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Keyword Research

Keyword research has come a long way since the term was invented. With this development, the role of keyword research in a search engine optimisation campaign has also evolved. The days of keyword stuffing and over optimisation are no longer. Instead, the Google algorithm has grown into a sophisticated filter that focuses on the quality of online content.

For many business or website owners with a lack of in-depth keyword research knowledge, there is a potential to miss out on significant organic traffic volumes. As a result, you could be missing out on substantial sales and leads. HQ SEO have years of experience working with a variety of businesses to build a keyword list that can dramatically increase your revenue. Do not believe us? Why not check out our case studies?

Keyword Definition

What is a keyword and why is it so important? In SEO, a keyword is a particular word, or phrase, that defines content on a webpage. These keywords form part of the webpage metadata. This is picked up by search engines to match with an appropriate search query. If you were to condense all the images, content and videos on the page, these will be described with the primary keywords.

Selecting the most relevant keywords for content makes it more likely for a potential customer, or lead, to find and engage with the website. Therefore, this increase in organic traffic can result in more sales and higher return on investment.

The Focus Keywords

At HQ SEO, our primary goal is to discover all the profitable focus keywords for our clients. Through establishing the focus keyword foundations, we are able to tailor our entire SEO campaign around these target keywords.

We do this using 3 core keyword research methods and combining the results. Consequently, we create a large list of keywords that once ranked, will result in a high influx of sales and leads to a business, or website.

During the keyword research and analysis process, there is a large emphasis on finding the right long-tail keywords. For the majority of businesses, the initial higher volume search terms will be very obvious. These tend to be highly competitive and more difficult to appear in search engine result pages (SERPs). For the long term, understanding what your target market is searching on a granular level is extremely important and can be very profitable. Over time, the website is able to rank for more focus keywords. Hence, generating more pre-sold traffic to the site, which will convert to a higher top line revenue.

Keyword Research Services

Our keyword research services form the backbone of any SEO campaign. Through effective keyword generation and developing a comprehensive keyword list, we are able to grow organic search traffic by 10 times. Below you can see our complete keyword research process. This process has been refined from years of experience working with a variety of businesses. If you have any further questions, or would like to request a free proposal, do not hesitate to contact us.

Research Tools

Our keyword research process begins with thorough keyword analysis. Our advanced granular approach involves using industry standard data analytics and research tools. These are Google analytics, Google Search Console and Ahrefs. These 3 tools allow us to build the website structure based on extensive search term data, competition analysis and current trends.

From this valuable data we can determine which keywords can be ranked for particular individual webpages. This is especially crucial to avoid keyword cannibalisation, which 90% of clients suffer from. This means that your own site competes against itself in the SERPs for the same keywords. Consequently, these pages could be hindered, or in extreme circumstances not rank at all.

During this first stage in the keyword research process we are able to build a broad keyword list of the major search terms specific to your business. This allows us to move onto the second stage. This is where we determine which target keywords are suitable for the home, category, product or service pages. This is based on the search volume and profitability of each keyword.

Search Volume & Profitability

Using the same 3 tools mentioned above, we can also determine the profitability of keywords based on search volume. These are the target keywords that will be searched the most and have the highest commercial value. In combination with high search volume, we also investigate the competitiveness of the keywords. By avoiding overly competitive broad search terms that are vague and immensely challenging to rank for, we can target the leads and customers most relevant to your business.

For example, when a prospect searches inside Google for a specific keyword, they may be looking to do one of the following actions, find information (non-commercial), find a service (commercial), or buy a product (commercial). We want to focus our keyword analysis on discovering the commercial style keywords and ensuring we find potentially profitable keywords that will result in sales and not just “website traffic”.

Search Intent

The final step of the keyword research process is search intent. This involves determining the motivation of the lead or customer during the search process. Subsequently, we are able to develop long-tail keywords that are specific to your target market. These long-tail search terms tend to have a clearly defined search intent, such as “cheap emergency electrician in Cardiff”.

The search intent stage is vital as it can bypass multiple sales funnel stages. We are able to bring in leads and prospects that are already pre-sold on your specific offering. There are numerous ways to do this.

At HQ SEO we use content generation for highly specific long-tail keywords targeted at organic traffic near the bottom of the sales funnel. At this stage clients or customers are more likely to be ready to buy. This makes the sales cycle shorter and frees up more resources and time to be spent running your business. This is a win-win situation! Of course, it all starts by finding the most relevant, profitable, bottom of the sales funnel keywords to rank. Once keyword research is completed, we move onto on page optimisation or technical audit depending on the website and campaign.

If you have any questions about keywords research or would like to request a proposal feel free to get in touch.