Principles of SEO | Keyword Research in 2019

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  is a subject that’s largely misunderstood on the web. It’s not because it’s so hard or complex, but because it takes time–not to just see results, but to set up your campaign, from planning your strategy to executing it to managing it to measuring it and its effectiveness. Campaigns that take small amounts of work, will likely see similarly small results. If you put a large amount of time into your campaign–for starters, identifying your target audience, then identifying them online by performing a thorough online market analysis. The best way to go about this is by finding the right keywords (or search query phrases) to target based on your findings. By doing this you’ll see much better results because you’re leaving nothing to chance.

Keyword Research in 2019 | The First Step to Perfect SEO

Keyword research is the practice of finding the EXACT keywords that people use to search for things that are relevant to your business. Let me use a quick example to illustrate why Keyword Research is so integral to your SEO campaign. So say you are a person who owns a construction company in Las Vegas. Now, you want to get more people, who are interested in a construction company in Las Vegas. To see your website on Google when searching for a construction company in Las Vegas.

So you decide to try to rank #1 for the exact term “general contractors in Las Vegas”.

Now, when you get to #1 for this term, you find you only receive a lead or two every week from being #1, even though you know you should be receiving more. Why is this? It’s most likely because only a couple people a week are searching for that exact term, “general contractors in Las Vegas”.

So comparatively, if you decided to rank #1 for the term “contractor in Las Vegas”, which gets 10 people searching a day. So if the term “general contractors in Las Vegas” gets 1 person a day, and “contractor in Las Vegas” gets 10, you would be getting 10x more business by trying to rank for “contractor in Las Vegas”.

Keyword research in 2019 is a very powerful skill, and the most important part of SEO, it is the foundation that you build the house on. If you build your house on bad foundation, there’s bound to be some unforeseen circumstances. But, if you choose a healthy plot of land, and use all the right materials, you’ll certainly have much more control over the process.

The general tool used to find keywords is the Google External Keyword Tool. You can type a keyword in, and Google will generate results based on the options you’ve set. By default, the tool will retrieve 100 results. If you are signed into an Adwords account(you can register for one easily, and it’s free) it will retrieve 800 results for you.

You can include more useful metrics like Cost per Click for ads(a subject we’ll be covering in a future article). This is amazing for Keyword Research in 2019, but you can always call me to do the work for you aswell!

Global searches are how many searches the term has gotten on average every  month, for the past 12 months. Local includes only your country. Note, to get accurate results, make sure you click the “exact” tab on the left side of the page, and un-click “broad” as indicated in this picture”. You must type a keyword in first to get the option to switch to “exact”.
You can also use tools like Ahrefs to get these numbers, some consider third party to be more reliable.