What Is Keyword Research?
Search engine keyword research reveals opportunities to increase online visibility and targeted traffic to your website.
Finding the right keywords that will contribute to the end goal of targeted website traffic and lead generation, involves analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines.
Keyword research can uncover popular search queries user’s type into search engines, their ranking difficulty, new search trends and your competitors ranking for the keywords.
Furthermore, combined with an analysis of content on individual websites, keyword research can reveal websites that currently rank for specific keywords but SEO improvements can be made to the page and its content with the goal of these specific pages ranking higher.
Historically, using keywords that match a person's exact search would trigger optimized websites to display in SERP’s and if done right the keywords result in driving targeted traffic to your website. These days it’s not just about keywords but a user's intent behind the keywords.
Does this mean keyword research is out dated? No, it simply means search algorithms have evolved to the point they better understand the reason behind a user's search query. Keywords should be used to find TOPICS and within the content of those topic articles specific keywords should be targeted based on keyword research.