What are keywords?

A keyword is any word or phrase that users type in the Internet’s search bar to find relevant information. 

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is called Keyword Research in English. This is the process of finding, reviewing, analyzing the words and phrases that users want to search for. Keyword research is very important because to determine the right search intent of target customers, potential customers of websites. In other words, keyword research will help businesses optimize content that has a high position on the SERP.

Algorithms affecting keyword research

Today, Google has new algorithms, SEO people need to pay attention to update their knowledge and experience continuously to have an effective keyword research strategy. Specifically:

• Google Panda: Algorithm helps google penalize content of poor quality, duplicated from sources and thin content.
• Google Penguin: Google uses an algorithm to penalize sites that show signs of abusing too many backlinks to achieve high rankings, signs of spam and manipulation.
• Google Hummingbird: Helps increase semantic recognition, which means that this SEO algorithm will be processed and understood under the semantic impact of keywords and other related keyword phrases.
• Google RankBrain: This algorithm will dig into the search intent of queries as well as understand how to interact with organic search results.

How to research keywords in SEO

Keyword analysis

Before doing keyword analysis, you must define your niche and audience. The SEO keyword on the first page of google, will attract a lot of traffic as well as create conversion value for businesses.

To analyze keywords, you can use many tools like Keyword Tool, Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Keyword Planner. Keyword analysis has 3 important steps as follows:

Step 1: Select potential keywords, keywords related to your business, product, topic.

Step 2: Use the Keyword Planner tool to analyze indicators such as: the number of searches, the list of suggested keywords, the main keywords suitable for the content.

Step 3: Access the link: https://ads.google.com/intl/ vi_vn/home/tools/ keyword-planner/. Then click Tools → Keyword Planner → Enter keywords to analyze. Select “Get ideas”.

The results returned are the number of searches by month and related keywords for you to easily choose. You can also refer to more keywords when entering keywords in the Google toolbar. When your business website has been in operation for a long time, you can use Google Console to optimize the keywords that are holding the top 7 – 15 position.

Indicators to consider when analyzing keywords: volume is search volume, Difficulty is keyword difficulty, Opportunity – Opportunity of topic keywords, Potential – Potential.

Keyword group

Buyer Keyword

This is a group of keywords that users have intended to buy, and can even determine which products they want to buy. These are keywords with high conversion rates and high value for businesses, but the level of competition is fierce.

Information Keyword

For this type of keyword, users are simply looking for information that is useful to them and has a low conversion rate. However, in SEO, this type of keyword has high volume and low competition, which is easy to SEO top. 

Tire Kicker Keyword

These are searches that don’t immediately convert, often with words like free, torrent, download, etc.

Navigational Keyword

This is a type of keyword that identifies a specific brand name. That is, they already know their end goal before searching.

How to do keyword research in SEO

Step 1: Go to Ahrefs → Choose Keyword Explorer → Enter your keyword (this is a phrase, consisting of 2 words or more).

Step 2: Select  Matching terms → Phrase match → Export

Step 3: After downloading the keyword list file, you need to keep the keyword and volume columns, the level of competition, and delete the rest.

Step 4: Filter duplicate keywords in excel file. 

Step 5: Keyword Classification: You can use the Keyword Modifier to identify related keyword phrases. That means you will see other keywords, related to the original keyword.

Step 6: After getting good keywords and understanding the basic structure of the website, you must build a suitable set of keywords for your SEO plan. Focus on the most important keywords, and then the related keywords.