SEO has gone through various changes throughout the years, especially with the frequent Google algorithm updates. These updates mostly revolve around the quality of your content. To rank on Google in 2023, you have to step out of the crowd and come up with a different approach.
There’s still one thing that remains constant – An effective Keyword research process. Keywords aren’t just a mechanism to make you rank on Google. It’s an art where you have to understand your audience’s needs to crack how they would search to find their needs. We can safely say that keywords are the backbone of your SEO success. It’s a compass that guides you to reach the right audience to boost your website visibility.
SEO Experts use various tools to target your audience. While we cannot deny the fact that keyword research tools are helpful, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to them. So, in this blog, we’ll take you through a different route to do Keyword Research to reach your target audience in a much better way!
We have split up the blog into 3 three simple sections to help you out with your keyword research.
- Putting your audience first
- Refining your keywords
- Finalizing your keywords by Metrics
Putting Your Audience First
While the word “Putting your audience first” seems a very basic thing to do, it is very critical. You have to understand the mindset of your customer to understand their needs. You have to put yourself in their shoes to understand what and how they will search for their requirements on Google.
For instance, you’re running a video game store and you want to build landing pages focused primarily on the targeted city for your service offerings. If this is the case, you don’t have to think a lot and you can come up with your primary keywords pretty quickly. You can start with the keyword “Video game stores in St. Louis” or any of your targeted cities. If you put this keyword through a keyword research tool, you might or might not get high search volumes. Either way, it’s still worth it to go after and we’ll tell you why.
Though the search volume could be low, the search intent for this kind of keyword is much higher. Your target is very specific and narrowed down to a particular city of your choice. Because of that, the chances are, that whoever uses this keyword to search on Google, will definitely have a high intent to click on your page or blog. It’s relatively simple and effective.
Once you have figured out your primary keywords you can then focus on the relative data to back up the keywords that you’ve cracked down.
Refining Your Keywords
This is the part where you can rely on any keyword research tool of your choice. Conduct keyword research for your own keywords. You’ll be getting a better perspective into how your audiences are searching for based on your primary keyword. By researching your keywords, you can pull the keyword difficulty, top-performing keyword, search volume, links to top-ranking assets, ranking URL, and so on. This data will help you prioritize keywords even more effectively.
After this, you can put a relevancy score to every individual keyword. The relevancy score can range from 1 to 3 while 1 highlighting high relevance to your business and 3 indicating lesser relevance. But that doesn’t mean the keyword isn’t worth pursuing assuming you’ve narrowed it down the right way.
In this way, you can ensure that you target not only the right keywords for your business but also targeting keywords with good data to make your website rank on Google.
Finalizing Your Keywords By Metrics
To finalize your selected keywords, you can use the scoring metric – Keyword Opposition To Benefit (KOB).
The Keyword Opposition to Benefit score is a metric that helps SEO professionals identify the most lucrative keywords for their specific targeted goals. It takes into account various factors to determine a keyword's potential impact on your website's traffic and visibility.
Let’s say you have a personal health-focused website and your targeted keywords are “Healthy Smoothie Recipes” for a blog or a landing page. Now, Let’s break this metric down real quick for this keyword.
Traffic Value – represents the estimated traffic value that you could potentially get for your website. Let’s assume that after conducting keyword research, you’ve found that the keyword has 10,000 estimated monthly searches, making this a high-traffic keyword.
Keyword Difficulty – After analyzing the SERPs, you determine that “Healthy Smoothie Recipes" faces moderate competition, with few competitors already ranking for the same keyword. Hence, you could assign a keyword difficulty score of 50 (on a scale of 1-100).
Relevancy Score – The relevancy score should be determined solely based on the nature of your business. Once you have a great understanding of your customer’s mindset, you will be able to mark down the relevancy score pretty easily. Since the keyword “Healthy smoothie recipes” perfectly aligns with your website, you can confidently give a relevancy score of 3 for this keyword.
Calculation
But to find the precise value of your targeted keywords, we have to dive a bit deeper into the numbers. Hey, fear not, we don’t need to be math heads as it will be just a simple calculation 😅
Let’s calculate the KOB score using this simple formula:
KOB Score = (Traffic Value / Keyword Difficulty) * Relevancy Score
Now, we can just apply the values that we got into this formula as below.
KOB Score = (10,000 / 50) * 3
KOB Score = 600.
We now determined the KOB Score for the keyword “Healthy Smoothie Recipes," is 600. By calculating, we now know that the KOB score we got is worth it pursue after.
“How” do you ask. Let’s crack this down a bit more.
The traffic value of 10,000 is a substantially high search volume. Higher traffic values indeed tend to result in higher KOB scores because they indicate a larger potential audience. However, while high traffic is desirable, it can also come with higher competition and difficulty.
KOB score takes keyword difficulty into account, and it's why a keyword with lower competition but slightly less traffic can still have a decent KOB score.
The primary use case of the KOB score is that it serves as a composite metric that combines these factors into a single value, making it easier to compare and prioritize keywords in an SEO strategy. With the KOB score, you can weigh keywords based on a single value rather than going through each and every individual part
Hence, It is important to understand that the highest possible Keyword Opposition to Benefit (KOB) Score you can get is not limited by any upper numerical value. Instead, it depends on the specific metrics you use in the KOB Score formula. The KOB Score is relative and unique to each keyword you evaluate. Therefore, there's no universal “high" or “low" score. It is precisely why, what you consider a good KOB Score will vary depending on your goals, competition, and so on.
Conclusion
We can summarize our Keyword research blog plainly and simply. Put yourselves in the shoes of your customer/target audience. In this way, you can ensure that you build your keywords that are highly relevant not only to your business but to your audiences as well.
As we talked about in this blog, the whole process might take some time especially if this is the first time you’re doing it. But hey, the end of this tunnel is bright so it is absolutely worth all your time and effort putting into this methodology of keyword research!
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