Many individuals have heard the SEO term – keywords or keyword research, but they don’t really know what this means or how it works in the SEO world.
Keywords are words or phrases in the content of your web pages that match the words and phrases users are entering into search engines as closely as possible. So, for example, a user goes on to google search engine and types in “best garden chair”. They will be provided with a list of services that either sell or talk about garden chairs. Businesses that sell garden chairs will want to be high up on this list, as this results in more people visiting their website and hopefully making a purchase.
An SEO agency/specialist will research all the commonly-used words or phrases that are typed into the search engine in order to look for a garden chair. There are many tools available that track all the variations used for such a product, as well as provides the amount of searches (volume) made for any given keyword.
A very popular tool amongst SEO agencies for keyword research is SEMRUSH. So for example, if I research the word “garden chair”, SEMRUSH provides me with a list of variations for this word, such as: garden chairs, garden chair and table, garden chairs (plural), table and chairs garden, and so on. It also provides me with the volume – currently 27K searches per month in the UK.
The SEO agency will then focus its efforts to try to optimise these variations into the website, so for example, making sure to include some of these words in to the headings on the website and the page title etc. implementing these strategies makes it clearer to google that your website offers such a service and as a result it will push you up the rankings ladder, making you more visible to potential customers.
Tools, including SEMRUSH, also provide information about keyword difficulty, which measure how much completion there is regarding a specific keyword or phrase. Very often, a high volume keyword will result in strong competition. An SEO agency will have to assess if a certain keyword should be sought after by its client, as competitive words will require a lot more work (and often money) in order to rank highly for that keyword.