Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a crucial part of your website's overall marketing strategy. While many strategies require up-front spending of some sort, SEO is a long-term investment while will pay off in the long run. Using your resources to strategically rank your website highest for the best target keywords is one of the best things you can do for your business. But, it's also one of the most time-consuming.

The benefits of SEO don't start showing for at least a few months after implementation, so it can be hard to tell what exactly is driving traffic unless your closely monitor and A/B test your website. One of the most important things you can do to enrich your website with search-friendly content is keyword research.

Why Keyword Research?

Keyword research is ongoing investigative work into what your audience is searching, how often they search it, and how much it would theoretically cost to place ads on these searches. Keyword research will also help you reverse engineer how worthwhile a keyword is. You can determine this by looking at three key pillars of this research:

1. Keywords with more searches per month will have many competitors
2. Keywords with fewer searches per month will likely show you to an audience further in the funnel
3. Keywords often answer questions your searchers are frequently asking—answer them!

Using these guidelines, you can often figure out what keywords will work successfully for your website. 

Important Things To Keep In Mind

Of course, like all things, there are important considerations to take in before you map out keywords for every landing page on your website.

Think like your customers to choose your keywords

Remember back to the last time you thought about something you didn't know the answer for. While you may have searched for broad topics related to your question, you probably typed out the entire question to see what the search engine would send back to you. 

This is exactly how your audience who hasn't discovered you yet is looking for answers. They have specific, detailed questions about something you have expertise in, and you should answer them. The website Answer the Public operates exactly on this basis. By looking up a keyword, you can see all the questions searchers are asking related to it, including questions starting with who, what, when, why, how, is, are, and so on.

The curse of knowledge can prevent you from thinking of valid questions your community has, and this tool helps greatly in unearthing those questions. Not just that, but it helps you see how often those questions are being ask, and how likely your content answering it would be seen by askers.

Some keywords are more competitive than others

When it comes to SEO, there are three different types of keywords: short-tail, mid-tail, and long-tail. These denote the length of the keyword, and by implication, how competitive the keyword will be; the shorter the keyword, the more competitive.

Here are some examples of what the differences in keywords look like:

1. Short tail keyword: martial arts
2. Mid-tail keyword: martial arts classes
3. Long-tail keyword: martial arts classes for kids

As the keywords get more detailed, they weed out the content your searcher is likely not looking for by adding more words. When a search goes from A to B, we know the searcher wants classes specifically, and when the search goes from B to C, we know they want children's classes. What does all this mean? At the end of the day, the keyword 'martial arts' could yield a lot more content, and will likely yield higher authority content from websites such as Wikipedia. As your keywords become more detailed, it helps search engines remove generic content and show your content higher.

Your goals may change—and so will your keywords

Finally, one of the things that impacts your SEO ranking is how frequently you change or update your website. It's one of the reasons why having a blog or news section on your website is a good idea—it tells search engines your website content is up-to-date and accurate.

This is one of the small ways that websites stay frequently updated, but what about your other pages? It's likely that your class schedule, prices, and even the type of classes you offer will change your website. In the event that this happens, it's a good idea to evaluate your keywords and whether or not they truly match what your content is trying to rank for.

Another event that may prompt you to change keywords is if you add a new page to address that topic. To avoid having two of your own pages competing for one single keyword, assess your content and what keywords it could rank for. Depending on the authority your website has built, and the success you've already seen, it could be time to change an existing page so that it attempts to rank for a shorter—and more competitive—keyword.