SEO Keyword Research: 6 Questions to Ask Yourself

By Caroline Marshall

Since creating content is such a time consuming process, it is important that people are able to find it. This is why keyword research is necessary for search engine optimization.

Let’s explore the topic of keyword search for SEO and some of the questions to ask yourself to create content that will rank highly on the search engine.

Q1: How does my audience search for my product or service?

In order for your audience to discover your content, you need to figure out what language they are using in their searches. The best way to research this is to either talk to them directly, or observe how they talk about the product or service. Also, talking to sales and customer service teams who have regular conversations with customers could provide useful insight.

Q2: What problems do customers need solved?

To come up with content ideas that will provide relevant information for customers, it is important to:

• Talk to customers
• Send out feedback forms
• Check the reviews on your website (or your competitors’)
• Reading answer platform sites (E.g. Quora, Reddit, etc.)

Use these pain points found during research to create helpful content that will resolve these issues for customers.

Q3: What is the search volume?

The search volume provides a guide on how many times a keyword is searched per month. If keywords selected from your research produce little search volume, this indicates a topic to write content about.

Even if this content doesn’t appear at the top of SERPs, you know that is will be useful to your customers in some way. Plus, it might end up producing high search volume over time.

In order to find out the statistics of any search term, it is helpful to use SEO tools such Google Search Console (GSG). This strategy is perfect for specifically identifying customer needs.

Q4: How competitive is each keyword?

Keyword tools offer information on how difficult each keyword is to rank highly for. This data is based on many factors within a complex algorithm. Generally, it is based on how many backlinks the ranking articles have – the more backlinks, the higher the SERP ranking.

However, another important rule to consider is that longer-tail keywords (4+ words) are much easier to rank for than head words (1-3 words). Finding out where your keywords compare to your competition is essential in for search engine optimization.

Q5: What is the search intent?

It is crucial to understand both what customers are searching for and what they’re looking for. This is because sometimes the predicted keyword for your website will not include the true search intent of the customer.

To identify the true search intent of your customers, it is important to aim for long-tail keywords that are more specific to your product or service. Additionally, doing Google searches and gathering your own data can provide insight to your research.

Q6: What else can I write on this topic?

After doing keyword research for SEO, it is not sufficient to only write one piece of content. You cannot showcase experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in one piece of content.

When you find a keyword or subject to write about, cover that topic fully by pulling in all of your expertise. Write other pieces of content about similar subjects, and provide opportunities to help customers while bringing in revenue. Covering a topic in multiple pieces of content is necessary because:

• It shows Google that you are a true authority on the subject. If you can write on all angles of a topic, you are considered to know a lot about it.
• Your website users will find your blog more useful. The more valuable content you have, the longer they will stay on your site.

Conclusion

While these 6 questions are not the only things to consider when creating SEO-driven content, answering them will help you to develop a strategy to drive higher SERP results.