What are Keywords in SEO? How Can Research Them For Your Website ?
What are Keywords in SEO? How Can You Use Them To Get Free Online Traffic?
As a business, keywords are vital to your online success. The goal is to rank high in Google organically and other search engines, so you need to implement certain SEO strategies, and keywords will play an important role in those. The keyword research it majorly to learn how your prospective customer is utilizing search engines to find the information or products that they want.
Keywords impacts every other SEO task that you perform, including finding content topics, on-page SEO, email outreach, and content promotion. That’s why it is usually the first step in search engine optimization services for any website. It is your task to take the words (and phrases) and use them on your site to ensure it’s relevant for your target audience.
Back in the days, keywords could be stuffed and hidden all over a website to trick search engines into helping a site rank high. However, things have changed in recent time, and the various search engine has worked on their algorithms. Now you have to use keywords with a white hat approach to have quality and relevant content, or you risk getting de-indexed in Google and other search giants.
Types of Keywords in SEO
While doing keyword research, you should be familiar with the different types of keywords that exist in SEO. Without the right understanding of the different types of keywords, your optimization strategies may not yield the intended benefit.
Long-tail keywords
In online marketing, we often speak of long-tail keywords, meaning search terms that are relatively special and are therefore not sought after so often, but which are less competitive and can be used more effectively in terms of online marketing.
As the name suggests, long-tail keywords are longer than the Head and Body Keywords keywords. As a general rule, they contain around 4 – 5 words in them, before they can be classified as a long-tail keyword.
For example, Long-tail keyword = ” Grow your business with Google Ads” and “order men medium shirt online” These terms don’t get a lot of search volume individually (usually around 10-300 searches per month). But when you add them together, long tails make up the majority of searches online. And because they don’t get searches for that much, long-tail terms usually aren’t very competitive.
Below are some of the benefits of using long-tail keywords;
Ranking: There is more competition for common head keywords, but much less for specific long-tail keywords. For instance, it’s hard to rank for “shoes,” but easier to rank for “order men shoes online.”
Targeted Audience: Long-tail keywords tend to be very specific, so it makes a customer ready to take action. Because they already know what they want so they find it and another way some customers search a general keyword.
Less Expensive Advertising: If you use Google Ad Words, the long-tail keyword is very helpful for your advertising. Compare to some other keyword, the long-tail keyword is more specific and lower search volume so that it will be cheaper and more targeted.
Higher Conversion Rate: Many people that search using long-tail keywords naturally are looking for a specific product or something, and other people have already spend a lot of time for doing research and narrowing down to their specific item that means searchers are still in research mode because they are not sure about what they want. For example, a person searching for shoes may not be sure about which color, size, and brand of shoes he /she wants, whereas a person searching for “Men medium shoes size 45” is sure about what he/she wants, leading to high conversion rate.
Body Keywords
Body Keywords are usually 2 – 3-word phrases that are more specific than head keywords and still generating a decent amount of search volume (at least 2,000 searches per month), but are more specific than Head Keywords. Examples would be keywords like “Nike Shoes” or “Blue Nike Shoes.” Even though the search volume of Body Keyword won’t be as high as head keywords, body keywords are usually very competitive still. These are the keywords that define a broad niche in your industry.
Head keywords
Suppose you are into the SEO niche. The head term for this niche could be “SEO tools.” This is the head term of this niche. Head term means the principal term of any niche. For the Medical niche, “Medical” is the head term.
These are typically one-word keywords that have the highest amount of search volume and the highest competition. Other examples of head terms are keywords like “blogging” or advertising.” Because searcher intent is all over the place (someone searching for “blogging” might be looking for blogging tools for WordPress website, blogging tools for marketing, or blogging tools for writing), Head Terms usually don’t convert very well.
In other words, these keywords are too general and are the most difficult to convert because predicting the intention of the persona searching head keywords is virtually impossible. Someone searching for an advertising company to promote their brand is completely different than someone searching for an advertising job. Head keywords generally describe an entire industry. So, it is essential to maintain a balance between search volume and keyword difficulty as there’s no “best” keyword category to focus on.
Bottom Line
All three have their pros and cons. Ideally, you would want to focus on targeting body and long-tail keywords. Head keywords are too competitive and don’t convert well. Unless your brand or website is big enough to compete with Wikipedia, you’re wasting your energy targeting head keywords.
But when it comes to competition, long-tails are usually the least competitive of the bunch. A lot of SEO experts will advise you to focus primarily on long-tail keywords because they convert the highest. However, this generally works best for companies that offer something hyper-specific. Most companies will find that they get the best results by focusing content primarily on body keywords and adding in sections within the content that target long-tail keywords.
