Keyword research is one of the most important parts of SEO strategy because it tells you what your audience is actually searching for. Without it, your website’s content is mostly going to be based on guesswork.
This doesn’t mean that keywords are the only thing that matters for search engine optimization. Your website needs to provide helpful information, have solid technical foundations, and be easy for users and crawlers to navigate.
As Philadelphia-based SEO experts, we start all of our clients’ campaigns with an extensive round of keyword research. This step helps us understand what customers want, how they ask for it, and where to use each relevant term to get the best possible results.
This article will explain the importance of keyword research in SEO and how you should factor it into your content strategy.
First: What Is Keyword Research in SEO?
Keyword research means finding words, phrases, and questions that people type into search engines and building a strategy on how to apply them for a specific website’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
These searches tell you a lot about your audience, and they can be categorized based on the intent behind them. For example, a search like “What is local SEO” has an informational intent, and a query like “local SEO agency in Philadelphia,” shows more buying intent. Since these keywords are used in different contexts, they’ll have a different place in a full SEO strategy.
How Does Keyword Research Work?
For accurate keyword research, digital marketing pros use tools that provide access to search engine query data, including the number of times users type certain words and phrases into Google and other similar platforms.
Keyword research tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs also give you detailed predictions of how competitive the search engine results pages (SERPs) are for certain keywords, providing a picture of how difficult it might be to rank for these keywords.
Knowing this stat, which is often called keyword difficulty, will let you know which keywords are achievable based on your website’s authority.
Why Is Keyword Research So Important for SEO?
Keyword research is important because it sets you up to match your SEO campaign to real search demand.
It Helps You Know How To Describe Your Services
You might describe your services one way, but your customers might describe them another way. For example, if your website only describes your auto repair work as “transmission rescue” rather than a more straightforward term that people are actually searching for such as “auto repair near me,” you’ll miss out on valuable traffic.
It Helps You Know Where To Spend Your Efforts
Not every keyword deserves its own page on your website, and some might not be worth using at all. Keyword research gives you a sense of how valuable certain keywords will be for your site and also helps you know where to use these keywords.
It Helps You Make a Cohesive Content Strategy
Keyword research helps you break up words and phrases across different types of website content. By looking carefully at search intent and other data for each keyword, you can decide whether to use it on:
- Your homepage and other key pages (best for the keywords that best describe your work)
- Service pages (best for high-intent, long-tail keywords)
- Blog posts (best for informational searches)
- Location pages (best for keywords that include a specific service areas)
As you create a keyword research strategy, keep in mind that it’s best to only have one page on your site for each specific focus keyword. In other words, you don’t want to create two pages built around the same topic, since this can lead to keyword cannibalization.
What Happens If You Skip Keyword Research?
If you decide to forgo keyword research, your SEO strategy will be missing a cornerstone. You might still be able to create good content and get some organic traffic on your site, but it may not match your company’s goals or what your customers are searching for.
Here’s a quick outline of some of the biggest pitfalls of skipping this key step.
You Can Target the Wrong Topics
If you don’t spend time on keyword research, you might end up wasting energy on topics that feel important but barely have any search demand. That content might end up sitting untouched on your site unless it’s retooled and optimized for keywords with volume.
You Can Miss Out on High-Intent Searches
For a business website, high-intent keywords are some of the most valuable opportunities in SEO. These are the searches that let you know that someone is close to converting, and they’re where you want to show up on search results.
If your website doesn’t have pages that match these terms, you leave room for your competitors to crowd you out and steal your traffic. For example, a general “Services” page may not be enough to rank in your area for specific searches like “commercial HVAC maintenance” or “HVAC repair services.”
For our clients, we always optimize pages like these to include high-intent keywords in their SEO metadata. All of these keywords are backed by our extensive research.
You Can End Up With Disorganized Content
Without keyword research, you risk creating a site full of disorganized, overlapping content. This is partly because keyword research helps you assign specific terms to each page, helping you avoid the keyword cannibalization phenomenon we discussed earlier.
When you don’t have specific keywords mapped to your pages, you can end up running the risk of diluting traffic to multiple pages by confusing Google about which page to serve to searchers. This is just one aspect of how keyword research helps you keep your pages organized and optimized.
Build a Smarter SEO Strategy
The importance of keyword research in SEO is that it gives your strategy clear direction. It shows you what your audience wants and which pages your site needs to have, which is a game-changer for any business online.
The best SEO strategies start with keyword research, which is why we use this key step to build smarter content strategies and get our clients to their traffic goals and beyond.
If you’re feeling stuck in your SEO efforts, reach out to our team today. We’re happy to help you turn marketing confusion into predictable growth.