The English language is a very powerful thing. Used well, it has the ability to provoke every emotion or invoke any image with a high degree of accuracy. People make use of this remarkable ability when performing searches. The SEO industry also has to make use of the power of language in choosing and responding to keywords.

The keyword research stage of your site’s optimisation will determine the path of the rest of your SEO campaign. If your keyword list is even slightly off-focus, or if you choose terms that are too competitive for your resources, the whole campaign will need serious adjustment down the track. This is why search engine optimisation companies spend time on the keyword research stage and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about keyword research.

Keywords and site design

Although the most obvious benefit of keyword research is an SEO one, there are others. Keywords can give you great insight into the minds of your target users. For example, without in-depth technical keyword research you might think that your list of keywords for your blog about dog handling would be ‘dog handling’, ‘dog training’ and so on. You might include variations on ‘dog’, like ‘puppy’, and other variations on the ‘handling’ side of things. Keyword research can give you a bit more insight into the minds of your target user, however, and include things like ‘aggressive dog’, which is something a desperate dog owner might type in when looking for a solution to their canine’s aberrant behaviour. Targeting this keyword will get you the business of people who haven’t connected your business to their need yet.

Your keyword list can also give you an idea of the angles to take with your pages. The above case is a perfect example of keywords providing a new way to look at a business. With the knowledge that some users are looking for answers to dog behaviour, you can use one of your pages to target these questions, getting your blog seen whenever anyone is wondering why their pooch is misbehaving.

Your keywords can even give you an idea of the user paths you should lay down. Using the dog handling example again, you can see that the user’s mind may travel from ‘aggressive dog’ to ‘dog behaviour’ to ‘dog training.’ This provides an obvious path that you can then lay down in your site’s navigation, drawing the user further in by answering their immediate questions.

Maintain your keyword research

The development of keyword groups is a kind of virtuous circle, as it comes from both sides of the game. Users develop keywords through refining their use, moving from simple keywords to more and more complicated ones in their searches. In reaction to this, sites rework their search engine optimisation methods to include more complex keyword groups, which means that more complex keywords are being used on pages, which then drives another round of complexity from the user side of things. It’s all very complicated, and a successful business simply has to keep up. Search engine optimisation is a continuous process.

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