Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the search terms used by your target audience to help shape your content. This process may involve free tools such as Google’s Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, or paid tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.

3.1.2 Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research is important because it provides you with specific search data that will help you determine:

• What people are searching for

• Search volume for a topic

• Most popular content formats

• People’s knowledge gaps

• Rival coverage.

Having this information means you’ll waste less time on low-performing content, gain more traffic and drive more revenue. Let’s explore each in more detail.

What People Are Searching For

When you’re close to an industry for a long time you’ll likely have a certain way of describing things. When that’s the case, you may not realize your readers don’t do the same thing.

The keywords you target should focus on what your audience is searching for. With effective keyword research, you can focus your content on what searchers are entering into Google and optimize your content for those terms.

Keyword research will also help you uncover similar keywords/themes as well. For example, if your publication intends to cover the World Cup, then it would be useful to understand that related keywords from Google searches include “World Cup fixtures”, “World Cup start date”, and “World Cup 2022 groups.”

You can create content focused around these keywords and help direct traffic to your site.