Using Keyword Research To Understand Searchers’ Needs

If I asked you what the most important aspect of SEO is, what would you say? To get top search engine rankings?

Search engine exposure certainly is valuable, but that’s really not the job of the SEO. Their job is to bring targeted traffic to the website. Rankings certainly help with bringing in traffic, but the rankings themselves don’t guarantee it.

Want to know what is more important than rankings in search results? Generating clicks from search results.

And what is more important than that? Making sure those clicks land the visitor on the page that best fits the intent of their search.

And that process starts with keyword research.

Uncovering Phrases vs. Understanding Them

We often think of keyword research as the process of uncovering phrases, but it is also the process of understanding them.

“We often think of keyword research as the process of uncovering phrases, but it is also the process of understanding them.” — Stoney deGeyter

It can often prove useful to perform a search for any keyword you find in your research and assess the results. Follow a few links and look at the content. If all the results show similar content, this gives you a good idea of what searchers are looking for.

This gives you a better understanding of what pages of your site you should be optimizing for those keywords. If the page you optimize doesn’t provide similar solutions as the rest, you’ll probably have a difficult time ranking for those phrases.

Don’t Fight Google

There is a saying, “Don’t fight city hall.” Well, don’t fight Google. If Google has a tendency to rank a certain type of page for a specific keywords, optimizing a different type of page for the same keyword can prove futile.

Let Google show you what kind of information a specific searcher is looking for. Then use that to build a page that meets that specific need.