What is the importance of keyword research?

Keywords play an incredibly important role in search engine optimization (SEO), and keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO campaign. Proper keyword research helps your website rank for the right keywords, attract relevant visitors to your site and establish the basis for an effective content marketing strategy. In this article, we'll discuss why keyword research is so important, along with a few tips for finding and using the right keywords.

As we discussed above, proper keyword research is essential to SEO success. By researching and targeting specific keywords that are related to your business and that have decent search volumes, you can effectively increase organic traffic to your site by appearing in organic search results for those terms. Additionally, when used effectively in titles and content on your website, you can also improve click-through rates from search results as searchers recognize your content as highly relevant to their search query. Lastly, by understanding the competition for a specific keyword or set of keywords you can determine whether or not it's worth pursuing ranking for them.

Having an understanding of which key phrases represent the most effective opportunities to improve visibility in search results is key to any SEO campaign's success. There are numerous tools available (some free and some paid) that make it easy to find related keywords with decent search volume that you could target with SEO efforts. Such tools typically allow you to enter seed terms (such as "digital marketing") and generate hundreds of different related keyword ideas based on how people actually use certain words/phrases when searching on Google or other various internet search engines.

Once you've identified possible target keywords, assessing competitiveness is typically a good next step in order to determine whether they are realistically attainable goals from an SEO perspective or if more effort should be put into different phrases. Tools like Moz offer great competitive data allowing users to assess difficulty spots such as domain authority and total number of linking root domains for competing pages for a given term which can give insight into whether you have a fighting chance at ranking if effort is devoted towards it based on what top-ranking competitors currently have working for them from a link acquisition & optimization standpoint.