offers a more visual way of identifying keywords. The keywords are converted into questions that can be very simply made into article titles that are of relevance to visitors. Because it lacks metrics, you would still need another keyword research tool, however, by itself, it is simply great for finding keywords.

SEMRush: As far as keyword metrics are concerned, SEMRush is one of the most popular keyword research tools. With an input of a single keyword, it provides a whole list of keyword-matched phrases and related keywords. You can also use it to study the advertisement data metrics, and conduct competitor analysis. The tool also has features that allow you to examine your site as well as that of your competitors for the keywords being used, the traffic being generated as well as the backlinks, and other such useful stuff.

Conclusion

In contemporary online marketing, there is nothing as much as important as keyword research simply because having the right knowledge empowers you to generate more interest and traffic to your website. Conducting keyword research also prevents you from wasting time and resources groping in the dark and hoping for the best.