Keyword Research: Optimizing your keywords to improve SEO

It all begins with the words typed in the search box.

It is important to understand how people search anything online. That's how SEO comes into play. Search Engine Optimization is the technique through which you can boost your organic (unpaid) search results. 

How does Search Engine works?

Search Engines perform two basic things: Crawling and Indexing. Crawling billions of documents, pages etc for relevant content and indexing them i.e a ranked list to the user with the answers which are most relevant and popular. Search Engines assume that more popular is a site or page, more valuable the information is.

Let's understand the stages of search: How can a mere search into a purchase?

Stages of a Search

A consumer search about a broad topic which gradually refines to more specific as consumer discovers what he wants. Awareness is what intrigues the consumer at first and after further evaluation from the search, the consumer narrow downs the search results as per his choices. Finally, from the final results, he chooses the best one for him and makes a purchase.

Types of Search Queries

A web search query is a query which user enters into the search engine to find desired results.

Navigational Query

A navigational query is a search is directly for a brand name, website or web page.

Informational Query

An informational query is intended for gaining some information. For example: Looking for information about a product before purchasing.

Transactional Query

The user is ready to make a purchase and has decided what they want to buy. The user now wants to get to a website to interact with i.e sign ups, free account register, Newsletter Sign-up.

Now that you have learned about various search queries, it is recommended to 

Craft your strategy around these queries for best results.

How to judge the value of a keyword?

Keyword rankings are of utmost importance for better rankings. This could make or break the rankings of a website. It helps you understand what your customers want and target the right audience for your business. For example: If you own a car business, keywords like "SUV", "family cars" etc make you more popular or help you make more sales?

To understand the value of a keyword, we need to understand our website, make some test cases and repeat. It is the classic marketing strategy.

• The keyword must be relevant to your content. 
• Keywords which are valuable to the other similar business or websites and helping them to gain popularity.
• You can check the desired keywords by entering them into the search engines and observing the results carefully.
• Understanding the Long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are those phrases with four and five specific words targeting a particular interest. Long tail keywords generate more traffic than single popular keywords.

It is a general tendency of the user to search a query using long multi-word phrases which when targeted can help prosper a business.

For example:

Cheap Hyundai used car 

Best stores for repaint of cars

Discounts on Hyundai car

Stores of Second hand Hyundai car

You can always use test cases but for initial findings, you can always use keyword findings tools:

• Moz explorer
• Wordtracker
• Google Adwords keyword planner tool

Happy learning.