What is the importance of keyword research in website rankings?
Keyword research is the backbone for ranking a website. Choosing the right keyword and optimizing it will give you more traffic and rank your website faster in the search engine. The keyword is the first thing you need to know when you are moving towards optimizing your site or blog. This article is for beginners to better understand the importance of keyword research in ranking websites and getting traffic.
If you take a deep look at the analytics, you’ll see that most of your traffic comes from a handful of articles. Have you ever thought why this is so and what did you do right? The reason behind this is that some of your posts rank based on highly searched keywords in a particular region. Before jumping to its importance, you need to understand the difference between long tail keyword and short tail keyword.
· Short tail keywords are 1-3 words long. Example: digital marketing services, local SEO services.
Long-tail keywords are more specific keywords and consist of three or more words. Example: how to be on top of Google, how to research keywords.
Long-tail keywords can get you more traffic and revenue, and increase your chances of getting ranked. High-quality post can get a ranking too, but have you noticed that content stops getting traffic after a while?
When you optimize your website, you have to define keywords called Meta_keywords, but in 2016 and onwards it is of no use as search engines are smart enough to automatically detect keywords and rank your pages automatically. Ranking the wrong keyword would affect your bounce rate and decrease the average time a user spends on the website.
You should look for the keyword density in your content. When bots crawl your site, they can calculate keyword density and rank your site for it. Stay as far away from keyword stuffing as possible as it can penalize you. Different SEO experts have a different view of keyword density, but it shouldn’t be more than 2% of the article length. You can target multiple keywords, but exceeding three is not recommended.
The importance of keyword research doesn’t end here. There are many tips and techniques that you need to become familiar with, and you can use free tools like Semrush and Google’s Keyword Planner to plan your keywords and rank your content faster.