What Role Does Importance Of Keyword Selection Play In SEO?

Keyword research refers to the method of discovering and analyzing a marketer experience when seeking to understand how their potential customers search. Typically it is a process to understand searchers’ behavior during the buying cycle – from wide exploratory terms to extremely targeted commercial terms.

Although SEO has been a buzzword in the field of website development, yet few people have really understood the real crux of it. For most of people, search engine optimization is just building a jazzy website and stuffing it with plenty of keywords so that it gets maximum hit. Well, it is certainly one of the important prerequisites. However, there is much more importance of keyword selection in the whole process. If improper keywords are selected then it will not yield desired links even if you have over-stuffed them in the content!

Why keyword selection is important?

Before understanding the importance of keyword selection we need to understand the use and purpose of it. Keywords are actually like the pathway indicators on a highway. They represent the purpose and subject of your website and the visitors follow them to land-up at your website. It is very obvious that the closer they relate to your website content, the effective they are in bringing the right traffic. There are a few points that would help in selecting the right keywords:

1. Keywords must and must represent the basic purpose and content of your website.
2. Keywords must be easily understandable to the visitors. Put yourself in the shoes of a novice visitor and then think about the keywords.
3. Keywords must contain adequate number of words. Too less would have millions of queries on the search engine with no relevance to your website and too many will have almost negligible queries to make your website disappear from the search results.

 How Does This Change The Uses Of Keyword Data?

It is great to have an access to more granular data than is now available, but the main effect is to encourage a focus on qualitative keyword research over exact mathematical calculations. In particular:

•   Extra attention paid to user intent
•   Extra focus on the confounding variables (location, time, preferences)
•   More thematic grouping and less focus on individual keywords

After digging a little deeper into the data quality, we’ll start learning more about the process itself.

Types OF Keywords:

Searcher intent

There is a number of ways for classifying various types of search by intent, but we usually refer to the following segmentation:

• Navigational: When one knows exactly what they are looking for and simply uses the search engine to find the location. For example search of Google as a keyword explains the intention of seeking the Google website.
• Informational: when one is researching something and seeks answers, information, or resources. An example of an informational search could be how many ounces are there in a pound.
• Transactional: when one is seeking to do something – whether that be to buy something or to carry out some other kind of action An example of a transactional search could be [buy digital camera].

Usually, it is not possible to know the exact intent of searchers, but one must try to understand what the searcher is seeking.

Branded vs. unbranded search

A “Branded Keyword” is a keyword contains either your brand name or some variation of it ( ex google, google.com). While non-branded keywords search query that does not include the target website’s brand name.

Let’s look at examples of each kind of keyword in both branded and unbranded form.

Branded examples:

• Branded navigational searches are those like facebook which are just shortcuts for typing facebook.com and also searches like [yahoo sports] which are seeking specific pages
• Branded informational searches are those like bbc chicken casserole recipe] which are seeking a general thing from a specific site or brand
• Branded transactional searches are those like [android tablet amazon] which are precursors to a transaction targeted at a specific site or brand.

Unbranded Examples:

• Unbranded navigational searches typically exist only where a fair degree of consumer education has taken place such that a generic term is actually associated with a specific brand.
• Unbranded informational searches are those like [California governor election results] that don’t seek to return only pages from a particular site or brand
• Unbranded transactional searches are typically very valuable rankings – searches like [professional indemnity insurance] would fall into this category.

Identifying keyword types

One should need to understand that a given keyword can mean different things to different searchers. So for identifying keywords effectively, it is important to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience (or potential audience)

One must follow rules of thumb for identifying exact keywords. Generally, these rules take the form of Excel formulae. (The following paragraphs assume do not seek to describe the exact Excel methodologies – you can check out our interactive Excel module or Excel for SEO guide for more on that.)

Here are some of the rules that we have found useful:

•  Word or stem matching – typically most useful for branded / non-branded analysis
•  Look-ups – for example against product lists
•  Filters on keyphrase length – to make manual review possible by making lists a manageable size – and noting that longer searches tend to be informational (and, to a lesser degree, transactional)Matching website Content to Searcher Intent

The key goal of keyword research is to match your website content with the intent of the searcher. This is important for a number of reasons:

1. It’s the key to profitable results as you want users who comes to your website, engage with your content and ultimately convert.
2. It’s important for long-term search success as if your content is not aligned with searcher intent, that will be reflected in poor user metrics, high bounce rates and lower levels of link growth

It is impossible to control everything that a page ranks for, so sometimes you will find high bounce rates where pages rank for an accidental term. Outside of those situations, where you find bounce rates indicating a mismatch, you can use the framework above to modify page content to suit.

The most common mismatch we see is websites that put commercial, conversion-oriented content in front of searchers performing informational queries. Of course, you need to consider the profitable outcomes you are seeking, but if users don’t even stay around to consume any content, you have no chance of converting them. In these situations, you may need to consider smaller conversion steps such as email subscription sign-ups.

Before working with the list you are building, you will want to gather data from a variety of sources to identify edge cases and also to enhance your raw list with whatever other data you can find.

We hope that the first part of this blog will help you steer clear of Keyword Research and that help you to become an SEO Expert. If this introduction to Keyword Research for SEO Services has make you excited about using these ideas for your search engine optimization services, then look out for Part 2, which will go deeper into things you can start doing right away — and tips for doing them well.  Stay tuned!