In Part I of our series on content marketing and SEO, we explored how SEO and content marketing got to where they are today.

For Part II, we’ll show you why SEO keyword research should be an integral part of your content marketing efforts, and how to do it.

Introduction to SEO Keyword Research

One of the most valuable techniques that come from search engine optimisation is keyword research. Researching, identifying and analysing keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your business can give you an invaluable insight into what solutions your audience is searching for.

Since a search engine’s intention is to match the user with the most relevant content to their search query, it makes complete sense that you should first research the keywords and phrases that your audience is using to search for answers before writing another blog post.

If you’ve done little or no work towards defining who your ideal audience is, then I recommend that you have a listen to our introduction to attracting, engaging & converting more customers on your website podcast and complete the accompanying worksheet.

To give more context around the subject of keyword research, let’s pretend that your business provides home loans to Australian families.

Your overall objective is to get your website in front of more people who are looking for a home loan to generate more sales leads.

How to identify keyword volume

Before proceeding, I recommend that you check if there is enough search volume for phrases relevant to your industry by using the free Google Keyword Planner tool.

We use Market Samurai and SEMRush to conduct more detailed keyword research at Web3, however these tools are not free.

If you are just getting started with keyword research, Google's Keyword Planner tool is the perfect free tool to start out with.

Once you have logged into Google’s Keyword Planner tool using your Google Account, complete the following steps:

Hit the save button to progress to the keyword data screen. Follow the steps in the image below to get the average search volume for your keyword:

From here your decision is pretty straightforward.

You want to target keywords that have search volume.

Targeting keywords that no one is searching for is pointless. As as a general guideline, we recommend targeting keywords that have over 900 average searches per month. The caveat to this guideline is keyword competition, which we’ll cover next.

In this example, we can see the keyword ‘home loans’ is searched over 8,000 times per month in Australia. This is great, however it would be very unwise to target this keyword phrase in our content marketing efforts because it is too competitive.

Understanding keyword competition

Keyword competition plays a very important part in deciding which keywords you should target. Overall, there are two important areas you need to know when understanding keyword competition:

Strength of Competition: Using our example above, the phrase ‘home loans’ has a large amount of monthly search volume. However, plugging the term ‘home loans’ into Google Australia, we can see the first page organic (non-paid) search results are dominated by Australia’s biggest banks and publicly traded home loan corporations.

It would be insanely difficult, if not impossible, for a young upstart Australian home loan company to get onto the first page of Google as the search position listing competition is simply too strong.The key outcome here is that you should target the keyword phrases that have low levels of competition strength as you'll have a much better chance of achieving a first page search results ranking.The best way to do this is by targeting long-tail keyw...