Impact of Keyword Research in SEO- a Beginners Guide

Every distinctly ranked website eternally bank on the keywords used.However, the seriousness of discrete keywords is slowly diminished.We can blame it on black hat SEO practices that, even when they're being cracked down, have a deep-rooted effect.For today in 2016, there are several factors that are significantly more important factors than keyword phantom:-

1. Keywords arrangement matters more than manipulation arrangements. Using keywords in the title tag and header has more weight than using them five times in the content.

2.Using synonyms is more than acceptable. Now that Google is more sophisticated in interpreting data of a website, keyword specificity is fading. So even if different key phrases are used, as long as they have similar context, Google can place them in the exact same category, theoretically.

3.Semantic search is making a huge difference on user searches. In the past, Google dissects search queries by words. A search query about "running shoes Utah", for example, would return anything that may be related with running, shoes and even events in Utah. But with search semantics, Google interprets the meaning of the whole search query rather than just the individual words.

With all these changes we need to take a different approach toward keyword research.Keywords still matter, but they need to be perfect to be really effective. So whatever process you have been following for as long as you can remember, you should completely forget. Even if you did rank, it turns out that you have been doing keyword research all wrong. Rather than research for high volume, low competition, and good CPC keyword, or effective latent semantic index keywords, you should use keyword difficulty analysis instead.

SEO Keyword Research Based on the following principles:-

1.Rival Websites/Pages

Find out who your competitions are for a particular keyword or phrase. Simply type in the search terms you want to use on a search engine and check out the results. As a blog or a business, your competitors are other blogs or companies that are providing the same products or services and using the same set of keywords. The top ten is your strongest competition.

You can further narrow your search by looking into the number of pages being indexed that use the same search terms on the title. To do this, use one of Google's advanced search operator "allintitle", which will display websites where the keywords appear in the title.

Now that you know your competitors, it is important that you don't make any decisions based solely on the data that you collected. Just use them as an indicator, since there are plenty of other elements that will keep you off the first page.

2. Top 10 search results

If you want to determine the metrics involved in keyword difficulty, determine the top ranking sites related to the terms you intend to use. Getting results is easy. It is making the searches non-personalized that is challenging, although not impossible. You just need to use the right tools to de-personalize your search and get the results that matter more. Using Chrome browser in incognito mode is one good example. What this does is to remove results returned based on search data and preferences, such as ads, news, images and YouTube videos.

3. Number of links

Top-ranking pages are likely to have a significant number of external and domains pointing links based on certain key terms. If you use the same keywords, you would definitely have a hard time ranking. But if there is a top-ranking website with just a few direct links, you have a door of opportunity.Using Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO, you can acquire a number of linking domains a website has. But know that a site with few high-quality links can have the same authority as one with plenty of low-quality links, which is why further analysis is necessary.

4.Off-Page Optimization

How strong a rival website's off-page optimization is reflected on the number, authority and type of links it has, including the backlinks. Keyword research will look into page authority, domain authority, keyword in anchor text and the diversity of unique linking root domain.

5. On-page Optimization

Now that you know who your rivals are, find out how well optimized they are. Think like a search engine and look for different signals that will help your keywords rank easily and effectively.

Keyword in title tag
Length of the title tag
Keyword in H1 Tag
Keyword in image alt text
Keyword in domain or URL
Keyword representation in anchor text or external links
Content quality
Optimization level (over optimized or not)
Use of questionable SEO practices
Internal linking architecture of a website

You can also keep your evaluation simple by just ranking each page's optimization as none, minimal, over, fair, decent or good, and excellent. Regardless of which step you take, however, this process takes a lot of work. If you want to cut down on the amount of effort and time you spend, you should filter your keyword list to a manageable size.

Using Google Search Operators for Keyword Research

Google can be your best friend in difficulty analysis and not just in knowing your competitions or the keywords they use. To maximize Google, however, you must use three of its special operators.

As already mentioned,allintitle returns results that contain your search terms on the title. allinurlon the other hand display results with the keyword included in the URLs, and allintext returns search results with the keyword appearing within the content

How do you use them to your advantage? Using the keywords "seo keyword research", for example, run a keyword analysis in Chrome. Don't forget to search in incognito mode to keep results organic and non-personalized. Take note of the total results and those that returned using Google's advanced search tools. The data you collect will look similar to the one below:

What do the figures tell you?

1.If the total results are equal or close to 1,000,000, you have higher chances of ranking on the first page

2.If the results with allintext are just 50% more than the total results, keyword difficulty is very high.

3.If the results with allinurl and results with allintitle is less or close to 1,000, the chances of ranking on the first page is high provided that certain criteria are met:

2000+ words in-depth blog post
Proper image optimization
High Flesch Reading Score
Quick Load Spee
Good Social Shares
Efficient Inter Linking
Several high DA, PA Backlinks

So this is the best process far my concern for free while in time you can use Moz and semrush to do keyword research. Have you tried any other methods do comments below?