Keyword research is one of the most important elements of Search Engine Optimisation. A lot of website owner often discredit the importance of keywords when optimizing their content for SEO. The reason? They aren’t getting the results that they want. Even the most affordable SEO specialists will tell you that keywords are the bedrocks of great SEO.

If you are using keywords and you are not getting the results that you want, the reason may be that you aren’t doing keyword research well enough. You can’t simply stuff your content with any type of keywords and expect your website to rank high on search engines. It does not work that way (at least not again)!

Most of the time, it is the quality of the keywords you use. And you cannot do this without doing proper research.

In this post, we will be taking a look at some of the best keyword research tips you can use to improve your website’s SEO.

Know Your Customers

This is by far the most important thing when it comes to SEO. You cannot have the SEO conversation without knowing your customer. Find out who they are, what they like, what their favourite colour is, what they like to eat for breakfast.  Knowing all of this can come in handy when you are doing keyword research.

When you who your target audience is, you can brainstorm ways they will look for what they are searching for. Once you understand how they make their decisions, make sure you offer value to them at each point if the buying process.

Also, make use of keywords that have commercial intent and cause your target audience to act immediately.

Make Use Of Negative Keywords

Another keyword research tip that you consider is making use of negative keywords in your digital marketing strategy. It will definitely take your SEO game to the next level. Negative keywords are the words that you are not looking to rank for on your website. By figuring out keywords that are not necessary, you narrow down the search engine users to reach your target audience.

For instance, let us say your website offers free seminars once in a while. Adding the word, free as a negative keyword can help you reduce the chances of reaching people who are not ready to pay for your services.

Once you find out what your negative keywords are, add them to Google Keyword Planner. Here is how to do so:

• Select ‘Keywords and Targeting’
• Then click on ‘Keywords, Negative’
• Click on ‘add a negative keyword’
• Enter the negative keyword in the edit panel

Get Ideas For Keywords Using Free Stock Images Sites

Your keyword research strategy should revolve around looking for new places to find keywords. One of such places is free stock image sites. These sites post royalty and copyright free pictures and are a great place for bloggers to get content for their posts. The pictures on these sites have an ALT description added to every image for SEO purposes.

If we reverse the principles, we will see that searching for keywords on picture descriptions will help you generate new ideas. Pixabay, Shuttershock, Freedigitalphotos, and Stockvault are examples of stock images sites you can find keywords on.

Get Keyword Ideas Using Offline Magazines

It is antithetical how offline magazines can help SEO. Regardless of how weird it sounds, it can help a lot. When you think about it, they are a great source of content. The only difference is that they are offline. As a result, they can be a good place to search for keywords.

The great thing about magazines is that you can find one that is hyper-targeted towards your niche. There is the added benefit of using them as source material for shaping what your online content will look like.

Use Answer The Public

Answerthepublic.com can be used as a keyword research tool. The primary function of this site is to suggest questions people would ask on a topic or keyword you type in. It also suggests which you can materialize in new keywords.

The great thing about this site is that you can tweak the location settings to get suggestions that are in line with the location of your choice.  This way you can get local keyword suggestions.

There is the added bonus of being able to download the whole keyword data into a .csv file. This way you have a comprehensive list of keywords you can use for SEO optimisation

Wikipedia’s database can also be a great place to source for keywords. It comes as no surprise, the site covers a whole lot of topics. However, the reason why it is not on our list is that the articles are information-centric and not keyword-centric. It will take some extra effort to get the keywords that you need.

Here is a list of other things that you can do to find the right keywords for your website:

• Analysing the keywords used by your competition
• Making use of Google Suggest
• Looking at the ‘People also ask’ section on Google

Conclusion

Every website that generates envious amounts of traffic is as a result of great SEO. The bedrock of great SEO is keyword optimization. Finding the right keywords to use in your content can be a very daunting task. In this article, I have shown you a few hacks that can help you find the right keywords for your website.

If this still seems like a huge task for you, you can hire the services of some of the most affordable SEO specialists at International Media House.

International Media House is an organisation dedicated to creating solutions for website owners in every aspect; Search Engine Optimization, PPC, and Web design.

They are made up of a group of staff who have tons of experience in the field and are very professional.