Keywords are important for marketing campaigns such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC). As for SEO, if you can bring your target keyword to the top of search engines like Google, it ensures that your effort will bring you targeted traffic. To achieve this in the least expensive way, you can opt for PPC. If you have the requisite advertisement budget, you can make your website position above the organic results.
Finding Keywords for SEO
How you find the appropriate keywords for SEO is very crucial, as the keywords that you opt for can make or break your SEO endeavors. Choosing keywords that are too competitive is not the best bet, as you will have a tough time ranking on Google. And if you optimize your website around keywords seldom used by your customers, your effort to convert a lot of traffic will not work. The bottom line is that if your website has been hosted recently, you need to focus on long-tail keywords as part of your SEO efforts, even though long-tail keywords are search terms with not much search volume. But they tend to be very specific, as long-tail keywords are bound to convert at a much higher rate, in contrast with the high search volume terms. You might wonder why it is so. Well, those who use long-tail keywords look to get information on a specific thing, which means they are likely to be advanced in their buyer journey, and hence, they are more likely to convert.
Qualities
When you are delving deep into the keyword search and firming up your mind as to which keywords you would want to use, you need to know what some of the qualities to pay attention to are. There are many qualities of a keyword; yet, the main qualities of a keyword are as follows: search volume, competition, price (cost-per-click), and word count. Here, you need to understand what search volume is nothing but the number of times a keyword is searched for in Google each month. This metric is vital because it eventually helps you estimate how much potential traffic you are likely to get by ranking that keyword in Google. For instance, the keyword 'loans' elicits a monthly search volume of 246.0k in the US and a global volume of 850.8k!
What’s more, spending on a keyword with humongous search volume has the potential to draw more traffic to your website. The flip side is that those keywords with lots of searches are also likely to be more competitive to rank for. That is precisely why a relatively new website should attempt to optimize low-volume long-tail keywords as and when possible, as they are less competitive and pretty much easy to rank for.
Competition
While it is heartening to see that you are getting many searches for a particular keyword you have chosen, it is equally important to note that keyword's competition. If a particular keyword is a sought-after one, you have to understand that it is likely that scores of websites will already be using the same keyword and vying with others to reach the top spot in terms of both paid and organic results.
There are many keyword tools that have a way of measuring keyword competition. For instance, Semrush, an SEO player, has two metrics to measure the competition on Google's first page, and they are - keyword difficulty and competitive density. The first metric suggests the level of effort it will take to rank in the top ten organic results of Google for a keyword, based on the authority of the websites currently ranking on the first page of Google, as measured by backlinks. The second metric suggests how competitive or expensive it is to rank an advertisement at the top of the search results, which are based on how many advertisers, are bidding on a specific keyword. Thus, the former helps manage SEO campaigns, while the latter helps to prioritize advertisement campaigns.
