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by Wayne Smith
Effective SEO relies on thorough keyword research. The site's content and keywords should align with the target audience's interests, needs, and search behavior.
Awareness-stage keywords should match the terms the audience uses or is likely to search for. Purchase-stage keywords should be particular and intent-driven. While SEO tools can help, they may not always provide business-specific insights and does not consider the user's journey through the sales process.
Marketing Research
Marketing research starts with the business plan by defining the ideal customer, and their needs, wants, and pain points. A business may operate in an untapped (blue ocean) or emerging market, where customer awareness and education are essential. Alternatively, it may compete in a commodity market, serve an underserved niche, or differentiate through quality, convenience, or price.
Keyword strategies should also consider and focus on new or fresh content and original content. There should be a strategy to keep the content up to date.
Consider that unique content is evergreen content.
Note: Many SEO tools based on information from Google provide limited information. Many keywords would be below Google's sampling thresholds to report.
PPC, Pay per click keyword tools
Many keyword-driven advertisement networks provide data for keywords. In some cases, these tools provide insights into cost and competitiveness.
PPC data can be publisher-driven, not query-driven, although data from search engines have query sampled data. The lack of a keyword in publisher-driven data can represent opportunities or underserved markets, query sampled data from search engines can provide insights. Having a keyword cluster that is different from the competitors can help SEO.
In a commodity market, SEO tools and AI can be used to look at what keywords competitors are using and determine how competitive the keywords are. It remains important to use or find unique keywords not commonly used by competitors. Uniqueness sets the site apart for clients in marketing, and for SEO, it helps diversify search results.
AI: Marketing and Keyword Research
AI can assist with brainstorming for marketing and keyword research by analyzing data from multiple sources. However, AI-generated information may be outdated, based on logical fallacies, or inaccurate.
Social Media: Marketing and Keyword Research
Social media platforms with search features help connect with ideal customers. By asking questions and identifying relevant keywords, businesses can align their content with the search queries their target audience will likely use.
SEO: Search Query Intent and Microintent
For SEO keywords dictate user intent. The search intent for the keywords needs to be research with the keyword research.
For example the keywords for bottom-of-the-funnel products; Are transactional intent keywords with the microintent of making a purchase.
The page content needs to match the search intent to be relevant.
Some search keywords may require a true-blue 100% matching of intent, and other keywords may be influenced by query intent but with more diversity in content types.
Microintent also applies to content formats such as (video, text, or image) content, and may trigger specific SERP feature sets.
Content optimized to search intent and microintent increases the likelihood of the page appearing in the results.
SEO: Semantically related keyword research
Relevance for a keyword could once be achieved by keyword density and ranking with only backlinks. Modern search engines have advanced and a page about a keyword will naturally use that keyword more frequently. The usage of semantically related words on the page provides a better relevancy signal.
AI produces a language dataset, which includes semantically related keywords. It is important for SEO to research these keywords.
Long Tail Keyword Research
Semantically related keywords also provide long-tail keywords. People may not recall the exact keyword for what they are looking for; And, instead, search for intent rather than exact-match keywords using entities or semantically related keywords.