Keyword Research

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization professionals use to find and research search terms that users enter into search engines when looking for products, services or general information. Search engine optimization professionals first research keywords, and then align web pages with these keywords to achieve better rankings in search engines. Once they find a niche keyword, they expand on it to find similar keywords. Keyword suggestion tools usually aid the process, like the Google Ads Keyword Planner, which offers a thesaurus and alternative keyword suggestions. Google’s first party data also aids this research through the likes of Google autocomplete or People Also Ask.

A very popular and highly competitive keyword on Google search engine is “making money.” It has 4,800,000,000 search results, meaning that billions of websites are relevant or competing for that keyword. Keyword research starts with finding all possible word combinations that are relevant to the “making money” keyword. For example, a keyword “acquiring money” has significantly fewer search results, only 116,000,000, but it has the same meaning as “making money.” Another way is to be more specific about a keyword by adding additional filters. For example the keyword “making money online from home in Canada” is less competitive on a global scale and therefore easier to rank for. Furthermore, keywords also have various intents which can affect whether the marketer would want to target that keyword. Multiple tools are available (both free and commercial) to find keywords and analyze them.