KEYWORD RESEARCH ANALYSIS
Data has to drive everything in marketing. That’s no exception with SEO. Spending the time to conduct proper keyword research gives us a clear view into exactly what keywords we should be targeting in our SEO efforts.
A lot of times, we’ll target words or phrases that we think people are using. This is often negatively effected by ‘industry speak’. Other times, we’ll completely leave out certain keywords that we never thought of.
But your SEO company in Raleigh should be leveraging actual data. With real-time data, we can find out exactly what words and phrases people are using when searching for your product or service, how often they are searching it, and what the competition is for that term (along with your current ranking). This gives us a straight-forward approach to the fastest and most effective way to grow rankings, traffic and sales.
Search Volume
Obviously we want to target keywords that get searched a lot related to our business. But how do we know what those are? We utilize several tools – mostly Google’s own keyword data – to find and understand which keywords are receiving the most searches each month. Those would be our highest priority, highest value terms.
Purchasing Intent
Sometimes, though, it makes sense to target keywords with lower volume. For example, “shoes” gets millions of searches each month. The term “I need shoes for work by tomorrow” gets way less. But – the intent of the lower volume keyword to buy is much, much higher. So we don’t just want to look at volume. We have to understand the intent behind the term as well to weigh the benefits.
There are a lot of steps to an SEO project. But if you miss this one, you’ll never be executing your SEO efforts with maximum efficiency or effectiveness.
The keyword research piece isn’t necessarily as fun for you as the client. It’s a lot of data and spreadsheets. But it’s setting the foundation for everything else. We water down the user experience, content, backlinks and so much more if we’re not targeting the highest volume, highest intent keywords. We conduct a very thorough keyword research process that will ensure you receive the most profitable and long-lasting rankings in the search results.