You might be asking yourself, “what is keyword research?“ Basically, keyword research is a practice used by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Professionals to discover the actual keyword phrases people are typing into search engines, and how competitive those terms are.
A website that is well optimised for search engines should be discoverable by your target audience. So, you need to know what your target audience are searching for!
For example, every month in Australia 14,800 people search hunter valley accommodation – from this we can see this is a highly competitive keyword phrase! If you have a small accommodation business with a couple of rooms, it would be a fruitless task hoping to rank on page 1 in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Your time (and money!) would be better spent determining your niche market. Perhaps that’s hunter valley romantic accommodation, at 140 searches per month, or hunter valley accommodation cottages at 320 searches per month. Whatever the relevant keyword phrases might be, keyword research will help you discover what topics to focus on.
Keyword research should be the first step in any SEO strategy. If you don’t know what your target audience are searching for, then how can you write the content for your website? You may think you know what people are searching for, but without effective keyword research, you are flying blind. Optimising for words nobody is searching for is just a waste of time, and optimising for terms that are too competitive will have you lost down on page 10 in the SERPs.
If you sign up for our Advanced WordPress SEO service, you’ll gain the benefits of Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress, along with keyword research and a backlink campaign. Yoast helps optimise each page or post for a specific focus keyword.
Don’t waste your time simply building a beautiful WordPress website – make sure that site is being found by your target audience.