If you want your business or website to appear in search engines, conducting keyword research is of vital importance. Keyword research involves gathering intelligence on what search terms your audience is using before creating content to suit these search terms.
At one time, you might have assumed that targeting only the most popular keywords would be sufficient to make an impressionful campaign. Today however, search intent has become even more critical to success, often making more of a statement than actual keyword selection itself.
There are various methods for narrowing a list of potential keywords using SEO metrics. Let’s consider four of the most helpful metrics here.
1. Search Volume
This metric offers an easy way of tracking how often certain keywords are being searched per month, helping you quickly identify potentially lucrative terms worth exploring further.
2. Traffic Potential
This metric illustrates how much potential traffic a particular keyword has on your site. You can use this number to assess how competitive a term is and whether or not it warrants ranking attempts.
3. Ranking Difficulty
This indicator quantifies how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword. This figure takes into account factors like estimated traffic potential, competitor rankings and difficulty creating highly-ranking pages for that keyword.
4. Search Intent
This often-overlooked metric can have a tremendous effect on the success of your website or blog. Search intent is a measure of how well a specific keyword meets the needs of its audience, providing guidance as to the content topics you should cover – for instance “wedding cake” will likely generate a more informative page than one with “buy wedding cakes”.
Once you know which keywords you need to target, it’s time to research the competition. An efficient way is using Ahrefs Site Explorer for this task and finding out which keywords are already driving traffic to competitors’ websites – this will give you an idea of potential new keyword ideas to consider.
As you continue this exercise for each of your top competitors, you will soon assemble a large list of potential keywords from which to select. Be sure to revisit it regularly since search trends can shift rapidly from month to month.
By using keyword metrics to prioritize your list, you’ll be able to create an action plan for developing content that will lead to long-term success for your site. Of course, as your competitor strategies or marketing initiatives alter over time, the list might need updating again; with some careful planning and diligent work though, you should soon be well on your way towards ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Best of luck!